cover image Cries Unheard

Cries Unheard

Gitta Sereny. Henry Holt & Company, $26 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-6067-6

In a searching examination of how children become violent criminals, and how the judicial system treats them, Sereny focuses on the case of Mary Bell. At age 11 in 1968, Bell committed the motiveless murder of two boys, ages three and four, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. The British tabloids demonized Bell as a ""born killer"" and ""vicious psychopath."" But Sereny, who extensively interviewed Bell, her therapists and social workers, portrays Bell, at the time of the murders, as a cauldron of repressed rage and anguish who lived in a grotesque fantasy world dissociated from reality. A prostitute's daughter, Bell was forced to watch as her mother was whipped by clients; she was also sexually abused by her mother's customers. Sentenced to life in prison but released in 1980, Bell, according to Sereny (who covered the trial in a 1972 book, The Case of Mary Bell), today feels profound remorse, sees a parole officer regularly, has a stable relationship with a caring man and is raising a daughter. Sereny's account of Bell's 12-year incarceration is disjointed and overwritten, but it offers a scorching look at British women's prisons as cesspools of drugs, abuse and coerced sex. Sereny (Albert Speer) proposes that children under 14 should not be held criminally responsible and should be tried by a specially convened panel instead of by jury. Her harrowing inquiry, marked by a rigorous and by no means easy exercise of sympathetic imagination, will compel people to rethink how to deal with children who kill or commit other serious crimes. (Apr.)