Member

Your Lordships will remember—noble Lords have referred to it today—the awful murder of James Bulger by two 10 year-olds. The anniversary of James’s murder is next week, and as we debate the question of children who commit crimes, this House will want to remember James’s parents, as well as his wider family, who have lived with this since 1993. Such cases are, thankfully, rare, but they do happen. In 2009, two brothers aged 10 and 11 tortured and almost killed two other children in Edlington in Doncaster. They kicked, punched and stamped on their victims, and did various other things that it is not necessary for me to set out, but one of the victims pleaded with their attackers to be allowed to die. More recently, in 2023, in Wolverhampton, two 12 year-old boys killed an unarmed 19 year-old with a machete in an unprovoked attack in a park.