Will UK politicians get the message on child murder? – As if!

No words can capture the horror. But every day in England between ten and 20 mothers and fathers will experience the nightmare of the death of a child.

Of the 6,000 children who die this year, most will have been the victims of illness. About a third will have been the casualties of accidents. Fewer than 100 will have been murdered – most likely by their parents. A handful will have been killed by other children.

The case of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, the boy shot dead in Liverpool last week, hit the front pages because it is so rare, because it comes after eight other shootings of children in England this year, and because it happened in a suburb of a city where another notorious crime was committed in 1993 – the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger.

The circumstances of Jamie's death were very different. He was shopping with his mother, when he was led away by two 10-year-olds who savagely attacked him on a railway embankment.

What unites the two cases is the predictable and wholly unhelpful political reaction. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised that Rhys Jones's murderers would be "tracked down, arrested and punished." Not to be outdone, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron spoke of "anarchy in the UK" pointed to a "spate of children killing children" and asked "…what's going wrong in our country?".

Both might reflect on what was uncovered during and after the Bulger case. The killing was a tragedy of terrible proportions, not just for one family but for three.

The few studies that have looked at the phenomenon of children killing children identify a recurring pattern of risks: inconsistent parenting, exposure to violence, a lack of engagement in school, and more.

Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the boys who killed Jamie Bulger, fit the pattern. But plunge the risk ‘magnet’ into a haystack of 100,000 children and several hundred needles will be drawn out.

In As If, the most penetrating account of the Bulger case (see Michael Little's blog [1]), the novelist and poet Blake Morrison assembled the catalog of chance occurrences that was as fundamental to the Bulger murder as the risks that predisposed Thompson and Venables to be capable of killing him.

Had the butcher from whom Mrs Bulger was buying meat noticed what was happening. Had the passer-by who questioned the boys as they abducted James intervened. Had Thompson and Venables obeyed an impulse to take the 'lost boy' to the police station, then Jamie would be alive today.

At the time, press, public and politicians stamped their feet in unison. The police van that carried Thompson and Venables to the adult court where English law required they should be tried was attacked. After they were convicted, there was an unedifying period of political and legal haggling over the sentencing, fueled by a 300,000 signature petition collected by The Sun newspaper calling for tough punishment.

In the aftermath, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that children like Thompson and Venables should be given more rights in the future. They were placed in secure treatment facilities, and released with new identities eight years later.

But that adjective 'tough' has reappeared in practically every political pronouncement on the murder of Rhys Jones, when there is small likelihood of any truly tough decisions being made.

Acting tough might involve ensuring that fewer guns are manufactured, and that none ever gets into the hands of children. If the UK Government wants to act tough on child deaths, it might look harder at preventing accidents. For every child murdered, there are 20 victims of falls, drownings, poisonings or car accidents.

If the opposition wants to tackle what it sees as anarchy, scrutinizing the behavior of the typical child is probably a better starting point than a promise to be doubly tough on the very few children who have murdered.

There may indeed be "things going wrong with our country," as David Cameron claimed this week, but they are not going to be explained by the terrible but unlikely combination of circumstances surrounding the tragedy that destroyed the Jones family.