Edlington...

[Artoo]

It's sickening. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6821037.ece

Two brothers aged 10 and 12 who tortured and sexually humiliated two boys were spared trial for attempted murder yesterday when prosecutors decided to accept their guilty pleas to lesser charges.

The brothers pleaded guilty to robbing, sexually abusing and intentionally causing grievous bodily harm to their victims, aged 9 and 11, during a pre-planned attack of extreme, sadistic violence that has drawn parallels with the murder of James Bulger and to assaulting another boy a week earlier. The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had accepted the lesser charges to save the victims from having to relive their ordeal in court and said that the brothers would still face the same maximum term of life imprisonment.

The attack happened in April, 25 days after the brothers had been taken into care and placed with a foster family in the mining village of Edlington, South Yorkshire.

The nine-year-old victim raised the alarm after being found wandering the streets barefoot and dazed and covered in mud and blood. His 11-year-old friend was found a short time later at the foot of a steep ravine. He was unconscious, naked from the waist down and half-submerged in water. He had been left for dead after a sink was smashed down on his head.

The court heard that the younger boy had tried to kill himself on the instructions of his attackers by shoving a sharpened stick down his throat after having the same stick driven into his arm and a lit cigarette pushed into the wound. The brothers had burnt his ears and eyelids.

The families of the victims were in Sheffield Crown Court yesterday to hear the guilty pleas. The defendants, both in shirts and ties, grinned occasionally at their social workers and solicitors during the two-hour hearing. Their parents were not present.

On the day of the attack the brothers had been due to attend a police station to be questioned about an assault on an 11-year-old boy a week earlier. His mother had reported the incident immediately. The police have been criticised for not acting more urgently.

Doncaster social services had had extensive contact with the brothers over many years. It said that a serious case review was under way and refused to comment further.

 

[Angel77]

Omfg....that's horrible!

 

[Aimee]

I'm speechless...

 

[Deleted member 66627]

Why?? Why would they, let alone anyone, do something like this? And the year gap each in age just makes it creepier.

 

[Musicroxmysox]

That is just amazing...I can't believe this kind of stuff occurs. G-d the youth today is so much more screwed then we were....Seriously we need to go help them out.

 

[Mister Scruff]

G-d the youth today is so much more screwed then we were....Seriously we need to go help them out.

Look up the James Bulger case mentioned in that article and you'll see this isn't true.

It's a pretty appalling case all round, but I think bad people do bad things, and sometimes those bad people are children. What I'd want to know is what induces a child to act in this fashion, and is there anything that can be done to prevent it.

 

[Artoo]

What I'd want to know is what induces a child to act in this fashion, and is there anything that can be done to prevent it.

The Times had a rather interesting column in the opinion section today, entitled, "We turn our backs on Baby P's who survive".

"This horror occured because the system for intervention in the lives of neglected children is woefully inadequete and intellectually and economically flawed."

 

[hotdog]

Some people have a greater propensity towards violence than others. When this type of child is abused, beaten, or neglected, they often lash out at others. Sometimes it's just a school bully, or it can be much more severe as in this case. Other mental issues may play a significant factor as well. Sad situation.

 

[milagros317]

It may well be worthwhile trying to figure out how the perpetrators became monsters so as to prevent future cases.

As to the perpetrators themselves, it's too late for anything but life in prison without the possibility of parole.

 

[herts tickler]

try as i might i havnt been able to get away from this story all day. ur right artoo it is sickening and but what makes it worse is that they will now prob get a new identity each to protect them and a council house and benifits when they get out. we will be paying for the little mugs. GREAT britain? yeh alrite....

 

[Mister Scruff]

As to the perpetrators themselves, it's too late for anything but life in prison without the possibility of parole.

You do realise you're talking about a 10 and 12 year old child, don't you?

 

[Fire_Sprite]

Sociopathic behavior usually starts at around that age. Most people who grow up into serial killers start out torturing animals as children, they rarely do anything as big as nearly killing other children.

Even once they're out, the government should keep an eye on them.

 

[Mister Scruff]

With the acts of disgusting acts of violence and depravity that they performed, the only thing that will change for them in their lives will be the size of their bodies and the age groups of people they can attack.

You're not qualified to make that sort of judgement. Even if you are, you're not in possession of the proper facts to do so.

Normal 10 and 12 year olds act like jerks when they misbehave.
Mischievous 10 and 12 year olds might go through a klepto phase.
Criminal 10 and 12 year olds might assault some kid or vandalize stuff.

In which case I know of about 30-odd kids I grew up with who'd fall firmly into the latter category. Me being one of them. I've never sexually tortured anyone that I'm aware of, but I was pretty bad. As in, shooting random folk with a .22 air rifle, setting a pidgeon loft on fire and holding someone's head under a pond because he wouldn't give me a quid bad; and I know lads in their 20's now who were worse than I ever was.

We turned out okay, though. Largely because most of us were given a shot at rehabilitation and redemption, because luckily enough we weren't surrounded by people who were ready to write us off because we did bad in our pre-teen years.

