For a time Golding’s allegorical novel The Lord of the Flies (1954) was regarded an iconic work of modern literature. But when Golding’s vision became reality, the novel was stripped of its allegorical power, the fate of all such prescient works.
One of the most powerful episodes in Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the phantasmagorical portrayal of Tamina’s death. The young angel Raphael takes Kundera’s heroine by boat to an island, where, in a setting reminescent of a Boy Scout camp, children molest, abuse, humiliate, and rape her, acting out their basest instincts. In Kundera’s dark phantasmagoria, children are executioners, the angels of death.
The Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures (1994) is based on a true story from the 1950s that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand. In spite of their class differences, two fifteen-year-old girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (played by Kate Winslet), form an obsessive mutual bond. The girls brutally murder Pauline’s mother, who they see as an obstacle to their future plans together. The media attention generated by the film led to the discovery of Juliet Hulme’s subsequent identity. After five years in a youth prison, Hulme left New Zealand and is today known as Anne Perry, a well-known writer of Victorian-era detective fiction.
Austrian director Michael Haneke first filmed his feature Funny Games in 1997, and in 2008 shot a remake with American actors. In the film a pair of good-looking, well-mannered young men (who could be the post-Ludovico sons of Burgess’s hero, Alex) brutally torment a family of three in a summer cottage, ultimately murdering them, just as they had previously murdered their neighbors, before calmly proceeding with a new wave of violence. Their brutality is driven solely by their delight in a sadistic game in which they have the upper hand. Watching Haneke’s film, as voyeurs, we too become parties to the crime.
Early in 2008 a Dnepropetrovsk court sentenced Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck to life imprisonment on twenty-one counts of murder. A third accused was sentenced to nine years. Armed with hammers and metal bars, these former local school pupils beat random people to death, gouging out the eyes and slicing off the ears of a number of their victims. They filmed the murders with a video camera, and there’s at least one of these terrifying clips out there in cyberspace. You hear their voices (Vitja, neater, you fuck!), but their faces remain out of view. The camera painstakingly records a battered old man drowning in his own blood, as screwdrivers are stabbed into his stomach. The two adolescents apparently documented their murders on camera so that they would have memories to look back on in their old age. The father of one of the killers accused the police of fabricating the charges, because, he said, his son was a normal boy. The mother of the other claimed that her son couldn’t even kill a cat. A defense lawyer for the young killers stated that the boys killed to overcome their fear of people.
Recently an eleven-year-old boy from the community of Wampum in Pennsylvania was accused of murdering a pregnant woman and her eight-month-old unborn baby.
In Yorkshire two brothers aged ten and twelve attacked and robbed two other boys, subjecting them to a physical and sexual assault that included poking them with sticks and stubbing out cigarettes on their skin. It was not the first criminal incident in which the brothers had been involved.
News stories like these have become part of our everyday lives. One can no longer separate juvenile violence from regular adult violence; violent children feature in newspapers’ court pages as frequently as violent adults. We regularly read stories about gangs of boys who have beaten one of their classmates to death, young people bashing old women while trying to snatch their handbags, or physically assaulting their parents. Youth violence is on view everywhere, captured on mobile phones, in newspapers, on television screens, in documentaries, and on the Internet. Several girls were interviewed in a documentary on teenage Russian killers. One had killed her newborn baby, another her grandmother, a third, helped by a couple of boys, a friend. Typically these young offenders were coolly indifferent to their crimes. Asked by a journalist why she had killed, one replied more-or-less: Why do you think? It’s a jungle out there! Responding to the same question in a documentary about young American killers, one young killer replied bluntly: Because it’s a thrill!
Crimes committed by children occur everywhere. The stereotypical psychosocial model — an impoverished and traumatic childhood, a mother who was a prostitute or drug addict, a violent father — still predominates, but can no longer be assumed. Violence is a part of children’s everyday lives, and children’s violence is part of the everyday lives of adults. Parental violence in the home, the prevalence of pedophilia, child prostitution, adults purchasing the services of children, criminal exploitation of children, training child soldiers to become cold-blooded killers, forcing children into crime — these are all part of the contemporary everyday.
The young Ukrainians tortured and killed people and animals with the same cool indifference, filming their crimes as mementos to look back on in their old age. Their crimes can’t be explained away; there are no answers to be had, no messages, no meaning. The evil is a dull, empty space. As the judge handed down his verdict, one of the two boys from Yorkshire yawned. The killers in Haneke’s film dress in white, on their hands they wear white gloves, the golf ball is white, as is the egg they use to begin the game. The murders are bloody, but there isn’t a drop of blood on the killers. The killers are free of remorse: there are no second thoughts, no compromises, no compassion, and no respite.
“There are no children anymore!” announces the nine-year-old Victor in Roger Vitrac’s classic absurdist drama Victor, or Power to the Children. There are no children any more because, simply, there are no adults. During the brutal siege of Sarajevo, asked what she feared most, a young Sarajevan girl replied: “People!” The little girl had adults in mind. Today, people also implicitly includes children.
March 2009
FILIPINAS
I recently visited some friends who live in Hong Kong. My friends do well for themselves, and although their apartment was large by Hong Kong standards, it was still smaller than I expected. My friend and hostess showed me a narrow cubicle that exited onto the balcony, the purpose of which wasn’t immediately clear. What do you do with a pokey recess that you can’t use for anything and just makes the apartment smaller?
“Lots of people in Hong Kong keep their Filipinas there,” she said.