A book on child murderers - there are two obvious genres in which this might fit: the quick exploitative "true crime" paperback, whipped after some horrible crime has excited public attention, or the deep and impenetrable psychological study, expounding the author's post-Freudian, post-Jungian, post-any-sense-at-all theory.
Happily, Loretta Loach's The Devil's Children is neither of these. Instead, it is a balanced, sensible account survey of the history of the treatment of children who've killed in British history. It's not a comprehensive study, but it seems to be a solidly enough researched one, and the good news is that while some of the early accounts of the judicial system's treatment of children is harrowing, it is mostly a tale of increasing, and surprisingly early, humane treatment of children who were understood to be something other than pure evil or simply mini-adult killers.
At least that's until you get to the two most famous modern cases, that of Mary Bell, 11, who killed two young boys in 1968, and Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who killed James Bulger in 1993, a case that provoked a degree of hysteria and a wave of vindictive public and judicial spite that the 19th century could hardly have matched.
In the Thompson and Venables case, Loach reports the officer leading the investigation as saying that the killing of James Bulger was "unique" because of the age of the killers. Yet there had been, in the 25 years since Mary Bell, at least 14 cases of children murdering children.
Loach doesn't exactly say so, but it is pretty clear that her aim in writing the book is education of the public, to understand that children who kill are neither extraordinarily rare, nor extraordinarily evil. Indeed she demonstrates how children usually do not have a grasp of the true nature of death, particularly its finality, until well into adolescence, so juvenile cannot, she argues, form an intent to murder in the same sense as an adult. (Although it is surprising that in a book published this year she didn't mention the recent work on how children brought up in abusive, high-stress environments fail to develop impulse control.)
Her first case is horrific to modern eyes from the behaviour of the adults: that of four-year-old Katherine Passeavant who was kept in St Albans jail in 1249 for more than a month, after pushing another child into boiling water by opening a door too quickly - which could surely only have been an accident. Her father, however, wrote to the king, and perhaps surprisingly the local sheriff was ordered to release her.
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