The Devil's Children

This book offers a true crime history - from medieval society to Jamie Bulger - of children who kill and how adults have tried to make sense of them.The extraordinary and horrifying crime of murder by children of other children commands widespread public interest, but has this always been so? Focusing on the earliest recorded cases, up to and including the tragic killing of James Bulger, this fascinating investigation goes beyond the notoriety of the crimes to explore the real-life stories of the children who committed them and the adult world in which they took place.As well as asking what has changed in the treatment and punishment of these children, and in how they have been viewed by the Church, the courts and the medical profession, it also reveals how these unusual crimes were as pivotal then as they are now in wider deliberations about childhood, morality and the troubling boundaries between innocence and experience.The intriguing story of these crimes is deftly woven together with the keen insights of social history and a groundbreaking depiction of how the legal and medical cultures used such cases to rethink human agency and responsibility.