Boxes of Tissues

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997

From Terence Chapman

Hilary Mantel (LRB, 6 March) is tough on Blake Morrison and tough on the causes of Blake Morrison – one of the ‘aristocrats of sensitivity’ who ride, uninvited, to the rescue of a nation in distress. But her wish to defend children from the likes of Morrison and Gita Sereny, who want to attribute diminished responsibility to the juvenile offender, is peculiar. ‘It is strange,’ she writes, ‘that people think that the way to protect children is to deprive them of status, to reduce them to something less than adults.’ I wonder whether the enormous differences between adults and children can’t be acknowledged without reaching for the language of disempowerment and jeopardy, as Mantel does. It is ‘other’ not ‘less’ that we should have in mind when setting children beside adults, and a ‘difference’ in status, not a ‘deprivation’. In many ways, adults conceive children as other than themselves, which is just how children conceive adults – and both have very different accounts of the others’ actions. I know more than I did when I was a child and I know differently, and for some reason that has nothing to do with ‘good’ and ‘evil’, I am less capable of cruelty now. I would be more of a monster than I am, I suppose, if I couldn’t forgive my little predecessor his worst misdeeds, and so, unlike Mantel, I reach for the language of extenuation, as I do when trying to think about Thompson and Venables. I don’t ‘reduce’ their status so much as equivocate about it, because I believe this makes for fewer monsters. Which leads me to sympathise with Blake Morrison – a pretty pass.

Terence Chapman
Bristol

Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997

From John Harding

I was stimulated by Hilary Mantel’s thoughtful discussion of the Bulger case (LRB, 6 March). First, the good news. Serious, as opposed to persistent, young offenders do rather well after release from secure units and prison, not least because of the attention they receive in the confines of a small unit from highly skilled teachers and therapists who work through issues of guilt and give them the confidence to restore their broken lives. Provided on release they are spared the intrusions of predatory journalists, they have the opportunity with a changed identity to merge relatively successfully back into society. However, I do find myself in disagreement with Mantel’s observation that it might be better if the background of Venables and Thompson was left behind closed doors. I am reminded of Barbara Wootton’s telling comment, as a juvenile court magistrate in London, that she was always dealing with ‘other people’s children’: in other words, children whose background and life experience were not the same as those of her magisterial colleagues. Part of the strength of Blake Morrison’s book is to get behind the stereotype we all have of juvenile offenders, to show their faces, to reveal the uncomfortable meaning of their lives. Statements such as ‘We must condemn a little more and understand a little less’ don’t help in this context. We need to remember, along with Burckhardt, that the worst form of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

John Harding
Chief Probation Officer