What drives someone to kill is a question that has long dominated the world of criminal psychology. But what drives children to kill takes it to another level. After teenagers Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were given life sentences for the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey, that question is under the spotlight more than ever.
“This has been one of the most distressing cases I have ever dealt with,” Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Ursula Doyle of CPS Mersey-Cheshire said in a statement released in December. “The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.”
But Jenkinson and Ratcliffe aren’t the only youngsters to have taken a life. The duo, who were 15 at the time of Brianna’s murder, were arrested on the 30th anniversary of the death of James Bulger, who was killed by 10-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables back in 1993.
Sharing her condolences for Brianna’s family, Denise Fergus, James Bulger’s mum, said, “It’s hard for me to understand how this is still happening to this day. Two kids have taken another child’s life.”
She added, “Anyone who has been in my circumstances, I feel so sorry for this family. They are now on a long road, a long journey without their child. To hear again that two kids have taken not only a young girl’s life, but also destroyed an entire family, like Thompson and Venables did with mine, it’s just so hard to sink in. I didn’t think we’d be here talking about somebody else in similar circumstances.”
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According to Ministry of Justice data, nine people aged 12-17 across England and Wales were convicted of murder in 2017, with the figure rising to 36 in 2022. Meanwhile, a survey by the Youth Endowment Fund found that 16% of teenage children (aged 13-17) in England and Wales had been a victim of violence in the past 12 months.
“It’s still very rare for children to commit acts of violence, never mind murder, and that’s why it hits the media because it is an unusual event,” explains forensic psychologist Dr Keri Nixon. “But unfortunately we have seen an increase in recent years, which is a really worrying trend.”
So what can drive children to carry out violent acts?
Traumatic background
Dr Nixon says in many cases, children who go on to commit violence may have certain characteristics in their background – though not all do.
“Historically, and still very much today, there’s a strong feature of things such as traumatic backgrounds in children who commit crime,” she says. “When we’re talking about people who get involved in crime as a child, whether that’s violent crime, drug dealing or stealing, the majority have come from traumatic, dysfunctional backgrounds, poverty, drugs, alcohol. It is incredibly rare for a child to get involved in serious crimes when they come from stable, loving backgrounds and that’s what makes the media headlines that we’ve seen recently. That is what is incredibly, incredibly rare.”
Dr Nixon adds, “If there is trauma, abuse or neglect in early childhood, it can actually cause changes in the brain. Nature and nurture go very much hand in hand. Nature can impact nurture.”
Retired psychologist Dr David Holmes agrees. For him, in order to gather “a complete explanation of offending behaviour”, people need to consider both nature and nurture and look at a person’s environment as well as psychology. “Upbringing will positively often intervene in the thinking and behaviour of would-be child killers, offering alternative motivations and activities,” he explains. “But in the absence of good upbringing and monitoring of children, the influence of jealousies, rivalries, gang culture or adverse nature can be allowed to run their course to murder.”
Given the changes that occur during adolescence, Dr Holmes also warns that unique developmental factors associated with being a teenager could make that age group particularly “at risk” of killing other young people.
“In general children are less empathic and have less insight into the consequences of killing another child than adults,” he says. “Teenagers are particularly at risk of killing other children due to increased hormone levels, brain restructuring and establishing their identity. With the additional influence of gangs we find that the homicide rate for 15-year-olds is close to that of adults.”
Online impact
And with this generation of children growing up in a digital environment, both Dr Nixon and Dr Holmes believe that attention should be turned to the role that the online world has to play in acts of murder or violence.
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“In some recent cases, we’ve seen that the social media videos some children are watching have had an impact. I’ve always said that violent video games and videos have an impact because they desensitise children,” says Dr Nixon.
“We never would have thought 30 years ago that youngsters could be in their bedrooms having access to strangers who are influencing them in a way that we have never seen before. Children are navigating an online world, often with no protection or supervision.”
Dr Holmes adds that the online environment “provides a template, encouragement and a sense of normalising” things such as
violence and killings. “One has to question why such content is available at all, as there are no legitimate reasons for this whether accessed by children or adults,” he says. “A lesson for future carers of children: always be inquisitive about what your children are doing behind closed doors.”
It may sound daunting, but Dr Nixon is keen to stress the importance of taking action with her three top tips for parents:
● Don’t allow children on sites and apps that they’re not supposed to be on.
● Ensure that parental controls are on devices.
● Make sure that children don’t think about their phone as being their phone – it is your phone.
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