Even most criminally insane individuals of ANY age group would not do what these kids did.

Are you right in the head? People do worse shit than these kids did every day of the year. Most of them aren't even criminally insane. Criminal, maybe, but not insane. The first one that comes to mind would be those two blokes that were found shot, stabbed, tortured and burned to death in Ince Blundell about 7 years ago; then there's that lad in Glasgow who was kidnapped and tortured to death by Pakistani gangsters just because he was white, or those two girls from somewhere down south who were kidnapped, raped, tortured, shot in the head and left for dead because of some turf nonsense or something. One survived, one didn't.

None of those cases involved people who could be classified as "criminally insane", nor could claim any sort of diminished responsibility.

Letting them out when they are larger, better trained (by spending years in a federal prison working out and getting stronger), and further increased by the depravity that being in a prison for so long and from such a young age can bring about would only be guaranteeing the long drawn out death and torture of some innocent person (people?) down the road.

I wouldn't want to be the one to condemn those people to that fate...

And I'm not a fan of damning a person for one bad deed unless there's compelling evidence to suggest recidivism is likely; especially not if the person involved is a pre-teen child.

Then again I'm not a psychotic worst-case-scenario alarmist who bases his faith in humanity off a few horrific news reports.

 

[Pulchritudinous]

I don't understand what about violence and cruelty is so fascinating to some of today's youth. It would've been one thing to just go ahead and kill them, but to instead torture them and leave them for dead... I just don't get it.

 

[herts tickler]

ok i try not to get wrapped up in thid stuff but mr scruff everything u say u did when u were a nipper and more is all filled under par for the course coming of age tings where im from and i dont go in for all that shite about people wrote us off and we never had the same chances in life bollox coz i had a ruff 1 but guess what? i always knew who was fair game (people in the same circles) and who was untouchable (innocent 9 and 11 year old kids).

another thing u say is about the guys from ince blundell. squeaky clean they werent. and the guys picked up by the tamil hindu gang (so ive heard) were aparently picked up for more than just bein white and i h8 it when people say thing like that.

one last thing- and feel free to call me a "psychotic worst case scenario alarmist" but i am a HUGE fan of damning to the lowest depths of hell a person for 1 bad deed if that deed is torturing 2 children until they beg for death. and u know what i dont give a monkeys if their pre-teen or 80 years of fucking age. sorry about that

 

[Mister Scruff]

ok i try not to get wrapped up in thid stuff but mr scruff everything u say u did when u were a nipper and more is all filled under par for the course coming of age tings where im from

Well yeah; exactly my point. I'm not trying to say "oh look at me I had a hard life I'm so great because I got through it"; fuck that, I didn't have a fantastic childhood but it was far, far better than most. The same goes for the kids I hung around with; very few one-parent families, very few abusive ones, few drunks or smackheads or horror stories from the family homestead.

We were little bastards because we chose to be little bastards. Because that's what kids do when they've got freedom, toys and nothing better to do. As I said there was no "sexual torture" involved in any of our antics, at least not the ones I'm aware of, but it's fair to say that we regularly went too far when it came to physical assault and casual violence. That's clearly what's happened in this case

and i dont go in for all that shite about people wrote us off and we never had the same chances in life bollox coz i had a ruff 1 but guess what? i always knew who was fair game (people in the same circles) and who was untouchable (innocent 9 and 11 year old kids).

And I don't buy any of that "honour amongst thieves" bullshit, because it happens only in the minds of clueless people who like to romanticise criminality.

another thing u say is about the guys from ince blundell. squeaky clean they werent.

I know they weren't; one of them had a cousin who lived on my estate. They were knee-deep in with the Ungies for starters, which tells you all you need to know right off the bat, and were apparently chopped up for stealing money from some Toxteth dealer or other.

Does that mean they deserve to be tied up, tortured, shot and burned to death? No it doesn't. Of course the argument could well be made that lying down with dogs is how you get fleas, but that sort of kicks the chair out from beneath the whole "honour amongst thieves" thing.

and the guys picked up by the tamil hindu gang (so ive heard) were aparently picked up for more than just bein white and i h8 it when people say thing like that.

First of all it was one guy, a 15 year-old kid named Kris something (Marshall, I think) from Glasgow. He was abducted by 4 Pakistani gangsters - full-grown men - and tortured to death. It came out during their trial that the reason for his abduction and murder was because he was white.

You might well hate it when people say stuff like that, but when it's a proven fact that a crime was committed purely because of the ethnicity of the victim there's no way to get around saying it. I'm not going to use it as a platform to try and galvanise white resistance against coloured immigrants because that would be stupid; it was an isolated incident, one that shouldn't be allowed to reflect on the character of the Pakistani community as a whole.

one last thing- and feel free to call me a "psychotic worst case scenario alarmist" but i am a HUGE fan of damning to the lowest depths of hell a person for 1 bad deed if that deed is torturing 2 children until they beg for death. and u know what i dont give a monkeys if their pre-teen or 80 years of fucking age. sorry about that

That's not psychotic worst-case alarmist at all. It's more "psychotic vindictive armchair legislator".