suitable vehicles: framing blame and justice when children kill a child

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Crime, Media, Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1741659008092328 2008; 4; 197 Crime Media Culture

David A. Green Suitable vehicles: Framing blame and justice when children kill a child

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ARTICLES

Suitable vehicles: Framing blame and justice when children kill a child

DAVID A. GREEN, City University of New York, USA

AbstractThis article presents the results of a comparative analysis of English and Norwegian newspaper coverage of two child-on-child homicides from the 1990s. Domestic coverage of the English case of James Bulger presented it as alarmingly symptomatic of deep-seated moral decline in Britain that only tough, remoralizing strategies could address. Coverage of the Norwegian case of Silje Redergård constructed it as a tragic one-off, requiring expert intervention to facilitate the speedy reintegration of the boys responsible. Four sets of plausible explanations are offered to account for differences in the ways the two cases were constructed. First, different cultural constructions of childhood endure in each country and these condition the responses deemed ap-propriate for children who commit grave acts. Second, the dominant claims makers were very different in each jurisdiction with consequences for the quality of the discourses readers encountered. Third, while the legitimacy of elite expertise appears to survive in Norway, it appears to ail in Britain, and addressing this absence of public confidence has become a political priority. Fourth, a consensual political culture obtains in Norway and this makes Norwegian politicians less susceptible to the temptations experienced by adversarially acculturated English politicians to politicize high-profile crimes.

Key wordschildhood; discourse; legitimacy; penal populism; political culture

INTRODUCTION

When two-year-old James Bulger was abducted and murdered by two ten-year-old boys outside Liverpool, England, on 12 February 1993, public concern about crime immediately doubled (MORI, 2002) and sentencers refl ected this concern in their decisions. The adult prison population in England and Wales has since 1993 risen almost inexorably, increasing by 80 per cent over the last 14 years after the reversal

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE © 2008 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 4(2): 197–220 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659008092328]



CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 4(2)198

of a brief downward trend that had begun one year before James Bulger was killed. The number of youths aged 15 to 17 held in prisons rose from 769 to 2089 between 1993 and 2002 (Muncie and Goldson, 2006). In explaining the apparent increase in cultural and political appetites for the punishment of children in England and Wales, Rod Morgan, former head of the Youth Justice Board, contends that ‘James Bulger is seminal’ (quoted in The Guardian, 31 March 2007).

The lasting impact of the Bulger case in Britain is due in part to a number of political contingencies. While in opposition in the immediate wake of the Bulger case, Tony Blair used the platform his position as shadow Home Secretary provided to articulate New Labour’s reworked approach to law and order at a time when public and press interest was at a peak. This articulation included a new, unapologetic enthusiasm for punishment, which remains at the core of government penal policy, and the dumping of liberal ‘hostages to fortune’ with whom the Labour Party had been formally allied (Downes and Morgan, 1997). Out-toughing the Tories on law and order also included the legitimization of simplistic, doom-laden, tabloid rhetoric that was usefully em-ployed to convince voters they were on the brink of a moral crisis, one which the Tories had allowed to occur and which New Labour was better equipped to address. Blair himself claimed authorship of a number of tabloid articles that spoke of, and granted greater purchase to, the notion that the Bulger case was a meaningful omen, an accurate barometer of societal moral health. In one he stated,

At last crime is taking its rightful place at the top of our concerns. And not just because of the horrifi c events of the past ten days. Beneath the headlines that shocked us so much are more minor versions of the same events . . . [I]t is time to wake up to the world around us. There is something very wrong and very sick at the heart of our society. (Daily Mirror, 22 February 1993)

His high-profi le performance in the storm of Bulger case media coverage, as well as his strategy later as party leader of wooing the tabloid press, were deemed by some to be key to Labour’s victory in the 1997 election (Rentoul, 2001; Oborne and Walters, 2004).

More recently, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron, invoked similar crisis rhetoric when commenting on a spate of teen shootings in London – a strategy his advisers linked with Tony Blair’s performance after the Bulger case. Cameron said, ‘That’s what our society’s now come to – teenagers shooting other teenagers in their homes at point blank range. It is deeply depressing’ (quoted in The Guardian, 16 February 2007). Blair was perhaps understandably less keen than Cameron to characterize these shootings in the same way he had the Bulger case during his own spell in opposition:

What has happened in south London is horrifi c, shocking and for the victims and their families tragic beyond belief. However, let us be careful in our response. This tragedy is not a metaphor for the state of British society, still less for the state of British youth today, the huge majority of whom, including in this part of London, are responsible and law-abiding young people. (The Guardian, 16 February 2007)1



GREEN SUITABLE VEHICLES 199

The now iconic CCTV image of James Bulger’s abduction by the two boys remains powerfully evocative today.2 Reasonably attentive Britons cannot forget – nor are they allowed to forget – the murder of James Bulger, nor what became of the two boys responsible. After Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were arrested, interrogated and charged, they were held in pre-trial custody with no psychiatric treatment, tried in a modifi ed adult court and sentenced to be detained ‘during Her Majesty’s pleasure’, the equivalent of a life sentence. Their minimum terms varied from eight to 10 to 15 and then back to eight years following a number of judicial and political interventions and legal appeals. They served their minimum terms in secure children’s homes before being released with new identities in 2001. Today the Bulger case is still frequently invoked in Parliament and referenced in news stories from across the world, especially but not only when children hurt other children. Members of the Bulger family remain outspoken critics of the treatment the two killers received, and the press continues to report any developments in the case and any issues tangential to it. For instance, it was recently revealed that the Government has spent £13,000 to protect the anonymity of Thompson and Venables (The Sun, 8 April 2007; The Scotsman, 9 April 2007; Yorkshire Post, 9 April 2007). Other tabloid stories allege that ‘Evil Venables’ has become a born-again Christian (The People, 27 May 2007) and that ‘Devil Dad’ Robert Thompson recently fathered a child with his girlfriend, who it is said does not know of his past (Gardner, 2006). More recently, James Bulger’s name was frequently invoked in the press coverage of the abduction of Madeleine McCann. Reminders of the Bulger case are diffi cult to avoid.

