It would appear that among Gitta Sereny's motives is the need to emphasise the problem of holding children culpable for acts of murder or manslaughter. In the book, Mary Bell's account of her own culpability is considered. In a letter to her teachers from 1976, reproduced in The Times, Bell is clearly contrite, talking of the 'absolute enormity of my crime'. The implication is that Bell did not fully understand death as an irreversible state, and so could not truly be held responsible for killing somebody. Similarly Jon Venables, when confronted with the news that he had killed Jamie Bulger, is reported to have asked why the toddler was not taken to the hospital to be made better.
Opinions vary about how much children do understand.
But Sereny's example comes in the midst of a very public debate about what to do with child offenders. According to home secretary Jack Straw, young children can understand. His proposals to allow the courts to find children as young as 10 capable of evil look set to put more infants in the dock. Like author Blake Morrison, who wrote a book about the Bulger case, Gitta Sereny is saying that it is wrong to treat children like adults, and to try them in adult courts as if they were capable of bearing the burden of criminal responsibility that adults do. As far as that goes, Sereny is right.