On Monday, a British court made public new charges against a man who had been convicted of killing a 2-year-old boy in 1993, when he was just 10 years old himself, and then released from prison in 2001 and given a new identity.
As Britain’s Channel 4 News reported, the man, Jon Venables, who is now 27, faces new accusations of downloading 57 images of child pornography from the Web and posting seven of them on a file-sharing site in February.
Venables and his accomplice were almost certainly the inspiration for the novel and film Boy A, a truly heartbreaking story about a young man trying to overcome a murder he committed as a child and lead a normal adult life. The film ends with Boy A’s (now Young Man A’s) grief-stricken suicide. It feels insane to suggest that suicide is a clean way to end one’s life—but it seems like the real-life Boy A’s story is going to be much messier than that of the fictional Boy A.
This is sad. If this guy spent his entire pubescence and adolescence– age 10 to 18– locked away in a British youth prison, then it seems fair to assume he experienced a pretty fucked up introduction to sexuality. And now I assume he’s fixated on porn showing the same….
Is that what that Radiohead album is about?
porn and pedophilia are inextricably intertwined
The problem is obviously that he killed them without eating them. Thou shalt not waste perfectly good meat. He’s gonna burn in Hell for that.
We’d be better off if the notion of an honorable suicide came back.
#1.
Ha. That’s one way to interpret it. Another is that he was born a perv and stayed a perv.
BTW — most child molesters are under 30.
How about a SPOILER ALERT, Brendan?
Of course in Boy A, the protagonist is made much more sympathetic than the real life killers of James Bulger ever were – there’s strong suggestion in the book that Boy A was only present for the killing, not a participant. The boys’ victim in the book and film (which is awfully good and won its star, Andrew Garfield, a BAFTA) is a cruel girl their own age who insults and mocks the boys before they decide to act, not a toddler lured away from his mother with cold-blooded precision.
With the fictional Boy A (and an earlier real life, heartbreaking UK case – Mary Bell) I did feel pity but I’ve never gotten there with Jon Venables or Robert Thompson.
@2 – the Radiohead album “Kid A” refers to the first (human) kid born of cloning. Pedantry done, off to bed.