In Norway, twenty months after the Bulger murder, three six-year-old boys killed fi ve-year-old Silje Marie Redergård outside Trondheim. The boys were swiftly identifi ed and briefl y questioned, but their parents soon withdrew consent for the questioning to continue and the child welfare authorities took responsibility for the case. The boys were not punished in any way, but were instead offered places in kindergarten, in part so that teachers and psychologists could monitor them and assist them in coming to grips with, and getting past, what they had done (Aftenposten, 20 October 1994). Initial press interest in the story was very high, in part because of the comparisons international journalists and commentators made with the Bulger murder. However, press coverage of Silje’s case dropped off quickly and she has not become the house-hold name that James or ‘Jamie’3 Bulger has become in Britain and elsewhere. Today, many Norwegians need little prompting to recall the horrible details of the Bulger case, but most have much more diffi culty recalling those of the Silje case.4 This is in spite of the fact that Silje’s death followed the Bulger case and roughly coincided with several Scandinavian cases in which children killed other children.5 It has since been allowed to pass from collective memory, in part because it was never invoked to participate in any broader crisis narrative, and its meaning was never infl ated beyond its confi nes as a tragic and aberrant event.

This article presents the fi ndings from a systematic analysis of the press discourse generated about the two homicides. By analysing the diagnostic and prognostic frames and themes employed in the text, the aim was to discover how blame for the homicide




was attributed in the texts, as well as the associated indications of how justice ought to be achieved. A frame is:

The focus, a parameter or boundary, for discussing a particular event . . . focus[ing] on what will be discussed, how it will be discussed, and above all, how it will not be discussed . . . Frame refers to the particular perspective one uses to bracket or mark off something as one thing rather than another. (Altheide, 1996: 31)

These ‘frames on public problems typically feature a diagnostic component that iden-tifi es a condition as intolerable and attributes blame or causality, and a prognostic component that prescribes one or more courses of ameliorative action’ (Sasson, 1995: 10). Themes are the ‘recurring typical theses that run through’ the texts (Altheide, 1996: 31).

Using these defi nitions, this article compares the dominant frames and themes presented in the press that attempt to account for each jurisdiction’s homicide, it un-packs both the diagnostic and prognostic components implicated by the frames, and it considers some possible explanations for the sharply divergent themes constructed by the press in each country. The purpose of this comparative media analysis is to assess the tenor of the times, the prevailing cultural sensibilities, specifi cally in relation to two particular acts of homicide, and to expose the bounded discursive limits imposed upon debates sparked in the wake of two killings of children by children. Tonry (2004) contends that sensibilities ‘refer to prevailing social values, attitudes, and beliefs . . . [that] change slowly over time and shape and reshape what people think and believe’ (p. 5). He does not specify how sensibilities are to be studied, but implies that analysis is facilitated by historical, comparative, ex post facto perspectives that the passage of time and a suitably appreciative memory provide. However, by studying the ways language is used and by whom, discourse analytic methods can illuminate the grist of sensibilities as it is being churned out.

Gill (2000) argues that ‘the ways in which things are said . . . [implies] potential solutions to problems. The analyst’s task is to identify each problem and how what is said constitutes a solution’ (p. 180). With this in mind, coverage from tabloid and broadsheet newspapers are compared in order to highlight the inter- and intra-jurisdictional similarities and differences in how the newspapers contextualized and accounted for the cases. This includes the causes the media discourses ascribe to the act, the policy implications or prescriptions offered in the text, the commentaries surrounding the acts and the responses explicitly and implicitly deemed appropriate.

A great deal has been written about the Bulger case and its cultural impacts (Smith, 1994; Warner, 1994; Hay, 1995; Sereny, 1995; Jenks, 1996; Valentine, 1996; Young, 1996; Davis and Bourhill, 1997; Scraton, 1997; Franklin and Petley, 2001; Goldson, 2001; Rowbotham et al., 2003), and a few authors have even compared and contrasted it with the Redergård case (Clifford, 1996; Morrison, 1997; Haydon and Scraton, 2000; Muncie, 2001; Kehily and Montgomery, 2003; Jewkes, 2004). However, these comparisons have been made only cursorily; no one has yet compared press coverage of the two cases in any systematic way. This article does not review any of this previous work, but rather complements it by presenting a thorough comparative




analysis of the coverage of both cases, and by focusing on several neglected cultural and political factors that appear to help account for the accumulation of very different press discourses.

THE COVERAGE

Two newspapers from each country were chosen, one quality daily title and one tabloid daily. In England, The Times and the Daily Mirror, respectively, were selected primarily for practical reasons. Access to The Times archive is available via Lexis/Nexis and the British Newspaper Library provides a searchable archive of Daily Mirror coverage. Coverage from other titles stretching back to 1993 proved more diffi cult to access. Norwegian newspaper access was simple in comparison. Both the tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) and the broadsheet Aftenposten were approached and both papers searched their own archives and provided all the requested coverage of both the Bulger and Redergård homicides. All this coverage was translated and prepared for the coding process.

One unfortunate aspect of this text-only approach to the analysis is that the press coverage is, in a way, de-saturated. The text is stripped away from the contextual images and juxtapositioning that readers encountered in the original newspapers. This was judged to be an unavoidable compromise due to the age of the press coverage to be analysed (which meant that the original coverage as it appeared could only be obtained by photocopying it) and the sheer volume of Bulger case coverage (which would have required a vast amount of transcription before coding was possible). However, critics of this text-only approach are right to argue that media scholars must fi nd new methods to analyse the nature and impact of the dramatic visual imagery news consumers increasingly encounter, especially as multi-media news outlets become more driven by visual impact (see Greer, 2007; McLaughlin and Greer, 2007).

All the stories mentioning each homicide in the year-long period beginning the day it occurred were analysed. Table 1 shows the quantity of articles produced. The Bulger case was a major press event in England, as might be expected, while the Redergård case got little mention in Britain. In Norway, the Redergård case got prominent attention, but only for a short period compared with the Bulger case, with most coverage generated in the fi rst fortnight. Aftenposten actually carried slightly more articles on the Bulger case in the year following it than it did of the Redergård case in the year after it happened. More could be said about the comparative prominence of the two cases in each country and why they differed so much, but the focus of this article is on the discursive frames employed to make sense of the two homicides.

