Usually these things don't disturb me

But in this particular case it did, there was a documentary about the Jamie Bulger murder on one of the myriad of channels last night, but they were actually interviewing the mother this time, I think it was the first time I had actually seen her speak for that length of time since the trial of the two boys who murdered her son.

it's amazing how your mind softens things up and files unpalatable things like that away over time, probably because it goes against every instinct you have on how you treat children and in Jamie's case he was only 3 years old when he was callously murdered by those two 10 year old boys, they interviewed most of the people who were involved in the case including the Police officers at the time, and one thing became clear, nobody except the people who were actually involved in the case were allowed to see the brutality of his murder and what had been done to Jamie, and it has haunted them to this very day.....

First off what was going through the minds of these two boys when they had planned to take another toddler and to push him/her out into a busy road with oncoming traffic to make it look like an accident ???? and were overheard planning this by a mother of two toddlers, one of whom they had targetted, and then by pure chance stumble across Jamie as he wandered away from his mother as she paid for food in the butchers shop that day, and how they led him for nearly 3 miles away from his mother, passing many strangers on the way who asked if he was ok, brutalising him and lying to the strangers who asked about him, and then take him to a train track throw paint over him and then torture and kill him ????

For all of that they got 8 years in council custody because of their age, and now they are both 26 years old, with practically their entire lives ahead of them, living with entirely new identities under licence.....and nobody is allowed to identify them, and for good reason .... because they would be torn limb from limb within days.....my guess..... Andrea and I discussed this last night and we both agreed that if we came face to face with the killer of any of our kids we would without hesitation take their life and suffer the consequences afterwards, does that makes us just as bad as them ? does killing somebody for a higher principle and belief in societies values in general alter that ? or would it simply be ridding the earth of scum/vermin with no right to live their lives ?

I suppose if you take murder on it's face value then yes it probably is just that.... murder, but there is such a thing as justice, and when justice isn't served I think it's a natural thought process to make such awful people pay for their wrong doings, I had forgotten just how harrowing the Jamie Bulger incident was, and that night I simply could not settle down and go to sleep, who knows maybe one day they will meet their end and be just as terrified as Jamie was that day he died, or then again maybe they won't, maybe they have learnt what they did was so very very wrong, and how they tried to lie their way out of it, and the fact that they tried to cover up their crime by laying him across a train track so he was cut in half, maybe the fact that they have to live with that until the day they die is enough punishment......Then again, maybe they simply do not care........ who knows ?

But the whole thing struck a certain resonance within me, probably because I have a 14 month old little girl...... just learning to walk and and talk and is experiencing life for the first time.......something Jamie didn't have very much of in his short life