Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 17:09:11 +0100
From: Jim heartfield <Jim-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: Mary Bell


Mary, Mary, quite contrary

Gitta Serenys book about childhood killer Mary Bell is a convenient
excuse for everyone to get up on their high horses

Tony Blair says she should not profit by it. Jack Straw says she has
surrendered her right to anonymity. Lord Taverne says that the Home
Secretary is playing to the mob. Lord Wakeham says that the press are
hounding her. 

Mary Bell killed two children when she herself was eleven years old in
1968, was sent first to a special unit and on turning sixteen to prison.
Since leaving prison in the eighties, Bell wrote her own life story,
which was turned down by several publishers. Now, Gitta Sereny has
interviewed her extensively to write Cries Unheard, which is being
serialised in the Times.

Bells story comes in the middle of a panic over the release of child
sex-killer Sidney Cooke, and parallels have been drawn between the two
cases. But the book was written with another case in mind: the case of
the two boys who killed the toddler Jamie Bulger. It would appear that
author Gitta Serenys motives are to emphasise the problem of holding
children culpable for acts of murder or manslaughter.

In the published extracts of the book, Mary Bells account of her own
culpability is considered. In a letter to her teachers from 1976,
reproduced in the Times, Bell is clearly contrite, talking of the
absolute enormity of my crime. However, Sereny also persuades her to
explain how she felt about death, having experienced only the death of
her pet dog: my dad bought me the same - well, to me, the same - dog
the next day. The implication is that Bell did not fully understand
death as an irreversible state, and so could not truly be held
responsible for killing somebody. Similarly Jon Venables, when
confronted with the news that he had killed Jamie Bulger is reported to
have asked why he was not taken to the hospital to be made better.

Serenys book pursues the nowadays compulsory course of describing how
Bell was persecuted by her mother, and so was damaged. But more
uplifting in the whole story is the fact that Bell has overcome her
childhood crime and incarceration to make a new life for herself, even
to the point of bringing up her own daughter. At least that was the case
until the Guardian newspaper leaked the story of the impending
publication of Cries Unheard, and its serialisation in the Times.

The first person to really stoke up the outrage was the Prime Minister,
who during an on-line interview (questions had been submitted four
days in advance) gave vent to the self-righteous prejudice that is his
metier. He said that it could not be right that Bell should profit by
her crimes. But Bell is not profiting by her crimes. On the contrary,
she paid a very heavy price for the part she played, as a child herself,
in killing the two boys. She has been paid a modest sum for the work
that she put into helping Gitta Sereny with her book - a book which will
ought to help clarify the vexed questions of childhood culpability and
rehabilitation. The idea that Bell is the equivalent of some drug baron,
growing rich on her ill-gotten gains is just other-worldly. The attorney
general has since agreed that there are no legal grounds on which Bells
payment could be seized.

The next person to get his knickers in a twist over Mary Bell is the
Home Secretary Jack Straw. Straw suggested that Bell had compromised her
own claim to anonymity - guaranteed in an earlier injunction dating from
the birth of her daughter. This was widely seen by the press as an the
nod and wink to go after Bell, which they did, even to the point of
confronting Bells teenage daughter with the news of what her mother had
done thirty years ago. When it emerged that the Home Office had been
fully informed of the impending publication, and had declined to advise
against it the Home Secretary was revealed to be stirring up the press
against Bell.

Dick Tavernes intervention to accuse the Home secretary of pandering to
the mob, though, was wide of the mark. Unlike the Sidney Cooke case
there is no mob pursuing Mary Bell - no mob except the Home Secretary,
the Prime Minister and those newspapers smarting at having been scooped
by The Times. But before playing the usual game of blaming the tabloids,
as Lord Wakeham has, lets not forget that this was a panic that started
at the very top: with the Prime Minister Tony Blair, who seems to think
that harassing a former prisoner, struggling to raise her daughter is
the morally correct thing to do.

-- 
Jim heartfield


     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---