TABLE 1 Number of articles per case in one year

Number of articles per case in one year

The Times(broadsheet)

Daily Mirror(tabloid)

Aftenposten(broadsheet)

VG(tabloid)

Bulger case 256 152 19 30Redergård case 2 3 16 56




The analysis revealed that the dominant frames used to ‘mark off’ the Bulger and Redergård cases are fundamentally opposed. First, the Bulger case was a criminal case. The Silje case was not. Thompson and Venables were at the age of criminal respon-sibility and prosecutable. Silje’s killers were far younger than 15, the Norwegian age of criminal responsibility. Thus the Bulger case fi t a legal, criminal frame and the Redergård case did not. Second, as the press coverage suggests, the Bulger case concerned a kidnapping and a brutal and wilful murder. If the Norwegian press coverage is a guide, the Silje case concerned the death of an innocent by innocents. The Bulger case is thus conceptualized using a ‘criminal justice’ frame rather than the ‘child welfare’ frame that defi ned the Redergård case. These outer frames determine the thematic terrain that can be constructed within their boundaries and the discourses that will sub-sequently be employed to discuss the cases.

Themes in the coverage are propped up by particular angles that support the theme. For instance, within the wider criminal justice frame, the English press at times prom-inently portrayed the Bulger murder as an indication of a deeper moral malaise affl icting the whole of British society. The angles or evidentiary assertions used to support this thematic claim included the perceived declines in parental responsibility and discipline and the subsequent, apparent rise in both the seriousness and prevalence of juvenile crime. Both English newspapers present similarly bleak visions of a nation in the midst of a rapid and degenerative descent into moral chaos. The Sunday Times (21 February 1993) claims ‘There is a new brutality about Britain’, and is supported by a Daily Mirror editorial declaring, ‘There is something rotten at the heart of Britain. A creeping evil of violence and fear. The death of Jamie Bulger has focused the nation’s attention on it. But it has been growing like a cancer for a long time’ (Daily Mirror, 22 February 1993). The prescriptions implied include a re-establishment of moral certainty, something with which ‘progressive thinkers’ cannot be trusted:

The fact is there are standards and standards are slipping – we need a return to a moral consensus. Schools should teach the fi ve R’s – reading, writing, arithmetic, right and wrong. The thing that so-called progressive thinkers fail to see is that you don’t punish or restrain children because you hate them, you do it because you love them and because you want to form certain moral certainties. You don’t want children to think and refl ect about murder being wrong – you want murder to be off the agenda completely. (Daily Mirror, 26 November 1993)

It is insinuated that those who try to understand offending also condone it – not only dishonouring victims in the process but also displaying intolerable weakness in the face of moral crisis (see Kennedy, 2000). As Table 2 shows, all of these angles and more were employed as symptoms indicative of this wider theme of moral decline.

In contrast, the dominant theme used to explain the Redergård homicide in the Norwegian press is the tragic accident or the ‘all victims’ theme, which holds fast to the notion that all parties in this case were victims, including the killers themselves. Silje, of course, is a victim of violent abuse at the hands of three playmates, but the perpetrators as well are constructed as victims of their own innocence (innocent of the knowledge of what damage their violent behaviour could bring and innocent victims




of violent television). One is a victim of child welfare services that failed to intervene properly when his mother asked for help with his aggressive behaviour in the past. The same boy is also constructed as a victim of Minimal Brain Dysfunction, now better known as ADHD (VG, 19 October 1993). None of these factors to which the boys are seen to have fallen prey are at any time in the reporting portrayed as illegitimate excuses for their behaviour, as they might have been in at least some segments of the English press.

Though the infl uence of violent television is a central part of the diagnosis of the homicide, Silje’s death is viewed most prominently as a tragic aberration, little more than the result of a series of unfortunate and deadly events that said little about the

TABLE 2 Dominant frames, themes, and angles in the Bugler and Redergård cases

Bulger: Criminal justice frame

Diagnostic Prognostic

Theme Moral Malaise Theme Moral Reaffirmation Theme

Angles Rising crime Condemn more, understand lessFight leniency and liberalismDeterrent/incapacitative penaltiesNew sentencing powers

Single and bad parenting Strengthen traditional family

Violent Britain Condemn more, understand lessDeterrent penaltiesNew sentencing powersCensor violent mediaProtect the children (never forget)

Evil children PunishmentCondemn more, understand less(vigilantism)Deterrent penaltiesNew sentencing powers for ‘persistent young offenders’Teach morality

TV/video violence Censorship

Redergård: Child welfare frame

Diagnostic Prognostic

Theme ‘Only Victims’ Theme Damage Reduction Theme

Angles Tragic accident Community outreach with crisis servicesAvoid stigmatization of perpetratorsForgivenessMove on and return to normal routines

TV violence CensorshipMBD diagnosis Treatment




state of contemporary Norwegian society. It was not seen, as was the Bulger case in Britain, as somehow emblematic of societal anomie. It was not interpreted as a typical act to be expected from anomalous children, but instead as an anomalous act committed by normal children. Silje’s parents actually met with the parents of one of the boys responsible soon after the incident:

When the parent couples met later, both parties were in complete agreement that they all are victims of a great tragedy. They met in the boy’s home only a few metres away from the apartment block where Silje grew up. (VG, 18 October 1994)

At a public meeting at the school Silje attended, her stepfather spoke to the pupils, describing the anger he felt when he learned of Silje’s death, but also expressing sympathy for the boys who killed her whom he also considered victims. He told them: ‘It is important to take care of all those who are parties in the case, and to have com-passion for all the victims’ (quoted in VG, 18 October 1994).

All the prognostic or prescriptive components of the frames employed in the Redergård case press coverage are forward-looking and are not condemnatory or re-tributive. They stress reintegration, healing, expert-guided treatment and inclusion. Most of the themes and angles that dominate the contextualization of the Bulger case are strikingly absent from the Redergård coverage. In fact, the only angle that the native coverage of each domestic homicide shares in common is the concern about the effects of violent media and the subsequent calls for some kind of censorship. None of the Norwegian themes refl ect the contention that Silje’s death was the result of moral decay, inherently evil children, or the belief that crime committed by young people was out of control – all of which represent the dominant themes in the English press, tabloid and broadsheet alike. Thus also absent from the Norwegian contextualization are the remedies advocated by the English press, including punishment, moral reaf-fi rmation, condemnation, exclusion and the nostalgic ‘back to basics’ return to decency and respect advocated by John Major’s Conservative government.

