The abduction and murder of two little girls is horrendous and very sad. What should we do with the perverts and psychos that carry out these horrific acts?

Is this some kind of neo-fascist provocation / troll post?

Last January the National Front held a rally in Bromley, Kent around the theme of "what shall we do with paedophiles?" In that case, they were trying to make political capital out of the Sarah Payne murder.

It now seems as if someone is trying to stimulate a reactionary debate on the back of the recent tragic events in Cambridgeshire. It is best not to be drawn into these kinds of debates until the facts are known. For one thing, no one has even been charged with the murders yet.

It doesn't help much to accuse someone of being a fascist for even raising this as an issue; in actual fact, it just makes a gift of the "law and order" question to the Right. If we want to engage with communities, we have to engage with the issues which concern them.

Now, I know that it's important not to get hysterical about this and that,statistically, the odds of a child being abducted and murdered in this way is minute. But it doesn't change the fact that two kids have been killed for no reason I can even begin to imagine. I'm a parent myself, and I feel so much rage and despair just thinking about what's happened.

So the question's a good one; what DO we do about this as an issue? What is a credible left/libertarian response to events like this?

Of course, we on the left have typically been paralysed when faced with the issue of horrendous crimes. Because we believe the state to be corrupt and in the pocket of the ruling class, and because we believe the police, prisons and judiciary to be instruments of oppression and social control, there is an idea held by some that we must therefore be in solidarity with all criminals.

Moreover, because we typically do not associate ourselves with the demented rantings of the political right who like to use such events as opportunities to demand a return to the death penalty and additional irrelevant but highly repressive measures, we are seen as being "soft" on crime.

But the fact is, the two nutcases who apparently committed this crime will very likely be tried and jailed for the rest of their natural lives. I see another Ian Brady and Myra Hindley story in the offing. Decades of press coverage, howls of outrage the second they might be released etc. I tend to think that as long as people are dangerous to others, they must be restrained. In the end, prisons (and, even worse, hospitals) may be the only option.

I think the most fitting tribute one could make to two girls who have been murdered would be to make it more difficult for this to happen again. We know that every year, a number of children are brutally murdered by their parents and/or relatives. Even more are sexually assaulted. And a vast number are physically assaulted. The single most dangerous place for a child to be is at home. The vast majority of child rape/murder etc occurs at the hands of parents and relatives. Given that this is the case, one might safely surmise there is a particular problem with the family, and the relations of domination that prevail within it. As long as parents have all the rights, and all the say over what happens in their children's lives, and as long as children have no rights, then this situation is likely to recur again and again. Because when children are deprived of power and recognised rights, the parents can use their power to abuse and assault with impunity.

Therefore, at the very minimum, without even beginning to challenge the institution of the family at a serious level, or contemporary capitalism which is buttressed by it, I suggest a charter of rights for children, enforced by the state not just within families (where it is obviously most difficult to ensure it is observed), but also within national institutions such as schools, care homes and the NHS. The fact that teachers may no longer smack a child is a step forward, and although it causes some marginal problems, teachers are usually far too wary of career loss to risk anything today which might look like assault. It doesn't do to look like a lecherous parasite on the student body. Similarly, parents should be banned from smacking their children, except in self-defence. Why is it taken for granted that children may be smacked by their parents? Is it not precisely the same as when husbands took it for granted that they could beat their wives? We seem to always assume that where the other person cannot hit back, that actually gives us a moral duty to use violence against them.

Therefore, any form of violence against the child which is not a matter of self-defence (say, against a knife-wielding adolescent who wants his Dad to fund his crack-cocaine addiction like I read about in the Daily Mail once so it must be true), should be made into a taboo. At the same time we should prevent corporations from exploiting children, from turning them into sexualised commodities as often happens in their advertising and product marketing. (Needless to say, the more pressing concern there is to prevent corporations from exploiting children by making them into slave labour).

Finally, with all the storms of hypocritical outrage, bombast and polemic pouring from the vials of the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, we should remember some important facts. More children die of road accidents each year than die of murder, much less abduction. 19,000 children die each day from third world debt. Yet all of these supposedly moral publications support the motoring lobby and defend the IMF. Sanctimony never tasted so foul as it does in these times.

theres been a lot going on behind the scenes on this story. I cannot recall a more lurid incident, and I think we should be very careful before taking brash positions in a complex situation. pS What about the entire family from Afgainistan that the police 'abducted' a few days ago ?

what about Blair and all the apologists for war - which as the old slogan says, is not good for children and animals?

or aren't we supposed to care about dying Iraqi and Afghan kids cos they aren't fair skinned innocent daughters of middle England?

can we not please mourn these tragic girls (whom so few of us knew) equally with the far too many other unknown slaughtered children of every race, place and nation? and does not the front page hype around every clue in these girls' case expose the narrow vision and hypocrisy of a media who fill our summer days with the grief-stricken cries of one small village, as if polite white married English parents have a monopoly on our sympathy when they lose their babies?

