Book Review: David A. Green When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture, Oxford University Press, 2008; 200 pp.: 13:9780199230969, £52.50 (hbk)

Abstract

From the title of this book one might be led into the expectation that a social or psychological explanation of child on child murders, or the circumstances in which they arise, would be presented. This however is not the case and the potential reader should take more cognizance of the subtitle which does reflect what the book is about. While the very different societal reactions to the James Bulger case in Britain in 1993 and the Silje Redergard case in Norway in 1994 provide a frequent and detailed focus for comparing the way the two societies responded to such events, the book provides a much broader analysis of penal populism and political culture using primarily the wider comparative focus of British and Norwegian society.The book provides a wealth of evidence to illustrate the dramatically different reactions to crime in the two countries. Despite broadly similar crime rates, the levels of imprisonment, length of sentences and punitive approaches to youth offending show very different cultural responses (Norway for example abolished life sentences in 1981 while the last decade has seen a 128 per cent increase in their use in England and Wales). There is a detailed analysis of the role of the media in feeding the atmosphere of penal populism in Britain (although the focus is mainly on newspapers), while in Norway the media remain more restrained and socially sensitive. The analysis shows for example, how press attention to the Redergaard case declined in Norway when it was established that the murder was committed by children, while in Britain this revelation in the Bulger case resulted in a dramatic escalation in coverage mostly of a vitriolic nature. The analysis of the media reactions to crime is used to show how expert evaluation of such matters is prioritized in Norway while in Britain the press leads or reflects a simplified and reactionary picture of public opinion while largely sidelining expert analysis.The author draws an important link between social forces, in particular the media and largely ill-informed public opinion, and the adversarial nature of British majoritarian politics in the perpetuation of punitive reactions to crime. The argument that consensus (often proportionately representational) democracies, such as that in Norway, create slower and weaker government is disputed. In fact adversarial political systems disrupt Criminology & Criminal Justice 10(2) 235-236