The salience of evil

One of the most striking differences revealed when comparing responses to the Bulger and Redergård cases is the ease with which the Bulger killers are constructed as essen-tially evil. These constructions contend the boys were born evil, not made bad by their worldly circumstances or by environmental conditions. A Daily Mirror editorial illustrates that evil is so attractive an explanation for brutal crimes because it absolves the rest of society of blame: ‘The murder of James Bulger was so appalling that it would be foolish to pretend the evil of his two little killers could have been averted’ (Daily Mirror, 26 November 1993). Elsewhere, we learn that the word evil is used:

seriously only on occasions such as this, perhaps to distance ourselves from what has happened; it is a way of saying that it is beyond our ambit and understanding. Ian Brady, the moors murderer, was regarded as evil, a one-off representing a dark, external force. We console ourselves that there are no general lessons to be drawn from such evil. (The Sunday Times, 28 November 1993)




Though some in the press, including the tabloids, argued that there are ‘evil acts, but there are no evil people’ (Daily Mirror, 26 November 1993), others, like the lead investigator in the case, Albert Kirby, insisted that the:

two boys were wicked beyond anyone’s expectations, but not only wicked, they had a high degree of cunning and evil. They could foresee the questions to be put to them [while under interrogation] and could counter the evidence which was to be put to them. To be able to do that indicates a degree of evil on their part. All you can say is that it was evil to the extreme. (quoted in The Times, 25 November 1993)

The Daily Mirror carries similar quotations in an article with the headline, ‘Evil Freaks of Human Nature’:

Sgt Roberts attended several interviews with Thompson. ‘He had two personalities – one was evil and one was good.’ The evil side showed up when he was asked diffi cult questions: ‘He had that glare in his eye which is diffi cult to explain,’ said Sgt Roberts. He added that Thompson was not afraid of him. ‘He is not afraid of anybody as far as I can see. He has a strong character. He was quite an intelligent boy – very streetwise.’ (Daily Mirror, 25 November 1993)

Evil as intimated here is apparent to the observer by an unnatural ability to have wisdom beyond one’s years and to lie. Though, in the Redergård case, one of the boys responsible weaved rather elaborate lies, claiming three older youths had killed Silje, and that he himself had hunted them down and ‘kicked one of them in the leg so he bled, just like Ninja Turtles’ (VG, 17 October 1994). Nothing more is made of this lie in any of the Norwegian coverage. In the Bulger case, the ability to lie ‘unnaturally’ increased culpability and the evilness of the perpetrators. In Norway, lying when facing accusations from adults seemed to be something to be expected from children.

In her study of Scandinavian moral attitudes, Bondeson (2003) found that most Scandinavians hold very relativistic views about good and evil. Sixty-fi ve per cent of her sample agreed with the statement: ‘There can never be clear and absolute guide-lines about what is good and evil. What is good and evil depends entirely upon the circumstances at the time’. Only 25 per cent agreed that: ‘There are clear and absolute guidelines about what is good and evil. These always apply to everyone, whatever the circumstances’ (p. 157). Though comparisons are diffi cult, the World Values Survey uses an identical question to assess moral relativism. Combining 1981 and 1990 British data on moral relativism, 78 per cent of those 30 years old or younger endorsed the morally relativistic position, while 58 per cent of those over 30 did so (Hall, 1999: 448). These fi gures are not far off the mark of what Bondeson found in Scandinavia, yet indications from the comparison of the salience of evil in each nation’s press discourse on these homicides paints a very different picture.

Rhetoric and resonance

Gill (2000) argues that:

Much discourse is involved in establishing one version of the world in the face of competing versions . . .The emphasis on the rhetorical nature of texts directs




our attention to the ways in which all discourse is organized to make itself per-suasive. (p. 176)

The discourse analyst is thus concerned with, among other things, determining what it is about the organization of particular texts that makes them persuasive. Following Althusser (1971), Hay (1995) argues that readers, through a process of ‘interpellation or hailing’, are called upon to ‘decode’ texts of crime events in two ways: fi rst, as an isolated event, or a single crime narrative, and, second, as a component in a larger ‘metanarrative’. The success of this linkage of an isolated event with the metanarrative depends in part on the degree to which the events and the texts describing them fi nd resonance with audiences. Moral panic will not spark if the claims legitimating a panic do not have resonance, or if the claims fail to hook into consciousness. The Norwegian homicide was never amplifi ed beyond its initial confi nes as a tragedy committed by children who were too young to comprehend what they were doing. The homicide was not recruited to be part of a crisis metanarrative by either Norwegian politicians or the media, as happened in Britain.

Audiences also matter, and their cultural predispositions and self-identities impact on the success and resonance that certain kinds of rhetorical strategies and discourses have when presented. Recent research on the psychological origins of punitive attitudes (King, 2005) suggests that the identity scripts people use and the narratives they draw upon to construct notions of themselves – or the ways individuals manage their own self-identities – can help explain the relative extent of punitive attitudes between groups. Punitive attitudes appear to be correlated with a self-identity that is communally oriented; non-punitive attitudes seem to correlate with more autonomous self-identities. Comparing how the pronoun ‘we’ is used in the reporting of the two homicides helps to identify the audience being targeted or hailed by this rhetorical strategy. James Thompson’s column in The Times invokes the Bulger case and helps illustrate the point: ‘Although murder by children has been extremely rare, we all sense that we need to wake up to the disturbed, violent and amoral behaviour of what seems to be a growing number of children’ (The Times, 27 November 1993, emphases added). Another example also comes from The Times in a piece written by Sally Emerson with the headline ‘Beast That Hides in the Infant Breast’:

. . . let us not feel too sorry for the evil in our society – evil has its own, intense pleasure as we have witnessed. Let us just say we have to fi ght it. We must not incite it. We must take care to avoid it. And we have to punish it as severely as we possibly can . . . What we need, of course, to do is bring back hell. People used to behave themselves through fear of it. If God has closed it down, let us open it up, although some might say we have already done that. It has been closed down somewhere, but opened up right here in our midst, in Liverpool, by a railway line. (The Times, 18 February 1993, emphases added)

In this collective sense, we, as members of the society that allowed the atrocity of the Bulger murder to occur and contributed to the moral decay that made possible the unthinkable, are thus collectively responsible for it. We are morally culpable.




The English collective approach to contextualizing and accepting responsibility for the crime sits uneasily alongside approaches appearing in the same newspapers that attempt to divorce the two perpetrators directly responsible from any collective sense of we or us.6 This othering is also more prevalent in the English coverage, both tabloid and broadsheet again, and absent in the less speculative and more informative Norwegian press. Thompson and Venables are often discursively cast out of the community with punishment of their crimes used to re-establish moral boundaries in a Durkheimian way, their membership in the community sacrifi ced in order to restore social solidarity (Durkheim, 1893/1969).

