James Bulger
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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James "Jamie" Patrick Bulger (16 March 1990 – 12 February 1993) was a two-year old toddler who was abducted and murdered by two 10 year-old boys, Jon Venables (born 8 August 1982) and Robert Thompson (born August 23, 1982), in Merseyside, England. The murder of a child by two other children caused an immense public outpouring of shock, outrage and grief, particularly in Liverpool and surrounding towns. The trial judge ordered that the two boys should be detained for "very, very many years to come".
Thompson and Venables were released on a life licence in June 2001, after serving eight years of their life sentence (reduced for "good behaviour"), when a parole hearing concluded that public safety would not be threatened by their rehabilitation into society. An injunction was imposed, shortly after the trial, preventing the publication of details about the boys, for fear of reprisals by members of the public. The injunction remained in force, following their release, so that details of their new identities and locations could not be published.
Video violence
One of the aspects of the case that gained much media attention was whether Venables and Thompson had been watching violent films in the days and months prior to the murder, and whether or not those movies had contributed to making the pair act in the way they did. The judge mentioned that one of their fathers possessed a large collection of violent videos, and that they probably had access to them whilst playing truant from school. As Bulger's death was similar to a death in the film Child's Play 3, and the father of one of the boys was known to have rented this film the week before the murder, The Sun newspaper explicitly named it as a movie they had seen, and printed a full front-page picture of the menacing Chucky, the child-killing doll of that horror series. However, no evidence that the boys had watched such movies was formally presented to the jury, and an officer investigating the case was quoted as saying "if you are going to link this murder to a film, you might as well link it to The Railway Children" [1], but the case gave rise to a national debate about the acceptability of violent media. Although no films were subsequently banned by the British Board of Film Classification, several video rental chains voluntarily stopped stocking Child's Play 3 and other titles listed by The Sun.