In a culture where pornography is proudly displayed on the front-page of the Daily Paper in sweet shops, and children are being sexualized by the Pop Industry at an even younger age, and any kind of debauchery can be accessed by anyone on the Net, and TV and adverts are saturated with sex, is it any suprise our kids are becomming the victims? But this media frenzy in Soham is coinciding with the call for micro-chipped children, there is always an angle.

Whaddayaknow?

 http://www.msnbc.com/news/791811.asp?0na=x221G120

spreads throughout. Microchipping is indeed the likely outcome
 http://www.thisistherealtruth.net/Knowledge/satanic_pictures.htm

Doesn't matter if the victim is fair-skinned or dark-skinned, if he/she lives in the UK or in Afghanistan, the murder of a child is still a horiffic act. The purpretrators of the murder of Holly and Jessica should of course be brought to justice. The people behind the war this has killed several million childern in Afghanistan and the Middle East over the past 30 years should also be brought to justice. The reason the murder of Holly and Jessica is of higher profile is because it is out of the ordinary, and therefore a nasty surprise. Sadly people have become desensitised by the plight of Third world childern because it happens so often, in fact too often, and it is then relegated to the back of peoples minds since they are lead to believe that there isn't much they can do about it.

No matter what your race, gender, or nationality, no justice, no peace!

Peace, love + solidarity, TJA

This joint abduction and murder happened during Lughnasadh. They are geographically aligned to the Amanda Dowler disappearance.
ellis c taylor described the area of burial 4 days ago on his website
 http://ellisctaylor.homestead.com/files/alignments_amanda_holly_jessica4.jpg

I hear people wondering what should be done to stop these murders, what can we do to stop them, how horrible it is, both here and in the mainstream media.

On the other hand, one child dies in a car accident every single day in the U.K. , 14 are seriously injured. If people were serious about "saving our children", why doesn't this make the front page every day ? Yup, spot on, people are not going to give their car away, are they ? I mean, saving childrens is important, but not if it implies changing our behaviour...

...Between this case and the plight of millions of developing world kids is in the detail. If our media went into HALF the detail they did with these girls in relation to dev. world kids, then the public outcry would be comporable. Unfortunately, the only time dev. world kids get onto the uk media radar is during 'famines of biblical proportion' and other such natural/manmade disasters. Tragically, this is the nature of the beast, our media has far more time for domestic issues than 'foreign' ones. And so what the fuck if these kids were the daughters of 'polite, white folks'? At the end, they were still children and were as equally terrified before they were snuffed-out as any dev. world kid in a war zone/famine etc. The day when this kind of shit DOESN'T make the news, is a day i hope not to see.

Why is there a need to compare the coverage of the murders of Holly and Jessica with the coverage of death in the third world? In my mind, this evades the question: what do we do with the psychos and perverts who rape and kill children in communities local to us. I live a few miles from Soham and am horrified at what happened to a couple of kids local to me. I want to know how justice would be served in my community if there was a non-hierarchical society. Murder, rape and other violent crimes are as much an infringement of human rights and dignity as any abuse of government power. So, let's have an answer to these problems that many people like me are concerned about, instead of trying to deflect the issue.

Surely, the point is that in a non-hierarchical society children would be much freer than they are now? They would not be treated as objects, whether for having information poured into their heads at school or for being smacked around at home...

But of course when it comes to these specific cases, the motivations and understanding is so complex that it would be wrong to try and draw a generalised conclusion about what could be done preventatively. Prevention is obviously the key in the long term, but what about when something has already happened?

If the point of justice was to have equity between the criminal and the victim, we wouldn't get anywhere. How could you punish someone enough who, say, had killed as many people as Harold Shipman did? Kill him a hundred times? Clearly, the first concern is the safety of society. So, people who pose a threat would need to be restrained. Prisons would surely be the form of that restraint in the initial phase of any new society, but one would want those institutions to slowly be abolished. So, restraint would have to become more imaginative, including solutions that enable the criminal to add something to the society from which (s)he has taken.

There again, treatment is often the primary need. Mental hospitals are one option, but how does one know when they have been successful? How does one know when the treatment has worked? In these instances, a limited freedom could be allowed once treatment was deemed to have been successful, with a series of gradual steps toward re-integration with society etc.

It is my view that these short-term measures dealing with individuals would have to be coterminous with the sort of radical long term measures that seek to end the alienation and despair that can drive people to do sick things. Allowing people free access to psychoanalytic care when they are in need of it would be one important preventative measure. As it is today, nutters are simply allowed to stew away in the social undergrowth conjuring up their sick fantasies, working them through, feeding them ... and we wonder when something happens?