Guilty and Anonymous

Jon Venables, one of the killers of three year old Jamie Bulger has been jailed for two years after admitting downloading and distributing indecent images of children.

Now 27, Venables was 10 when he and friend Robert Thompson murdered the toddler in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1993.

This trial has raised many issues surrounding Venables and his partner Thomson. Since their early and controversial release many people want their identity’s to be made public. They feel that by hiding them and protecting the young killers, they are affording them the safety that their baby victim was denied.

This recent trial of Venables hasn’t helped quash that issue, his admission of child porn and his allowance of giving evidence behind a screen enraged and further enflamed vitriolic public anger.

The trial of Venables was conducted through screens that only the judge could see, to protect his identity.

Robin Makin, the solicitor for James's father Ralph Bulger, said giving somebody a false identity was a "liberal experiment" that was never really going to work.

Speaking outside the Old Bailey, he said: "What appears to have happened today, come out today, is that there must have been totally inadequate supervision and support from the probation service."

Both Thompson and Venables were given a child custodial sentence when they were ten years old. They were taken from broken poor homes and given a good education and a safe upbringing, which ironically they would have been denied had they never committed a crime. But this isn’t Victorian times and Milbank prison for kids is no longer an option, we must educate and care for any prisoner that our system incarcerates. What is the alternative? Throwing them on a deserted island?

I feel for the people of Liverpool who saw their community crushed by the Jamie Bulger murder, but a witch hunt of the killer isn’t going to make us a better society is it?

I often get asked to join Facebook groups where they aim is to make public the whereabouts of people who have abused and or killed children and I refrain from it. I don’t believe in public justice, I don’t really trust the official justice system either, but I still err on the side of caution when it comes to letting the public loose on a paedophile hunt. Not since some idiots famously attacked a paediatrician do I trust the ‘Vigilante mob’ on the street!

The parole service have to address the issue of ‘secret identity’ in serious offenders like a child killer, if the public aren’t allowed to mete out their own punishment, then the public have to have the knowledge that the parole service is working to protect other children when the killer’s are released.

It really is a rock and hard place situation and level heads need to address this issue.

Within the last few hours it was reported on the BBC news website that the Ministry of Justice is to review how Jon Venables was supervised after his release from custody in 2001, eight years after he murdered James Bulger.

Former Home Office permanent secretary Sir David Omand will conduct the probe, which is expected to take three months.

The review will seek to establish if the appropriate action was taken or if he should have been sent back to prison for breaching the terms of his licence - imposed on his release from custody for killing James Bulger.

Diana Fulbrook from the Probation Chiefs Association defended the decision not to return Venables to prison for recent and past alcohol and drug-related crimes.

"Here we had a young man, who'd held down a job for nine years, he was in settled accommodation, some of his presenting behaviour around drugs and alcohol are not uncommon amongst young people - all young people - who are living in society," she said.

I don’t think the parole and probation service know how to deal with people like Venables, on one hand they are determined he should live a full and free life having served his time and on the other they are duty bound to ‘supervise and scrutinise’ the life of the young man they let loose on the public.

This latest instalment of the Venables situation is horrible all round. He was a ten year old child when he gruesomely helped kill a three year old boy and now seventeen years later he is downloading and distributing child porn. Many people have reiterated that his release at eighteen years old was way too soon for the severity of the death he and his friend had inflicted.

During the extensive investigation into his porn activities it was revealed that in online communications Venables claimed to be a 35-year-old married woman called Dawn Smith who abused her eight-year-old daughter, and offered to sell access to the child.

In a statement read to the court, Venables said he was "genuinely ashamed" of the offences. He added that by getting involved in child porn was ‘breaking the last taboo’ for him. I don’t really understand that statement to be honest, because after having taken part in murdering a small child, you don’t have many taboos left to break, and a benchmark had already been set in so far as his criminal history goes. I think he needs further psychiatric help and this is what needs exploring.

I truly believe that a tougher sentencing has to come into force to deal with child killers and I don’t think red top tabloids should be trading and inflaming on the highly emotive rages of the people who want to hunt down Venables. If we let the public kill him then we are no better than the boy who battered a baby to death on a lonely railway line are we?