ABSTRACT
As the final draft of this chapter was being prepared the Edlington case of two young boys convicted of grievous bodily harm and sexual assault against two boys aged nine and eleven came to the forefront of national media coverage. After their conviction – an indeterminate sentence with a minimum five-year tariff – sections of the media, politicians, ‘experts’ and social commentators all denounced the boys as evil, and criticised child protection services for failing to stop this awful attack being undertaken. What is obviously going to accentuate the influence this case has on future public protection policy is that we were in the run-up to a general election. On hearing of the conviction of the two boys, Conservative Leader David Cameron took the opportunity to make a political point by calling the case a ‘symptom of broken Britain’ and that we should not consider this case an isolated ‘incident of evil’ (Stratton 2010). To a certain extent this is not an isolated case by any stretch of the imagination. Children have been doing horrible things to each other for years and will continue to do so. However, such terrible incidents are still rare and the more robust measures of violence in society do indicate that violence in the UK has decreased in recent years. Despite most sensible criminologists knowing this, and being able to relate claims such as the ones made by Cameron to Labour’s use of the American Right’s populist approach to crime (Young 2003: 36-42), cases such as Edlington will enable the mass media, politicians and vested interest groups to push for an extension of the penal policies that have been a core feature of the Labour government’s law and order agenda since 1997. Nowhere more have we seen this than in the responses to sexual and violent predators.
