James Bulger’s mother: wrong kind of victim
The First Post, 10 March 2010
Why does the liberal media have it in for Denise Fergus, mother of murdered toddler James Bulger, describing her Justice for James campaign as “threatening”, her supporters as a “lynch mob”, and Fergus herself as being possessed of “Scouse self-delusion”?
It isn’t because these high-minded journalists oppose the idea of the victims of crime showing their wounds in public or getting to have special meetings with politicians or the police. Indeed, their fawning support for Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, shows that they love victims as much as any tabloid.
No, it is because Denise Fergus is the wrong kind of victim. Too angry, too foul-mouthed, too uncouth, too much make-up, too working-class, too Liverpudlian.
The problem with Fergus is that she hasn’t learned the cosmopolitan etiquette of how to be a Respectable Victim, one who is capable of giving intelligent interviews to the Guardian or delivering quietly profound speeches at conferences on crime, and the broadsheets hate her for it.
For the past decade, since Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the killers of James Bulger, were released on life licence in 2001, the respectable media have had their knives out for Fergus.
Just because she says things like “I am still full of hate” and expresses the view that Venables and Thompson should have stayed in jail for life - perfectly understandable emotions for the mother of the toddler they killed - the media look upon her as a one-woman lynch mob.
In 2001, Charlotte Raven sneered at Fergus’s “back alley threats” against Venables and Thompson, and said she and her supporters should be “condemned to rot in Kirby [in Liverpool] until such time as society is satisfied they no longer present a threat”. She said Fergus’s victim act was a product of “Scouse self-delusion” and fretted about the threat posed by “Scouse justice” to child criminals in Britain.
Mary Riddell expressed the same sentiments, only more politely. Under the headline “The mob must not rule”, she damned the “spirit of hatred and vengeance” leaking from the Denise Fergus bandwagon, and described Justice for James as “anachronistic, even threatening”.
More recently, as the adult Venables has been recalled to prison, Fergus’s name has once again appeared next to the insulting tag “lynch mob”. Her arguments that she has a right to know what Venables is suspected of have led to accusations that she is stirring up a “baying mob”.
One broadsheet reporter even accuses her of helping to generate “monstrous, unsubstantiated fears of young people” - which is remarkable considering it was the government, aided by the scaremongering media, which turned the Bulger killing into evidence that Britain’s feral youth were out of control and subsequently introduced everything from tougher youth sentencing to ASBOs to try to deal with Britain’s alleged gangs of half-children/half-animals.
The treatment of Fergus and her supporters as a pogrom waiting to happen, who might at any minute dispense vigilante justice against anyone who looks or smells like Venables or Thompson, shows that there is a strict hierarchy in today’s politics of victimhood. There are Good Victims, dignified and worth listening to, and there are Bad Victims from the wrong side of the tracks who should shut up or ideally be “condemned to rot in Kirby”.
So the liberal media continually indulges Doreen Lawrence, the softly-spoken, intelligent mother of Stephen, because she puts her victim status to what they consider to be good use: making the case for multiculturalism, for example, or suggesting in 2008 that black people should vote for Ken Livingstone rather than Boris Johnson in the London mayoral elections.
Frances Lawrence, wife of the London headteacher Philip Lawrence who was stabbed to death in 1995, is taken seriously on everything from knife crime to educational standards, and was described in a recent Guardian interview as “vivacious, warm and strikingly youthful”.
Even Sara Payne, mother of murdered schoolgirl Sarah, despite also being a bit too working-class for the liberal establishment’s normal tastes, is treated with respect. She has been awarded an MBE and last year was appointed Victims Champion by justice secretary Jack Straw.
The promotion of victims in the debate about law and justice is deeply problematic. It accords too much authority to the feelings of those who have suffered as a result of crimes, distracting from society’s responsibility to dispense justice in an open, fair, rational and dispassionate way.
But what makes this victimology even worse is the branding of some victims as worthy and others as unworthy, where someone like Doreen Lawrence has been virtually beatified by the liberal media while Denise Fergus, simply on the basis of what she looks like, how she speaks and the rawness of her feelings, is looked upon as a murderess-in-the-making with a dumb accent.
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