My example for today that I will be analyzing is about a child killer named, Mary Bell.
I first found out about this young girl who had killed two young boys when she was 11 by simply doing a Google search on children who killed. I was very surprised to find that there was actually a list of the Top Ten Young Killers (2).
What!?! Someone actually sat down, researched, and then wrote up the list of the top ten young murders. This was absolutely astonishing to me that these children are getting this type of attention, simply because they are murderers. Instead of simply forgetting about the horrible people who committed such heinous things, the news media highlights them and makes them even more famous for years after their trials.
However, that is a topic for another day. What I am focusing on today is about the specific instance of Mary Bell, her crimes, and how she was reported on.
Mary Bell was age 10 and then age 11 when she murdered two boys, one who was 4 and the other who was 3. She had strangled both boys and had tried to accuse her friend of the murders. However, he reactions after both boys were found made a lot of people very suspicious since she was seen to have been laughing and smiling at the dead boys' bodies.
The way that Bell was portrayed in the media was as a child who had no sense of remorse and who had hurt other children before murdering these two boys. Mary was seen as manipulative and intelligent. A lot of people felt that she had known exactly what she had done and felt no remorse what-so-ever.
After reading articles on Mary, I fully agree with those people. When she was young she knew exactly was she was doing and seemingly enjoyed hurting people. I think in the case of Mary Bell that the media portrayed her in the correct way, which is how she actually was, however I do think that there should have been more investigation into Mary's mother and what could have possibly turned Mary into this type of person.
Thankfully, not all child killers are as sick, demented, and aware of their actions as Mary Bell was.
Not much is written about Mary Bell anymore because after she was released from prison and had a child, her and her daughter were granted lifelong anonymity by the high courts. This means that current identity and whereabouts of Bell and her daughter cannot be disclosed and that there is no reporting on the two.
In my opinion this is a good things because as quoted by the mother of one of the boys that Mary had murdered, "The best that could happen would be for her to remain anonymous and just vanish and we can get on with our lives."(1) The victims of the murders are what is important, not the murders and why they did it. More focus should be put on the victims.
Sources:
1 http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html
2 http://listverse.com/2011/05/14/top-10-young-killers/
http://www.crimecasefiles.com/forum/famous-killers/13522-mary-bell-child-from-hell.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html
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