Discussion

Female member of the audience: I've done a certain amount of work with young delinquents, and I think in children of this type that you have been lecturing about, you feel that there is an enormous identification between the aggressor and the victim. It's as though there is an internalized aggressor and victim in the child. The assault on the victim is a way of externalizing the inner victim in the aggressor. It's as though the only alternative to being a victim is to be the aggressor. Just as if you were perhaps treating the victim in more favourable circumstances, you might try to liberate this aggression because, for them, the only alternative to being a victim is to be an aggressor. You notice in groups where a child is being bullied, where a group of children are all bullying one child, that they all seem to be saying: ‘He is the victim, not me’. They choose a vulnerable child so that they can externalize their own victim, get rid of it, on that child.

Blake Morrison: It may be worth pointing out that Jon Venables had actually had to move schools because he was being bullied, and had had a period off school, and that Robert was thought by his own family to be rather gentle - I mean, he had a habit of sucking his thumb and he was thought of as the gentle one among the Thompson boys.

Same female member of the audience: They had both been victims within their families, anyway.

Blake Morrison: Yes, indeed.

Ann Scott: If I could make a comment. It occurs to me that one of the points that you [Blake Morrison] are making implies that an individual would have a sense of what it would be to be a victim. I want to link this with something that Blake says about speculating that the little boys may have been killing the baby in themselves. If the environment in which they grew up was as depriving as it seems to have been, it makes me wonder whether the boys would have had a notion inside themselves of what it is to be a baby. I wonder, Blake, whether, in observing the trial, o