Sometimes
we trot out old sayings, as if everyone will accept their truth, because
they have been said so many times before.
“An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” has a ring of justice
about it, and at times it has provided the rationale for long-running
vendettas when it has been read as “a life for a life”.
“Give
them a taste of their own medicine” is another, when someone
has perpetrated a cruelty on another person. It sounds only fair that
those who cause hurt should experience the sort of pain that they
caused.
If someone
has done something especially unpleasant, now that we no longer hang
people, it is often said that a person “should be locked up,
and they should throw away the key”. The offender is beyond
redemption, and obviously we should care for him or her no more.
These
sayings are graphic, but do they really represent wise advice?
The sort
of judgemental thinking behind all these sayings was all too apparent
during the last month. It was on 12th February 1993, ten years ago,
that two boys, Venables and Thompson, killed two-year-old Jamie Bolger.
They did so in a particularly callous way, quite beyond everyone’s
comprehension. What is worst, they were filmed leaving a shopping
centre with him, hand in hand, the little boy trusting the older pair,
and that image is as sharp and hurtful now as it ever was. It has
frozen at that moment in time, and like a perverted sort of Ground
Hog Day we keep going back to it as if things had not moved on.
Jamie’s
life was ended. He will never experience adult life and his parents
have the life sentence of living with their loss. But Venables and
Thompson live on, and having spent several years in secure care, they
are now young men with other identities, living in the community.
In Liverpool
there was a dignified minute’s silence to commemorate Jamie’s
death ten years before and the shuddering impact it had on the city.
Many of those interviewed, though, echoed the sorts of sayings quoted
above. If Venables and Thompson had appeared in person that day, they
could well have been lynched. The feelings are still raw.
What
the two boys did was terrible, but it was no more terrible than the
actions of a lot of other people who have killed children. Every year
there are parents who kill their children when they are just as small,
defenceless and in need of care and protection. These child-killers
often suffer for their actions, but they do not seem to stir up the
depth of reaction that the boys who were killers created. What was
different was that the killers were also children, and we do not like
to think of children as potentially dangerous or malevolent.
Yet,
as children themselves, the personalities of Venables and Thompson
were only partly formed, and they had each suffered difficult childhoods.
Given their age and the chance they have had to grow and change since
then, surely they now deserve more compassion?
It is
often said that the way a country treats offenders and other social
rejects is the measure of its civilisation. If the reactions to Thompson
and Venables are typical of this country, we will have demonstrated
a serious loss of humanity. Britain used to claim to be a Christian
country. It may have an established Church still, but practising Christians
are a minority now. Certainly, for the people who still condemned
Jamie’s killers, the ideas of being born again, of redemption,
or of fresh starts in life meant nothing. What counted for them was
rejection, exclusion and condemnation.
There
are times when a body cannot tolerate something harmful and it has
to be rid of it, and so we vomit or eject it in some other way. But
if our constitution is stronger, sometimes we can take things on board
and become even stronger, and better for it. I think that learning
to forgive is like that. It is easier to hate and reject, but hating
narrows one’s life, it diminishes one’s personality and
limits one’s horizons. Learning to tolerate, accept and love
is much harder, but it leads to greater fulfilment and deeper happiness.
Of course, this is what Jesus taught, and maybe - in the widespread
reaction against organised religion in this country - we have actually
thrown out the compassion he taught with the ecclesiastical bathwater.
If so,
it is time to look at it again. With compassion, we can accept that
we all have faults. We all need to start again at times. We all have
the capacity to change, if we can let ourselves admit what went wrong.
Without compassion we simply condemn and are condemned. It is not
a question of accepting such thinking because it is put over by the
Church; the question is whether it makes fundamental sense of the
way people behave and learn and mature.
It is
time we let Venables and Thompson get on with their lives. The death
of Jamie Bolger was terrible, but it has happened. We - and they -
have to accept that fact and live with it. We have all to get on with
the rest of our lives, knowing and accepting that people - including
children - are fallible and can do terrible things, but knowing and
accepting also that people can change. Continuing hate will only limit
what we can do.
It is
a real regret to me that our society is so uncivilised that Venables
and Thompson will have to live the lie of assumed names if they are
to survive. We all ought to have the maturity and strength to live
with the reality without it leading to further violence. Until, as
a country, we can show that degree of compassion, we will not be able
to consider ourselves as truly civilised.
