Distorted Reality – Dream the new beginning.

I was really pleased to get an email from Premier Radio today, asking if I’d be able to take part in their debate on the Premier Drive show.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to, but they might have used some of the blog anyway.  Apparently, they were discussing the Jon Venables case that I blogged about here yesterday.  I’ll try to catch the debate on their catch up service when I can, but I hope it was interesting.

The Bulger case is really emotive for most people who were around at the time or know much about it.  I was a child when the murder happened (I’m only a couple of years older than the boys who killed Jamie), but I remember Jamie’s mum appealing for people to help find her son, and then to help find his killers.  I remember the trial and Michael Howard’s, intervention which reduced the age of criminal responsibility to ten, so that the two boys could go to prison.  By the time I was studying for my degree, this case had completely changed the way that children and young people were dealt with in the UK – in everything from law and the media to parenting.

Well, watching the footage of people proclaiming judgement on Venables over the past few days on the news, I’ve been amazed to see how one case can so affect society’s idea of justice.  Numerous people have been calling for his life to be ended while I’ve been watching.

I guess I’m saddened but unsurprised by people’s inability to see past their (justified) anger and take a stance founded in real justice.  ’Street justice’ is a devoid of justice and I’m thankful for the relative temperance of law in the current situation.  There is obviously a huge emotive punch that comes from knowing that a vulnerable child has killed an even more vulnerable child, but this emotion should not guide our judgement.

It seems that, while a mother might be allowed the right to proclaim her grief-fuelled anger, the rest of us must, surely, need to temper our justice with mercy.  If we do not, we must have to expect the fair judgement of our own acts, with no mercy.  Who would survive in that situation?

And, if we use this mercy, within the confines of justice, might it even lead to forgiveness?  A friend texted me today with a great phrase:

Forgiveness releases the Forgiven and the Forgiver

I think that there will never be justice in this lifetime.  True justice would demand all our lives.  In the end, I believe, justice can only be in the gift of somebody free of fault, so I’m thankful that that’s how my God revealed himself.

So, Jon Venables, one of Jamie Bulger’s killers, is back in prison.

I’ve written about the Bulger case before on my blog, but I’m afraid the post was lost.  The thrust of what I said (so far as I remember) was that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, while guilty of an unimaginably horrible crime, are actually the products of a society that failed them – they were not born murders.  They were failed by family, by community, by wider society, by the state and, in those vital moments, they were failed, as 10 year olds, by their own judgement.

As a social liberal, it saddens me that Venables is in back inside.  I would have loved to have believed that some sort of redemptive process could take place.  I know that the way we treat offenders (young and adult) is about punishment, rather than rehabilitation, but there are plenty of offenders who do manage to change despite this.  It would have been great to know that somebody who committed even this crime (even before adolescence) could go through a reflective process and come out ‘clean’ on the other side.

Very Hollywood.

But as a realist, Venables’ re-imprisonment offers a glimpse of a painful edge to society that I have to remember.  The fact is that we cannot redeem ourselves by our own efforts.  There can be the moves towards an improved humanity that we see and cherish, but just like a teenager’s bedroom, we continue in our entropic move towards mess.  Pain, oppression, injustice and violence become more and more ‘normal’.

As a Christian, I really do only know one answer.  Not a pie-in-the-sky Heaven that we might see when we die, but a re-creation that is current and with us, where even death can work backwards.  I know that my faith can appear to lack the answers that we need sometimes, and I know that words are far too easy, but in a situation where redemption is so desperately needed, I can’t help but see a clear answer emerge.