Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny Read Free Book Online Page B

events and their ready acceptance of ” evil” as an explanation [for them],” she continued, ‘people tend to forget that these are, or were, children. They were children who,” she emphasized, ‘prior to what one might call their ” explosion” into such acts of violence, carried around a baggage of childhood experiences unknown to or ignored by any responsible adult.”
    She said her experience had taught her that if such children were as young as Mary, and indeed as the two boys who killed James Bulger, the reason for such a baggage of childhood experiences “If one can use the word reason,” she said bitterly will have been entirely incomprehensible to the children themselves.
    “Maybe we have progressed since 1968,” she said.
    “Maybe, though I have my doubts, those two young boys [now serving life sentences, as did Mary] are being helped to understand what brought them to the point of killing little James. But as far as Mary is concerned, the childhood experiences she suffered prior to committing the crimes are still undigested, still neither really understood nor accepted.
    She would have needed continuous psychiatric help throughout her detention. But basically, except for the human kindness shown to her as a child by the headmaster and staff of Red Bank, and a short stretch of once-a-week group therapy in prison a privilege she had to fight for she had no professional attention or guidance whatever for the twelve years of “growing up” “
    Probation officers in Britain are not usually trained therapists; it is not their function.
    “I happen to be very interested in it,” Pat Royston said, ‘and have developed this style of working with the help of further training. And because of this, I was able, two years after Mary’s release from prison, to help her begin the long process of untangling her confused emotions which then made it possible for her to create a family and thereby begin to have something of a life. “
    There were four reasons, she said, why, after long soul-searching, she had accepted Mary’s decision to co-operate on a book. Two applied specifically to Mary, and two to the many other children in trouble.
    “The first is that if Mary is ever to become a normally functioning human being, she must be helped to understand not what she did for she understands that already and feels a grinding guilt for it but what was done to her as a child. And this means that she must take issue and be helped to come to terms with what her mother was and did to her, and with her own feelings about this mother.” Secondly, she said, she also hoped, as Mary does, though with less optimism, that once her whole story is on record, the media will leave her alone and she can at last begin to lead a normal life.
    Her third reason arose from her own concern at the grave deficiencies in the training of social workers, primary school teachers, and also probation officers, which resulted in the lack of awareness and care for seriously troubled children. Without any doubt, she said, this contributes to the catastrophic rise in serious crimes committed by children and, as we could see from Mary’s case, in which many cries for help were left unheeded, to the risk of tragic outcomes in such cases.
    “Finally,” she said, ‘my fourth reason is my own distress, and that of most people of my service, with the way children and young adolescents who commit serious crimes are dealt with by the judicial system. I finally came to feel that, although very unconventional and normally neither welcome nor even acceptable to professionals like myself perhaps to have Mary, who is very articulate, take issue with herself so to speak in public, is a legitimate means of demonstrating, firstly, the degree to which society fails in the care of children, and, secondly, how we doubly fail in our dealings with the resultant tragedies. I came to the conclusion that, in this age of communication, it may finally be the only way to