The News of the World heaves with self-righteous anger. Mr Richard Desmond's fine Daily Star bathes in fury. The words of James Bulger's mother Denise are spread large across every sheet and TV station in the land: "I know that no matter where they go, someone out there is waiting." It is difficult not to feel ashamed of this country. We tut-tut, pruriently horrified, over the public execution of Timothy McVeigh. Our landslide prime minister joins with other EU luminaries to wag a consolidated finger at George Bush's punishing beliefs. Yet any civilised nation, anywhere in the world, would cringe over the punishment we are inflicting on Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Take one dreadful tragedy, stir relentlessly over a decade; then await tragedy renewed.  Some day soon - on an internet website, in a magazine bought at Milan or Madrid airport, after a punch in a pub or a stroke of vile luck - these two 18-year-olds will be "exposed". The law is an ass if it thinks that it can guarantee lifelong anonymity to the pair for much over five minutes. What else are "communities" but neighbourhoods that watch and talk together?  We may lament such exposure, a continuance of our shame. But big secrets can't be kept forever in a small country. This, more balefully yet, is the old Spycatcher syndrome: judges and politicians don't decide - they have to persuade. And where, pray, is that persuasion?   David Blunkett - at least in the beginning - doesn't even try. He issues one of those the-parole-board-has-informed-me statements which, barely between the lines, says: my hands are tied. The home secretary apparently thinks that holders of his great office, like Michael Howard, avid readers of the tabloids and public-opinion polls are better custodians of juvenile murderers than the judges who heard their cases or the psychologists who have worked to redeem them. European human rights? Forget it. Let's see if we can turn back the clock.  What could his statement - or yesterday's slightly more responsive call for calm - have said?  That here were two kids from fractured, disrupted homes which society - our society - left to fend for themselves. Already victims. They were 10 years old, falling out of the system. They killed a toddler; and the revulsion there is palpable. But what was supposed to happen next? A dose of the junior McVeighs? Obscenely ridiculous. A lifetime behind bars, without hope of release? Barely less obscene. These boys hadn't even had the chance to fail their 11-plus.  Nowhere in mainland Europe is the age of criminal responsibility as low as it is here. Thirteen in Holland, 15 in Denmark, 16 in Spain, 18 in Luxembourg. Anywhere on the continent, Thompson and Venables would not have found themselves in some panoplied crown court listening to men in wigs deciding their fate in language they could not comprehend. They would have been taken away and tended in obscurity - because they were children.  That, in a way, happened here, too. Our secure units are one of the better bits of the system. Robert and Jon have had the care they needed. They have grown up, found themselves and education and remorse. They have come to terms with their malign past. We call it rehabilitation.  Everybody in a position to assess them thinks that they should be released to try to build lives which can never be normal but can, perhaps, be useful and fulfilling. Nobody who knows them today thinks that they should be spun over into adult prisonhood where all the work (and money) invested would surely go to malign waste.  But - David Blunkett could have added - all this patient toil and love stands in pawn today: not from the efforts of those securely inside the unit, but from those outside in the society which first created Thompson and Venables. We dragged them through those adult courts that Europe would despise. We politicians joined the cry for retribution. We judges - like Mr Justice Morland in the case - stripped Child A and Child B of their anonymity so that the flames were fed. We journalists wove the boys of 18 and the kids of 10 into a seamless robe of supposed responsibility. All that was wrong and foolish. We saw the public wrath, the parental grief, and we trembled before it - or rode it out for our own ends. Shame on us.  From that, in turn, inevitably flows the vital factor missing in this equation. Again, ourselves. The courts, which still look inward, clutching their majesty, have ordered lifelong anonymity for these new personalities released into the world.  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss fears vigilantes hunting two "uniquely notorious" lads - "a real possibility of serious physical harm and possible death from members of the public or from the Bulger family". Thus the cloaks are cut to cover them while they live. Her injunctions - which may well be doomed because they strain at reality - are only half the story, though.  Lay it out in the clearest terms. This is also our test. So-called "vigilantes" are deluded thugs. The pain of the Bulger family is felt but, prolonged indefinitely, it merely builds further tragedy on tragedy. Denise Fergus has other children now: they deserve their normality, too. The memory of Jamie Bulger is best honoured not by vows of eternal revenge, but by closing that door on the past.  The direst test comes not when Thompson and Venables are slipped into the outside world. It comes when, and if, they are discovered. Another media feeding frenzy? More photo-ops for placard wavers? More interviews with outraged neighbours? More politicians hopping up and down and judges eating their dignity?  No: the test is whether, even uncovered, they can be brought to live in peace, to be known but not threatened or ostracised, to be treated for what they have become not what - in childhood - they were. It is a test of our civilisation and our maturity. And leaders who are elected to lead, like home secretaries - should set in directly.  All we have, for the moment, is a dawning of concern (with Ann Widdecombe, to her credit, rather more forthright rather earlier than David Blunkett). But this release is not some neutral act by yet another panel of experts who can be duly excoriated if it goes wrong. It is a decision taken on our behalf because that is the way we have chosen to order our affairs and define our self-image. No ifs, no buts, no facile cop-outs about how five or 10 years more behind bars would have made everyone happier.  Be honest: the time would never have been right. The edge of adulthood is the only point to choose. Heart-searching begins here: and if the home secretary isn't searching hard enough, then the prime minister should be. What's the point of a committed Christian who bites his tongue?