Some (Tyler and Boeckmann, 1997; King, 2005) suggest that punitive public attitudes are indicative of general concerns and anxieties about perceived changes in morality and other factors seen to threaten social solidarity and provoke ‘ontological insecurity’ (Giddens, 1990) in citizens of late-modern western countries (Bauman, 1991; Garland, 2001). Nostalgia for an idealized past when moral boundaries were uncontested de-fi nes much of the discourse supporting the moral decay thesis. King (2005) found that of an inventory of both instrumental and symbolic variables contributing to puni-tiveness, ‘generational anxiety’ – or the belief that the youth of today are less well behaved and more disrespectful than kids used to be – was the most highly correlated with punitive attitudes. Thus it would seem that those with punitive attitudes might fi nd sustenance in the nostalgic media discourses that support these contentions. These beliefs that the youth are anomic, amoral and disrespectful seem always to have defi ned older generations’ views of the young (Pearson, 1983, 1985). This fear of youth seems to be linked to broader anxieties concerning moral decline more generally.

Young (1999) explains the appeal of ‘essentialism’ in late modernity, which he sees as a by-product of ontological insecurity. Constructing children as possessing evil essences has some cognitive appeal. Anomalies serve social functions. In the Bulger case press coverage,

two kinds of ‘Otherness’ can be identifi ed: (a) the child possessed of an inherently evil nature; and (b) the composite creature, the ‘adult-child’. Both are highly trans-gressive images, at once wilful, bizarre and demonic. In that these images instance acute fractures from the commonplace idea of ‘the child’ as it is understood within western society, they both constitute a powerful, and volatile, ambiguity in public accounts of childhood. Anthropological work on social classifi cation enables us to understand such a response as one emitting from a people whose cosmologies are under threat. As Mary Douglas (1970) has shown, the identifi cation of anomalies, whether in the form of people, plants or animals, is integral to the establishment of social order. Anomalies are, in essence, the by-products of systems of ordering. Through their remarked differences, ironically, they work to fi rm up the boundaries which give form and substance to the conceptual categories from which they are excluded. In this sense, by refusing children who commit acts of violence accept-ance within the category of child, the public has reaffi rmed to itself the essence of what children are. (James and Jenks, 1996: 323)




It might then be that the restrained approach taken in Norway following Silje’s death – evident in the lack of enthusiasm in the Norwegian press for the expulsion of children who elsewhere might be deemed anomalous deviants – might be explained by a diminished motivation for Norwegians to rally in this way. Perhaps due to its cultural and ethnic homogeneity, the high levels of trust among citizens and strong governmental legitimacy, the social order remains unthreatened by such anomalies and expulsion to repair the damage wrought by an incident like Silje’s death is deemed disproportionate and inappropriate. Reintegration is chosen instead as the preferred route.

It would appear that the English press’ coverage of the Bulger case, especially but not exclusively the tabloids’, taps into these collective sentiments and concerns through their sensationally colloquial style and open editorializing. The reader is drawn into the speculation and hand wringing with contentions that we, author and reader both, are complicit in the wrong that has been done. Perhaps in so doing, this kind of reporting engenders punitive reactions by triggering guilt in the reader, guilt that is expressed in anger. The rhetorical approach of the tabloids might then be understood to facilitate these reactions because of the ways in which they appear to speak for the public, to stand in as the conscience of the readership. The above excerpts from English coverage of the Bulger case invoking collective sentiments also imply that disagreement with the author would somehow be unconscionable to ‘right-thinking’ people with ‘com-mon sense’.

Understood in this way, the tabloidization of news through these populist appeals to some vague sense of the collective might have consequences for public attitudes, particularly readers’ support for harsh punishments for offenders, as tabloid-style portrayals of crime tend to be correlated with support for harsher penalties (Doob and Roberts, 1988; Roberts and Doob, 1990). Though they do not create them, the media do seem to cultivate and massage these elements of readers’ self-identities in those for whom this kind of coverage resonates. It is also notable that these features are not only present in the tabloid Daily Mirror but in The Times as well. This suggests the English broadsheets have to some extent ‘gone tabloid’, presenting opinionated and emotive editorial content that refl ects a comfortableness with engaging the issues of public concern on a gut level. The tabloids seem far less inclined to return the favour by ‘going broadsheet’ and presenting the dispassionate informational analysis and context that readers still get from the broadsheets.

EXPLAINING DIFFERENCES

In short, the Bulger murder was prominently framed as indicative of a wider moral malaise, as a symptom of something even worse. The Silje case was instead character-ized as a horrible aberration, indicative of the unfortunate fact that tragic things happen. Four plausible factors help explain why the frames, themes and angles used to put the Bulger and Redergård homicides in context are so different. These are intertwined and involve the dominant constructions of childhood, the identities of dominant claims makers, the legitimacy of societal institutions and elite expertise, and the role of political culture in the politicization of crises.




Cultural constructions of childhood

The age at which young people are deemed to be criminally culpable for the offences they commit varies broadly among western countries. In Scotland, for instance, the age of criminal responsibility is as low as eight, though the Children’s Hearings system ensures that the approach taken with most young people is a welfare-oriented one. In England and Wales, the age of criminal responsibility is 10, though until 1998, a child between 10 and 14 was presumed to be doli incapax, or incapable of doing wrong, unless the prosecution could prove the accused knew right from wrong. In the same 1990 White Paper in which the Conservative government famously declared that prison was ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse’, it also defended the doli incapax presumption: ‘The Government does not intend to change these arrangements which make proper allowance of the fact that children’s understanding, knowledge and ability to reason are still developing’ (Home Offi ce, 1990: para 8.4, emphases added). However, by 1997 the Labour government had decided that doli incapax ‘fl ies in the face of common sense’ (Home Offi ce, 1997: para. 3). Questions about the criminal culpability of children were thus simplifi ed in the post-Bulger case penal climate with the abolition of the presumption in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (Gelsthorpe and Kemp, 2002).

