Children who Torture

So here we go again – 2 young boys accused of a violent assault on another couple of youngsters.
We ask how can it happen that boys of an age more suited to playing with Lego ( as one of the victim’s fathers apparently said) end up feeling it’s OK to amuse themselves by torturing others.
The answer’s quite simple, sadly. If a child is born into a chaotic environment where love is either absent or may be offered sporadically; if their parents are unable to offer them a basic level of care so that they often go hungry; if one parent is perpetually stoned so that she doesn’t recognise their needs or answer them; if the father shows them violent videos featuring scenes of torture.....well, hey ho, surprise, surprise, the children are likely to grow up damaged!
It all comes back to emotional intelligence. If a child doesn’t know love, how can it learn to love others? If a child is perpetually being told to go away, or shut up, or leave its mother alone because she can’t be bothered, that child is learning that his needs, including his hunger or thirst, don’t count and don’t matter to anyone. If he’s then in pain through this neglect, and no one pays any attention to his pain, how is he going to learn the value system that most of us grow up with, whereby we try to look after each other, avoid hurting others, and try instead to pay them attention and surround them with love and care?
He learns instead that people inflict pain on each other as a matter of course. He thinks from the videos that he’s witnessed that torture is normal. He has no barometer to measure his feelings against, so when he’s feeling bad, which is probably most of the time, he thinks this is normal. So the idea of making other people feel bad doesn’t bother him one bit.
Deep down, we all know this. We must all understand how these cruel children develop, how it’s their very upbringing (or lack of it) that turns them this way. So why don’t we do something about these chaotic families within our midst?
These boys were apparently known to everyone around – on the estate where they lived, by the schools they were excluded from, by the police and Social Services.
So it sounds as if basic joined-up thinking was missing.....or surely some kindly soul in one of these departments/offices/areas would have intervened sooner to take care of this large chaotic family?
And that’s what bothers me really, that our sense of kindness, our sense of humanity seems to be being eroded somehow by a culture of ‘turning a blind eye’ that’s grown up around us.