The Article "Boys guilty of murder - Detention without limit for 'Unparalleled Evil'-" comes from the Guardian Newspaper on Thursday 25th November 1993 and was written by Edward Pilkington.

Boys Guilty of Bulger Murder – Detention Without Limit for ‘Unparalleled Evil’

Arti Mehta

The Article “Boys guilty of murder – Detention without limit for ‘Unparalleled Evil’-” comes from the Guardian Newspaper on Thursday 25th November 1993 and was written by Edward Pilkington.

The article has three underlying psychological assumptions. The first assumption is that exposure to violent video films (such as Child’s play 3) is a contribution for a reason as to why the two boys abducted and murdered two-years-old James Bulger. As the just is quoted as saying ‘…I suspect exposure to violent video films may be in part an explanation’. Films such as ‘Child’s Play 3’ have been cited widely as examples of how screen violence can induce copycat actions among viewers. The boys could have been attempting to imitate aggressive behaviour they had seen on the videos. Children imitating aggressive acts has been studied by Bandura in his laboratory experiment ‘Bashing Bobo’.

The second underlying psychological assumption is closely linked in with that of the first one, because, aswell as the violent behaviour being imitated, the movies could also cause psychological reactions in the brain to make the watcher of the violent movies (in this case the two boy killers) too feel an increased audience aggression and a reduction of inhibitions against committing acts of violence themselves and becoming desensitised to the pain and fear experienced by their victim, leading to denial and self-justification. A field study on the effects of this media violence was conducted by Parke et al.

The third underlying psychological assumption is inadvertently related to the first two as it states in the article that the same just judge was quoted saying in the same sentence as the previous quote ‘it is not for me to pass judgement on their upbringing’; when in fact the social factors involved in the upbringing of the boys such as family patterns, child-rearing strategies, social influences, peer pressure, poverty and unemployment actually play an important part in the reason for their criminal behaviour as well as the short term factors such as watching violent films before resorting to their killing escapade. Sergeant Phil Roberts is quoted to have remarked ‘These two were freaks who just found each other. You should not compare these boys with other boys – they were evil.” ; when in fact this is most probably not the case, social factors as mentioned before most probably contributed greatly as the way in which people are bought up and the vents that take place around them during their life mostly determines their character and results in them acting in certain ways as is a probable truth with the two boys and their decision to torture and murder Jamie Bulger. As an example; both boys had large families and a field experiment on the effect of large families on children was carried out by Farrington and also by Offord.

2. The first piece of evidence which sheds light on the first assumption is Bandura’s ‘Influence of Models’ Reinforcement Contingencies on the Acquisition of Imitative Responses’ laboratory study. In this, he looked at the way in which behaviours of an aggressive nature are developed in children. 36 girls and 36 boys were taking part and he put them into eight experimental groups. There were three major conditions which were a control group, a group which was exposed to an aggressive model and one which was exposed to a passive model. Firstly the children observed the model playing within ...

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From the outcome of the study which was mainly that children mostly repeated a considerable number of aggressive actions, mainly girls more than boys, Bandura concluded that aggressive behaviour can be learnt and we can learn by being witnesses to the behaviour of others and basically we can learn through imitation and reinforcement from role models; which the two Bulger killers could have been affected by.

The second piece of evidence which is relevant to the next assumption is that of the field study conducted by Parke et al (1977) where juvenile offender from three different institutions were split into two groups and on each of the following five days were show either violent or non-violent films, all judged to be ‘equally exiting’. Trained observers coded the amount of violence the boys showed during the days of the study and found that boys watching the violent films were more aggressive than those who had watched neutral films and in addition to this, the boys who had seen the violent films were likely to give what they believed to be an electric shock to opponents in a game when provoked.

Though these findings cannot be generalised to most youngsters as the studies used a sample of delinquent boys, they did however demonstrate that media violence may increase the antisocial tendencies of youths who are already very aggressive as Thompson and Venables (the killers of James Bulger) were already proven to be, and make the act of violent more surreal and less realistic.

The psychological evidence which is relevant to the third assumption are those carried out by Farrington (1991b) and also by (Offord, 1982). Farrington carried out a field study in which he concluded from his results that if the family is large, it may be that children fail to receive individual attention and the poverty associated with large families (as was associated with Veneables’ and Thompson’s families) may result in parental stress, disorganisation and material deprivation. This factor could cause a child (as they could have the two killers) extreme annoyance, discomfort and overall unhappiness with their situation causing them to attempt to want to rebel against it and the system that put them in such a situation by becoming delinquent. Also as concluded by Offord in 1982, exposure to delinquent siblings is another important factor and is more likely in large families where there maybe a ‘contagion’ effect, with children more reliant on sibling than parents as models of appropriate behaviours which was the case with Veneables’, he was influenced by his brothers’ delinquent, helping him form his own delinquent personality.

3. Using my own psychological and general knowledge and the issues raised from this article a number of positive suggestions can be made in regard to further improving the situation. In relation to the first assumption I would suggest that the promotion of ‘heroism’ with fictional action characters that actually promote violence should be minimised by film-makers, so that people, especially children would not imitate such acts of violence thinking it is heroic as shown by the ‘Bobo doll’ experiment conducted by Bandura. This would bring aggression due to imitation down to a lower level than it was before and cut down the growing number of aggressive individually growing up and turning to aggressive crime.

With regards to the second assumption I would suggest that the Film ratings would become more strictest and ages restricted to a higher level according to the amount of violence being shown in the film, and also stricter guidelines on renting and selling films of such nature, then maybe children like Veneables and Thompson wouldn’t get hold of and be influenced by them.

In relation to the third and final assumption, I would suggest that the government would provide more benefits to those with larger families and more social care and advice to those who request and are in need of it, so maybe families such as those of the murderers’ wouldn’t have been at such loose ends and more devotion, attention and care would have been spent on the bringing up of the children and their parents would actually have time to understand and examine their child if they feel there is an underlying psychological problem and have it dealt with instead of letting it fester and escalate to such a scale that their children would result in committing murder.