A special investigation into a chilling modern phenomenon
A boy stripped naked, battered and left in a makeshift grave. Two little brothers sexually humiliated and tortured in a two-hour ordeal. And the attackers? Young children like themselves. DAVID JONES explores a chilling modern phenomenon...
The two attacks bore chilling similarities and they were carried out on grim Yorkshire council estates less than 30 miles apart. In both cases the victims were young and vulnerable, and an elaborate story was invented to lure them to a secluded place.
In both cases they were stripped, and saw their clothes ritually burnt before they were tortured and savagely beaten.
Most disturbingly of all, however, when police investigated these protracted and gratuitous acts of violence they discovered that the perpetrators were themselves no more than children, their ages ranging from just ten to 14 years old.
One of the attacks, which took place in Leeds - the other happened in nearby Doncaster - involved four children, who attacked a 15-year-old with a mental age of seven.
Such was the savagery of the assault that Judge Kerry Macgill described it in court as 'almost like a scene out of Lord Of The Flies, where children are left to their own devices and do simply appalling things to other children'.
After talking to those involved, I have found this reference to William Golding's disquieting novel, in which a group of schoolboys turn on one another with animalistic savagery after being stranded on a desert island, was no exaggeration.
These two cases come more than 40 years after another North Country child - 11-year-old Mary Bell - was convicted of strangling two little boys aged four and three 'solely for the pleasure and excitement of killing', as the prosecutor phrased it. At the time, a horrified nation vowed that it must never be allowed to happen again.
The same was said in 1993, when Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, two ten-year-old Merseyside boys, abducted and murdered toddler James Bulger while he was out shopping with his mother.
Yet barely a week seems to pass without news of a vicious assault by a young person, and those recent atrocities in Doncaster and Leeds - in which, as we will see, the victims were fortunate to escape with their lives - are only the latest reminder that such brutality is happening again, and with alarming regularity.
Inevitably, this raises disturbing questions. Are attacks by children really increasing, and are we correct to suppose the attackers are using ever more extreme and inventive forms of violence? If so, why?
More pressingly, what social factors are spawning this frightening new generation of potential Bells and Thompsons, and is enough being done to identify them and prevent them from developing into psychopaths?
During this investigation I have examined reams of statistics and reports, and spoken to leading experts, including two of Britain's most eminent adolescent psychiatrists, Professor Susan Bailey and Dr Eileen Vizard, both of whom gave evidence at the Bulger trial.
The picture that emerges is surprising and illuminating. Before we study it, however, we should describe in more detail the two episodes in Yorkshire. For, extreme as they may have been, the background to these incidents appears to form part of an all-too-typical pattern.
As Judge Macgill heard in court last week, the Leeds attack occurred on a sprawling red-brick council estate south of the city, where the four assailants - a girl of 14, two boys aged 11, and another boy of 13 - lived in close proximity to their 15-year-old victim.
Since the attackers all pleaded guilty to attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent, the full story was not told in court.
But according to the 14-year-old girl's mother, the attack was conceived after the victim became infatuated with her.
'He stalked her for four months and would not leave her alone, spending hours standing outside her house,' she told me. 'He was constantly texting and telephoning her.'
She claims the attack happened one Sunday evening after the victim sent the 14-year-old girl - a pretty, popular teenager, who had hoped to become a nursery teacher - a particularly lewd message accompanied by a 'pornographic' image of himself.
But even supposing this story to be true - and the victim's mother strongly disputes it - then it surely cannot excuse the calculating manner in which this mentally disabled boy (who attends a special needs school and cannot even tie his own shoelaces) was ensnared, nor the horrific torture inflicted on him.
According to his mother, a 55-year-old who has seven children by several fathers, he was lured to a stretch of waste ground, hidden from the estate by a ring of trees, after the girl asked him to help her look for a mobile phone she had supposedly lost there.
When he arrived, he was grabbed by the gang. They threatened to kill him, stripped him naked, made a bonfire of his shoes and coat, urinated on him, stuck lit cigarettes up his nose, punched and kicked him and lashed him with planks and branches
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