In contrast, in Norway and the other Nordic countries, the age of criminal respon-sibility is 15. Norwegians seem culturally incapable of accepting that children under 15 should be prosecuted as adults or that any child should be in prison. The notion that children cannot be criminally, or even morally, culpable for what they do is fi rmly established. This contrasts sharply with what the prosecutor in the Bulger case said in court. He argued, ‘some criminal acts are more obviously seriously wrong than others. These crimes are most seriously obviously wrong, not merely to a 10-year-old but to a child of perhaps half that age or even less’ (The Times, 3 November 1993). This contention suggests that even if James Bulger’s killers had been six, like Silje’s killers were, or even as young as four or fi ve, then they still would have been morally culpable for that they did. Such a statement would be unsayable in Norwegian culture, especially by someone in so prominent a position in society. Children in Norway cannot be constructed as criminally culpable, punishable, moral entities in the same way that they are in Britain. These culturally different constructions of childhood inevitably conditioned the ways in which the two homicides were framed in the press accounts (see Jenks, 1996; Davis and Bourhill, 1997). Other factors did too.

The importance of legitimate claims makers

The dispassionate, analytic, expert-dominated discourse commonly associated with the broadsheet press is only persuasive to those readers who regard the expert whose views are expressed as a legitimate and trustworthy authority. The persuasive elements of expert discourses tend to rely upon forms of persuasion that are evidence driven, like research fi ndings and other forms of non-commonsensical, non-experiential knowledge. The prestige of the expert or the weight of an expert’s evidence is meant




to have persuasive purchase. Other non-expert driven discourses expressed in the press rely upon different strategies to persuade readers, refl ecting in a Foucauldian sense their relative position in a ‘hierarchy of discourses’ (Schlesinger et al., 1991; Jupp and Norris, 1993). The relative prominence of views expressed in a given news medium by various claims makers can be said to refl ect the relative legitimacy those groups enjoy.

If we accept this logic, content analyses of claims makers reveal a very different hierarchy refl ected in Norwegian and English press categories. Table 3 shows the per-centage of items about the domestic case – the Bulger case in the English press and the Redergård case in the Norwegian press – containing the views of various claims makers. Arguably of most interest are the fi rst two rows where claims made by experts and those made by the public are shown. Almost half of Aftenposten’s Redergård case items featured the views of experts and almost 40 per cent of VG’s did so. Only slightly more than a fi fth of The Times coverage of the Bulger case featured expert views and only 10 per cent of the Daily Mirror coverage did. An even bigger contrast is found when views of the public are examined. No public views were expressed in the Norwegian press in either the tabloid or broadsheet coverage of the Redergård homicide, while such views were featured as prominently in The Times as expert views were. Public views were expressed in one-quarter of the Daily Mirror’s coverage of the Bulger case – two-and-a-half times more prominently than expert views.

What are we to make of these discrepancies? Certainly, to explain the comparative salience of particular claims makers’ views goes some way towards explaining the comparative salience of particular discourses. However, to explain why expert discourses were invoked by referring to the higher prevalence of expert claims makers in press accounts is tautological and not very satisfying. How can we account for the higher prevalence both of expert claims makers in the Norwegian press and public claims in the English press? Two observations help account for them, though probably only partially. First, the relative lack of expert views expressed in the pages of the Daily Mirror on issues relevant to the Bulger case suggests that expert views are not highly prized by its reporters, editors and, by extension, its readers, whereas the dominance of expert views in the Redergård reporting refl ects favourable attitudes towards them in Norway. Second, incentives to mine this particular seam of public distrust in elite expertise are experienced especially acutely in Britain for political and commercial reasons. When politics is highly adversarial and when the public’s trust in government is low – two

TABLE 3 Domestic case items with views by claims makers (%)

Domestic case items with views by claims makers (%)

The Times (broadsheet)

Daily Mirror (tabloid)

Aftenposten (broadsheet)

VG(tabloid)

Claims Maker Groups

Experts 22 10 47 39Public 21 26 0 0Police 19 27 53 22Clergy 10 8 7 7Victims 11 17 13 17Perpetrators 7 12 20 15




factors that characterize English politics – opposition politicians are motivated to exploit public mistrust as a political weapon to discredit the party in power and to make the case that the opposition would do better if only given the chance to govern.

Legitimacy and trust in expertise in late modernity

At the time of the Bulger murder, a recession was ongoing in Britain, with an unemploy-ment rate not seen since the 1930s (Hay, 1995). Highly publicized Gallup and MORI polls followed on the heels of the case, showing a sharp decline in the public’s national confi dence. Eighty per cent of the British public were said to be unsatisfi ed under Tory leadership (The Sunday Times, 28 February 1993), almost half of Britons were believed to want to emigrate (The Times, 24 February 1993), and law and order was second only to unemployment as the primary worry on British minds (The Times, 26 February 1993). The Bulger case only crystallized more general anxieties and broader concerns that had been accumulating, providing an opportunity for people to express them.

Whether or not commentators are accurate in their appraisals of crises, by focusing so intently on the appearance of one conveys to readers the message that conditions are such that such appraisals are worthwhile and valid. Ryan (2003) recalls the 1970s when there was a broadly perceived breakdown in faith in the ability of the Govern-ment to do things. A similar pessimism about Britishness appeared to be peaking again in the 1990s. As Table 4 shows, the Bulger and Redergård cases occurred at a time when the Norwegian public’s confi dence in their press and parliament was nearly twice the level of Britain’s (Listhaug and Wiberg, 1995).

The signifi cance of events is contingent and can only be interpreted with an appreciation of the event’s cultural context. Another English child-on-child homicide illustrates this point. Franklin and Petley (2001) and Rowbotham et al. (2003) compared the Bulger murder with the 1861 murder of two-year-old George Burgess in Stockport. The two cases share remarkable parallels: both victims were the same age, both cases involved stranger abductions in which the perpetrators led the victims on long walks of over two miles during which numerous witnesses failed satisfactorily to intervene, and both cases involved torture and the removal of some of the victim’s clothing. Like the Bulger case, there was a high degree of press interest in the Burgess murder and its uniqueness, but the two eight-year-old boys responsible were demonized only in

TABLE 4 Confi dence in selected institutions (%)

Confidence in selected institutions (%)

Legal system Press Police Parliament Civil servants

Norway 1982 84 41 89 78 581990 75 43 88 59 44

Britain 1981 66 29 86 40 481990 54 14 77 44 44

Source: European Values Survey data cited in Listhaug and Wiberg (1995).




the earlier stages of the coverage. By the time of the trial, press opinion focused with optimism on the prospects of rehabilitating the boys and the harsh punishments ad-vocated initially were abandoned for more reintegrative approaches. Though they faced murder charges and the death penalty, a jury found James Bradley and Peter Barratt guilty only of manslaughter, a verdict cheered in the court’s public gallery, and they were sentenced to one month in gaol and fi ve years in a reformatory.

