Looking into our dark places

Blake Morrison, whose study of the trial of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson for the murder of James Bulger attracted praise and criticism in almost equal measure, felt despair last week at ''the old savagery'' in the hounding of Bell on the excuse (apparently backed by Government Ministers) of the money she had received for co-operating with the author Gitta Sereny.

It was John Major who summed up the trial and conviction of two 10-year-old boys for the murder of the two-year-old James Bulger by saying: ''We must condemn a little more and understand a little less.'' Despite the populist appeal, there must be many who thought at the time that this was disgraceful nihilism and more who think so now. Morrison acknowledges that beyond the tabloid press the reaction of the public to Sereny's book was a little more encouraging and recalls that after the publication of As If, his account of the Bulger case, members of the public thanked him for helping them to understand more about this action which sent shock waves throughout the country.

He drew particular opprobrium for the idea that the murder was not planned and that there was a degree of innocence in the murder: that the boys knew what they were doing, but at the same time were not completely aware of the consequences. Inevitably, any consideration of the boys' behaviour leads to their family background and to their parents and their background in turn.

On Tuesday he will give the Child Psychotherapy Trust Scotland's annual lecture. His subject, stemming from As If, is Children and Violence. ''It is difficult for adults to know what is going on inside children's heads because we tend to forget what kind of a place it is,'' he says, citing the all-too-obvious readiness of adults to ascribe adult ways of thinking to children, evident in the warning tap on the hand of a toddler which is completely meaningless to a child of that age.

In the case of children and the extremes of violence in the cases of Mary Bell, Jon Venables, and Robert Thompson, it is, of course, the adults who resist the lesson. ''It is a very natural tendency not to want to read about things like these cases, but there are lessons to be learned for those who can make the effort to find out what the truth is.'' he argues.

He met Gitta Sereny at the Bulger trial and the focus of many of their discussions was that children of that age should not be tried in adult courts because the system does not - often cannot - address the question of why the crime was committed. Morrison would like to see the age of criminal responsibility raised (from 10 in England, eight in Scotland) to somewhere around 14 or 15, in accord with most of Europe and below that age even the most serious crimes dealt with in a juvenile tribunal which would allow material inadmissible in a court and put the emphasis on understanding what had led to the crime.

The strong resistance to psychotherapy on the part of Mary Bell's mother was also a feature of the family of one of the boys in the Bulger case. Morrison acknowledges that we are not allowed to know what kind of therapy or help Venables and Thompson are receiving, but believes that while provision has moved on enormously from the disastrous inadequacies of a system unprepared for Mary Bell in 1968, there is still a long way to go.

He is not convinced by the idea that children are more violent than they used to be, although he thinks there has probably been a rise in petty crime. The significant difference, he thinks, is in the adults' perceptions of children as ''possibly malevolent''. ''They are less likely to intervene when they see children behaving badly than they would a generation ago, because they are afraid that if they rebuke or reproach children they may be violent. That fear, reinforced by the stabbing of the London head teacher Philip Lawrence is part of it, but so is the break-down of communal responsibility for children. Now, other people's children are not our problem,'' he argues.

It is part of a much wider change in attitude in society as a whole. ''Adults are much less deferential to the bosses or the nobs, and children are copying what adults do, but the downside is that this small empowerment of children is illusory because it has led to them being demonised. People do not have positive images of children. I think we can be sentimental about and indulgent of our own children in a way we would not feel about others. There have always been problems across the generations, but whereas it used to be seen as a problem of the late teens, it has now been brought down to toddlers.

''Childhood is presented as a series of problems and the idea of saying that you enjoy the company of children has something almost suspicious about it,'' he says in reference to the recent obsession with paedophilia. Among his recent reading have been a number of texts on psychotherapy and he's happy to support the Child Psychotherapy Trust. ''It seems that there is a tendency to dismiss certain problems when they arise early on, about the age of four or five, on the assumption that they will sort themselves out and it will all come out in the wash, but the evidence seems to be that, on the contrary, if you intervene at that stage, it can do a great deal of good and the problems overcome.''

The main objective of the Child Psychotherapy Trust in Scotland is to raise funds to train more child psychotherapists, who are in very short supply in Scotland, where there is not a tradition of specialist child and adolescent psychotherapy services. It is a provider of training rather than services, but in June the Scottish Institute of Human Relations will provide psychotherapy treatment at the first purpose-built centre of its kind in Scotland.

And with money from the National Lottery Charities Board, 10 families who were unable to find appropriate help in the NHS and who could not afford to pay for private treatment have had treatment paid for by the trust.

n More information from the Scottish Institute of Human Relations, telephone 0141 353 3399.