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Anorak News | Doncaster Devil Boys: Thatcher’s Mines, Blair’s Iraq And Compensation

Doncaster Devil Boys: Thatcher’s Mines, Blair’s Iraq And Compensation

by | 26th, January 2010

draw-brothers1THE Edlington Devil Boys are still making news. Justice has been done and seen to be done – the boys will serve at least five years in an institution. But the tabloids and politicos want more:

Daily Star (front page): “Devil kids mum: Give me £100k.”

Devil Kids? That makes them sound like the stars of a new teen film. What of the Devil Kids?

THE Devil Boys’ drug addict mum plans to sue social services for £100,000 for not taking them into care sooner. She claims she complained they were out of control for two years before their brutal sex torture of two pals aged nine and 11.

Last night a pal of the mum-of-seven said: “It’s negligence and one lawyer reckons she could take them for £100,000.”

Pictures: Edlington Devil Boys

Reckons. Could. Which lead to front-page news to make you feel abused.

The Express has more on the “evil” boys:

Social workers finally took the 10 and 11-year-old into care after their mother told them: “I don’t want to be here any more. I feel like doing something to myself. I can’t cope.”

But with local child services at breaking point after the deaths of seven children on the “at risk” register, the brothers were placed with an elderly couple in Edlington, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

They were unable to cope and the pair went on a reign of terror which culminated three weeks later with the victims being put through a sadistic two-hour sex torture ordeal.

So we can blame the parents, and the parents can blame the state. And the boys are evil. So who can we blame?

Yorkshire Post: “‘In these two boys, the building blocks that tell us what is right and wrong just weren’t there'”

David Wilson insists he has never yet met a child who was born evil.

Throughout his long career, which has taken him from governor of Wormwood Scrubs, where some of the country’s most violent prisoners are held, to professor of criminology and one of the leading experts in his field, he has trawled through countless psychiatric reports of those whose offences seem to many incomprehensible.

Pictures: Edlington Devil Boys

But before we get to hear from him, we get to hear the details of the crime one more time:

During the 90 minute ordeal in an isolated spot in Edlington they made them eat nettles, burnt them with cigarettes and repeatedly threatened to kill them, safe in the knowledge no one would hear their victims’ screams

Prof?

“There is a way back, absolutely there is,” says Prof Wilson. “These two brothers are still relatively young and they can be re-educated. The important thing is that they have now been removed from the toxic environment in which they grew up. They are now somewhere they can learn the proper social models of behaviour.

So what of the victims? Well, our writer knows all about them, too:

THE VICTIMS: Unseen scars take toll on children emerging from a nightmare

So say the experts.

But what say the Tories? The Sun knows:

A FULL report into the “Devil Brothers” scandal WILL be published by a Tory government.

And we need to know the details because..?

The Conservatives last night vowed to reveal the horrific failings that allowed the young thugs to remain free to torture and abuse two boys. They also pledged to lift the lid on the explosive Serious Case Review into the tragic death of Baby Peter.

Baby P and the Devil Boys. How’s that for making the horrific crimes sound less real?

Mr Gove said: “Keeping these reports secret stops people learning from what has gone wrong and endangers other children. If the Conservatives win the election we will publish the Serious Case Reviews into the Baby Peter and Edlington cases.”

Pictures: Edlington Devil Boys

Hurrah! Vote Tory for more entertaining pain! Pass the wristbands.

But during a Commons exchange, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said releasing the full review would be “deeply irresponsible”. He told Mr Gove it would reveal “detailed harrowing personal information” and was “not supported by pretty much anyone”.

Good of Mr Balls – who jumped on the Baby P case – to speak on behalf of “pretty much anyone”.

But before you make your judgement – and, mind, Balls of the moral compass has made it for you. The Mirror’s Sue Carroll is here to cheer the Labour Party, with this bit of blame shifting:

With superb irony, David Cameron jumps on the bandwagon to make cheap political capital out of Edlington’s “Devil Boys” blaming their savage and grotesque attack on two innocent boys as symptomatic of a “Broken Britain”.

It’s not an entirely empty soundbite – parts of Britain are broken and Doncaster, once the heart of this country’s coal industry, is certainly one. For evidence look no further than its child protection register – double the national average.

And now the ugly social consequences have emerged it ill behoves the Tory leader to cast blame elsewhere.

What Mr Cameron chooses, conveniently, to forget is it was his party which oversaw the decline of coal-mining and the subsequent closure of the Yorkshire pits.

What. The. ****?! You close the mines and you get fleckless, stoned, parents who spawn Devil Boys?

Pictures: Edlington Devil Boys

But hold your spittle. And hold the electrified fencing to be placed around former pit villages. Mary Riddle has a riposte no less bonkers in the Telegraph:

The division of Blair’s children into good and evil has hit a new crescendo, with wails of vengeance against the “devil brothers” of South Yorkshire by those who presumably think the apparent redemption of the Bulger killers an affront to justice. Meanwhile, Edlington is furious at being branded Savagery Central because of the appalling crimes of two children brought up in a home disfigured by emotional and physical carnage.

Iraq? Send the Devil Boys to Iraq! David Aaronovitch notes:

While Mr Blair cannot be blamed for individual atrocities, he wrote the mood music and devised the policies under which 50,000 families, on No 10’s calculation, have splintered away from mainstream society. Yes, he also brought in SureStart and tackled child poverty. But in Britain, as with Iraq, he pitted the virtuous against the vile with tragic results.

In fact, the specific and incredibly rare combination of personality and opportunity on display on that day in Edlington can, and does, recur at odd, awful moments through our history. In 1968 Mary Bell, 11, killed two boys by strangulation. What the familiar villains of today’s crises — the social services — were doing, was far less an issue back then than it is now.

And the Devil Boys?

This makes it, to me, the more remarkable that one of our main “campaigners” for child welfare, the voluble and valuable Michele Elliott, founder of Kidscape, should have demanded that the minimum jail sentence for the Edlington brothers be doubled from five to ten years, irrespective of whether such a sentence was in their interests or whether they were judged by experts to be any further danger. Some kids, it seems, are not permitted to ’scape.

One should note here that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the prepubescent killers of James Bulger, were released in 2001, that Mary Bell became a mother herself and that, as far as we know (and I think we’d have found out if it were otherwise) they have not reoffended in any way.

You see, we are all individuals. And that’s it…

Edlington Devil Boys: Meeting The Mum For Sex And Drugs

The Truth About The Edlington Devil Brothers: Vile Pictures



Posted: 26th, January 2010 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink