And Then What?

Society everywhere hosts its share of sociopaths, psychopaths whose predations on the rest of us wreaks carnage and horror. Policing authorities investigate, make arrests leading to convictions and appropirate incarceration sentences. Although from some of the malevolence displayed against society, and the resulting savage mutilations and deaths many of those punitive devices a just society utilizes somehow don't present as 'just' enough.

There are the mass murderers, the serial rapists, the child abductors, the racist beatings that take place, keeping law enforcement agencies and the courts busy, and the public perusing the news media for new information on precisely why it is we should all be barricading ourselves in our solitary castles. Our paranoia is fed by those very news agencies hoping to increase their readership while lamenting their loss of advantage to the Internet.

Perhaps it's possible that these dreadful instances of viciously abusive behaviours always existed, and we just hadn't heard about them; news of those events weren't promulgated so prominently in the media. Events so disgustingly depraved that they were spoken of in hushed tones and kept quietly within the confines of an ashamed community, unable to cope, but fearful of exposure.

The inexplicably brutal crimes increasingly committed by younger and younger socially maladjusted people are confounding in their nature. Bad enough that fully mature men and women stoop to dreadful acts of human carnage against one another. But children? Children so deliberately resentful of life and society that their disdain for others' rights and their propensity for violence cannot be ameliorated.

A father with little-to-no interest in the way his children fare, and a mother whose ability to cope is so limited that the children they bore with little investment on their part in emotional support and direction turn out to be flaming psychopaths. Brothers, one 12, the other 10, in the care of child welfare agencies in northern England, given into the care of an elderly couple, when it is abundantly clear that their vicious behaviour is uncontrollable.

Two children, already hardened psychopathic criminals, due to appear in court to answer to a brutal attack against another child, hie themselves off instead to another assignation targeting two other little boys, brothers 9 and 10. Robbing them of pocket money and a cellphone, then battering them with bricks, stabbing them with sharp sticks, burning them with cigarettes.

Finally, in the solitary place to which the two younger brothers were lured, a broken sink was hurled over the head of the 10-year-old, a noose placed on his neck, then he was tossed down an abandoned railway embankment, to die. The attackers are registered with the local child protection agency and held under supervisory surveillance. Despite which they were able to terrorize a community.

The younger of the two, at age 10, is on bail, suspected of burglary and assault. Both are suspected of assaulting and almost murdering other young boys. What do you do with such youngsters? How is it possible for hard-pressed social agencies - tasked with looking to the welfare of abandoned and criminal children to ensure society is protected by their baleful depredations - to successfully manage these young charges?

How can society manage to hold absent and inadequate parenting to account? How can society exert some positive influence over children whose psyches have been so dreadfully impaired? Incarceration of pre-teens does not present as a humane option. What then, does? Would it present as an affront to human rights to hold the feckless parents responsible and incarcerate them?

How would that alter the behaviour of their offspring?