Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell

"Yes, the vast majority of violent perpetrators are male. Quite why that is, no one really knows. It’s a bit of a Nobel Prize-winning question. Across the world, there are no countries or cultures where men are not the main perpetrators of violence. Women are always a minority, and not just a minority but a tiny minority. Usually in the region of 5% or so. It’s unusual for women to act violently towards others. Having said that, when women do act violently, they can be just as cruel and brutal as men. There were female prison guards involved in the killing in Nazi Germany too. No question about it, women can carry out that kind of violence, it’s just that the absolute numbers are far fewer. That makes those that do so very unusual compared to the general population, and pretty unusual compared to even the small population of women who break the criminal law at all—which is a pretty small proportion. Most women are rule-keepers, and if they do break criminal laws, they don’t usually commit acts of violence. They steal things, commit fraud. The few crimes of violence they do commit are nearly always within the family. There’s a kind of theme to homicide, which is that it’s about exerting power and control over other people. It’s about communicating to the victim: you don’t get to say no. It’s there in Christopher Browning’s account of Reserve Police Battalion 101, it’s there in the stories we read of women who kill their children or partners… something about killing another person is about exerting absolute control. Very few homicides take place after any kind of ‘equal’ scuffle. Yes, a murder that is absolutely unicorn-like rare. It’s not only a murder by a woman, but a murder by a little girl. Mary Bell was 11 years old when she killed two little boys—a three-year-old and a four-year-old about six weeks apart. One little boy she killed entirely on her own, the other she killed with a friend, and the friend got acquitted. The really intriguing thing is that this 11 year old girl was convicted of murder, even though it was clear to anyone who covered the trial, including Gitta Sereny, that she was very, very disturbed. When it comes to children killing other people, I don’t think there can ever be ‘normal’ for a child to kill. The only possible exception might be child soldiers, who are groomed by adults to participate in war, but of course such children have usually already been traumatised by war and their participation makes them even more disturbed. All the evidence we have about domestic homicides by children is that these are very disturbed children who need help, and who have nearly always been exposed to grotesque levels of abuse and neglect at home. And that is indeed what had happened to Mary Bell. Gitta Sereny covered the trial, and had already written a book called The Case of Mary Bell . She was very concerned that this little girl didn’t get a properly fair trial, but was completely demonised in a way that was grotesque. She served her time, and was released when she was 23. Gitta Sereny contacted Bell then through her probation officer, and asked if she could write a book with her about her experience. So Cries Unheard is about Mary Bell, grown up and released from prison, having completed a prison sentence for the murders of the little boys. It’s a book that will make you really think about what it takes to create the kind of disturbance for a child to kill, and how extremes of abuse and neglect could disturb your mind so much that you no longer know what is real and what is not. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s one of the things that Gitta Sereny concludes: that these two girls—Mary, 11, and Norma, 13—were living in a distorted reality, a kind of fantasy land. The idea that they could have been truly criminally responsible is a complete nonsense. By the time Sereny wrote this second book, the James Bulger trial had happened as well, so it’s all the more powerful that she is able to reflect on that trial as well. In 1993, two 10-year-old boys were arrested for the murder of two-year-old James Bulger. Something similar happened as happened to Mary Bell—these two little boys were held up as murderous monsters. What they did was monstrous, of course it was, but the idea that they themselves could be typified as monsters, I think, is not really tenable. There are striking similarities, although in the Parker-Hulme case the girls were older—Juliet Hulme was 16 and Pauline Parker was 15, I think. But that sense of living in a joint fantasy, in which their victims were not very real to them, is similar for sure. That’s certainly something I’ve seen in my work—people who have killed in a state of mind where nothing seems real, the victim doesn’t seem real, the killing doesn’t seem real. Some of the guys in our homicide group say that ‘it was all like a dream’, as if their sense of reality had been suspended. I do want to say something, which I hope will be very obvious. Christopher Browning says this at the beginning of his book too. To understand is not to excuse. What I say here is not to excuse the killing. But understanding and explaining might help us prevent it in future. It’s vital that we invest in thinking about these things and take them seriously, not just take the easy way out by saying, ‘oh, well, they are disgusting monsters, just throw away the key and forget about it.’ That’s not going to help anything."