In presiding over the Burgess trial, Judge Compton said he ‘believed it was mere babyish mischief’ that accounted for the boy’s crimes (Rowbotham et al., 2003: 119), whereas Justice Morland declared the Bulger murder ‘an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity’ (The Sunday Times, 28 November 1993). While some cases like the Bulger murder become suitably emblematic ‘vehicles to which concerns about the overall stability of the community could be attached’ (Rowbotham et al., 2003: 115), others like the Burgess and Redergård cases do not. The suitability of certain high-profi le crimes as vehicles for such concerns appears to have little to do with the murder narratives themselves and more to do with the questions of legitimacy, public trust and public confi dence.

Lest it be assumed the climate of the time of the Burgess case to be conducive to such public mercifulness, Rowbotham et al. point out that there was plenty on the minds of Victorian Britons in 1861 that would seem to make palatable a more vengeful Burgess case verdict:

From its start, 1861 was characterised by a high degree of panic, with the harsh winter heightening both crime and misery levels. There was a high-profi le building strike, high levels of petty crime associated with unemployment and misery, and numerous leaders in papers from The Times to the News of the World about what the Annual Register summed up as ‘the doctrine of juvenile capacity for crime.’ (Rowbotham et al., 2003: 114)

To account for the disparity between the public reactions to the Burgess and Bulger cases, the authors argue that the Victorian response ‘was enabled because of the existing substantial popular faith in the “justness” of the system’ (p. 114). They point to the apparently widespread dissatisfaction with the decision to release Thompson and Venables in 2001 as evidence that ‘. . . the present legal system has NOT instilled a similar popular confi dence that justice is being seen to be done’ (p. 114).

If true, these arguments suggest that the public’s trust and confi dence in the criminal justice system matters, and for reasons that go beyond issues of principle and some detached legalistic sense of legitimacy. Low levels of trust have real and far-reaching consequences that can – as high-profi le and rare events like the Bulger case have done – affect citizens’ subsequent perceptions of the criminal justice system and of justice more generally.

To make matters worse, editors and journalists – especially in the crowded English newspaper market and particularly when tabloids enjoy the largest readerships – are enticed to make the most of political confl ict and scandal to sell newspapers. The English newspaper market is extremely competitive with 10 national daily newspapers vying




for readers. Local newspapers dominate Norway’s press market and there are really only two large-circulation, national dailies. The practice of emphasizing the sensational is probably further intensifi ed when, as in Britain, most newspapers are sold by occasional sales at newsstands, not by subscription, as most Norwegian papers are. Subscriptions sales likely decrease the need for highly sensational headlines because most readers receive the paper on their doorsteps regardless of how provocative a headline might be. Both of these tendencies – the political and commercial capitalization on the public’s distrust – appear to perpetuate the notion that citizens ought to be distrustful.

Political culture and incentives to penal populism

This brings us to the fourth plausible explanation for the frame disparity in Bulger and Redergård press coverage. Capitalizing on the public’s lack of confi dence is easy to do in England. Polls are easily found to support that notion and there are political incentives in English political culture to politicize the perception of crises. This is because ‘under the conditions of a competitive party system . . . it is perfectly rational for opposition parties to postulate a societal or political crisis to convince voters of the urgency of removing the governing parties from power’ (Fuchs and Klingemann, 1995: 4). This kind of behaviour is less rational in co-operative, multi-party systems in which coalitions are common.

Moreover, ‘Crises do not exist in the world. They exist in discourse. Crises are not real events, but are evaluations of the signifi cance of what is happening’ (Bruck, 1992: 108). This evaluative feature of crises means they are subjectively assessed and thus highly susceptible to manipulation. Though it is true that moral panic discourses cannot spark a crisis without a considerable level of existing concern (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994), it is also true that the scale of those concerns can be forcibly aroused with alarmist rhetoric that resonates with audiences who recognize its prima facie validity.

English majoritarian political culture is highly adversarial, whereas Norwegian polit-ical culture is based on a consensus model and is thus characterized by ‘inclusiveness, bargaining, and compromise’ (Lijphart, 1999: 2).7 This is an important distinction that has been overlooked by most criminologists (Green, 2007, 2008). It suggests that political incentives are much stronger in majoritarian democracies to politicize criminal events like the Bulger case than they are in consensus democracies like Norway. Be-cause power is shared among numerous political parties and there is less to gain by using crime as a political issue, Norwegians were less likely to encounter, as Britons did and do, politicians’ intention to legitimize tabloid conceptions that a horrifi c child homicide was somehow emblematic of a nation in crisis. When the only way the pol-itical opposition can exercise power is by opposing and deposing the party in govern-ment, then opportunities to exploit apparent crises are hard to pass up. Lijphart (1998, 1999) has demonstrated that consensus democracies tend to be ‘kinder and gentler’ than their majoritarian peers. Their incarceration rates are lower than those of majoritarian democracies, they use the death penalty less, are more protective of the environment, more generous with foreign aid and are committed welfare states.




Cavadino and Dignan (2006a, 2006b) have recently developed another typology or set of distinctions with considerable explanatory utility to characterize different types of political economy.8 Appetites for punitive responses to crime are highest in those countries where neo-liberalism dominates. Neo-liberalism arrived in Britain in the 1980s with the New Public Management movement under Margaret Thatcher and has continued under New Labour. It is premised on the belief that a large and interventionist public sector is ineffi cient and undermines the autonomy of the individual. The remedy is the injection of private sector management principles into the public sector through privatization and more managerial, market-driven ways of thinking: ‘The size of the public sector was to be reduced through privatization, its power delimited through deregulation, debureaucratization, and decentralization’ (Olsen, 1996: 186).

Reiner (2007) suggests neo-liberal countries like England and Wales and the other Anglo-Saxon countries ‘tend to have a “dark heart” (Davies, 1998: 373) of both serious crime and cruel punishment’. For instance, these countries tend to display, among other things, wide disparities between rich and poor, scaled-back welfare systems, high levels of social exclusion, right-wing political ideologies, exclusionary punishment systems and high imprisonment rates (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006a). In contrast to the neo-liberal countries, Norway and the other Nordic countries – which Cavadino and Dignan (2006a) categorize as social democratic corporatist – have lower cultural appetites for punishment, inclusionary penal intervention and low imprisonment rates. They also generally tend be more egalitarian, have narrower income disparities, broad and strong welfare systems, low levels of social exclusion and left-wing political ideologies.

Additionally, in England and Wales, where trust in government remains low, polit-icians are preoccupied with restoring and building public confi dence in government and the political system. Under Blair’s leadership, this often took the form of more legislation, criminalization and penalization to signal that the Government was responding to public concern. Gordon Brown (2007) focused prominently and justifi ably on the need to ‘renew people’s trust in government’ in his very fi rst statement as Prime Minister. Whether he approaches this goal any differently than Blair did remains to be seen.

In contrast, the State and its institutions retain high levels of public confi dence in Norway. As one justice committee member from Høyre – Norway’s Conservative Party – put it, ‘People trust the State’; it is viewed as benign, well-intentioned and reasonably effi cient. Even the right-wing Fremskrittspartiet or Progress Party – the populist party which often employs New Labour-style, tough-on-crime rhetoric9 – remains committed to social democracy and a strong state. As a consequence, neo-liberalism never took fi rm hold in Norway because ‘institutional elites in Norway viewed an interventionist, planning state with a large public sector as a suitable means for promoting the com-mon good’ (Olsen, 1996: 186). Unlike Britain, there is no history of feudalism in Norway and a ‘radically egalitarian’ culture concerned with the best interests of all still survives there (Christensen and Peters, 1999: 143).

Political culture and political economy clearly condition the ways in which crime is featured in political debates, the reasons why it is – or is not – enlisted for political ends, and the nature of the accumulating discourse created and used to make sense of it.




CONCLUSION

This article has illustrated the very different ways that blame and justice were framed in the tabloid and broadsheet press following two child-on-child homicides in two countries. It is impossible to account for the differences in responses to the Bulger and Redergård homicides without considering the political-cultural context in each jurisdiction. Whether or not a particular crime event becomes a suitable vehicle to which late-modern anxieties can be attached appears to be conditioned not only by the levels of confi dence that members of the public have in their institutions and in those charged with responding to that event, but also by the incentives that particular ways of doing politics create to politicize such events and to magnify their signifi cance.

Comparisons like this one illustrate how the meaning and signifi cance of crime events are socially constructed. These constructions refl ect cultural sensibilities and implicate deep-seated concerns and anxieties. We need to understand better how variations in democratic confi gurations infl uence how politicians, the press and publics respond to crime and the late-modern ontological threats that crimes represent. In particular, we need to clarify the nature of the relationships between mediatized representations of crime, audience responses to, and effects on, those representations, and a jurisdiction’s specifi c political culture.

It appears that one principal driver of the responses to the Bulger case in Britain, which continues to drive political responses to crime and disorder, is the public’s apparent lack of confi dence in the ability of politicians and criminal justice system practitioners to deal effectively with crime. The acute awareness that those politicians and practitioners have of their own failure to command confi dence, as well as their acknowledge-ment of, and reactions to, these failures, seem to perpetuate them still further. News values favour worst-case interpretations of crime fi gures, freakish high-profi le crimes and embarrassing cases of apparently unjust leniency in the system. Opposition party politicians subsequently seize on these publicized failings and extrapolate crises from them, often emptily promising to do better if elected. These mass-mediated, highly politicized interactions seem to be particularly destructive to informed public debate under the conditions of English majoritarian political culture, and we would be wise to investigate why other nations, like the Nordic countries, appear to be dealing more adaptively with late-modern anxieties and retaining higher levels of public confi dence in their experts, their leaders and their institutions.

Notes

I would like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Parts of this article appear in the book When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture, published by Oxford University Press (Green, 2008).

1 The notion of the law-abiding majority survives in spite of the evidence. See Farrington et al. (2006) and Karstedt and Farrall (2006).

2 In June 2007, after a flood of complaints and international press attention, the computer game Law and Order: Double or Nothing was pulled from the shelves because it featured the




reproduction of the CCTV image of the Bulger abduction on a police station bulletin board. James Bulger’s mother said:

To know that James has been turned into a clue in a game makes me very angry. The people who made this game have treated him as though he is public property, like some kind of fictional figure. It dehumanises the memory of my lovely son. (quoted in The Times, 20 June 2007)

3 Though the Bulger family made clear they always called their son ‘James’, the press frequently referred to ‘Little Jamie’, apparently to elicit greater sympathy (Morrison, 1997).

4 Two anecdotes illustrate. First, during a recent research trip to Oslo, the author encountered two parents who could not recall the Silje case, though they too were from Trondheim and in 1994 had a daughter Silje’s age. However, they immediately remembered the Bulger case from 1993. Second, part of this study entailed extensive interviews with 20 contacts from politics, academia and the media. Most did not recall the Silje case, and only very few could recall it in any detail.

5 Another Norwegian case occurred in either 1989 (Aftenposten, 18 October 1994) or 1992 (VG, 19 October 1994). Two Swedish cases followed Silje’s death. The first occurred in Bjuv, Sweden in 1994. Two brothers, 16 and 17 years old, stoned their 15-year-old friend to death. The second occurred in Arvika in 1998 when two brothers, aged 6 and 7 strangled a 4 year-old to death.

6 See Maruna et al. (2004) for a discussion of psychoanalytic explanations for punitive public attitudes, as well as Greer and Jewkes (2005) for their expansion upon it.

7 The majoritarian–consensus distinction exists on a continuum, but Lijphart identifies the majoritarian democracies as the USA, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the consensus democracies as the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Portugal.

8 They distinguish between four types, only two of which are discussed here: neo-liberal (USA, England and Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), conservative corporatist (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands), social democratic corporatist (Sweden, Finland) and oriental corporatist (Japan).

9 The party’s justice spokesman and first deputy chair of the justice committee, Jan Arild Ellingsen, spoke admiringly about the forthright manner with which Blair has talked about law and order, but he also advocated the provision of more state aid to single mothers whose partners are in prison (personal communication, 2 May 2007).

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DAVID A. GREEN, Sociology Department, City University of New York, USA.Email: [email protected]



suitable vehicles: framing blame and justice when children kill a child

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