Can children be born evil? And can they be reformed?

Kenzie Houk was just 26 when she died. Shot through the back of the head with a 20-gauge shotgun. Her unborn son Christopher was due in two weeks. He died too. Standing over the bed, allegedly, was Jordan Brown. He had apparently just shot his future step-mum.

He was eleven.

The United States recently abolished the death penalty for children – in 2005 – but Jordan Brown still faces the rest of his life in prison, set to become the youngest child in the history of the nation to be jailed for the term of his natural life. The laws have been relaxed to exclude this punishment for any other crime apart from homicide, but that still leaves thousands of children locked up, essentially forever.

Last week a 10-year-old boy shot his Nazi, white supremacist father in California. The evidence so far suggests the boy – so young, so maleable – had been infected with his father’s neo-nazi rants and beliefs. That will be considered in his trial. Who’s the real monster here: the father? The boy?

Human rights groups are outraged about handing out life sentences to children. And the argument goes a little something like this. Locking up children is against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States of America joins only Somalia in not ratifying the treaty. The convention is, incidentally, the most ratified of any international treaty in the history of the world with 193 national signatories. As you read this, the GOP (Republicans) in the US state of Minnesota have introduced a bill to condemn the treaty; and the rights of the child.

The rights groups slam the rejection as an abdication of responsibility toward children everywhere. They’re children, after all. They’re developing. They’re growing. They shouldn’t be imprisoned for a lifetime for crimes they committed in the ignorance of youth; crimes they may well have never committed when they were 24. Or 30. Or 50.

Take the case of Dontez Tillman and Thomas McCloud who beat to death two homeless men over the course of three days. It was savage and it was unprovoked. They were 14.

Having been offered a plea bargain, in order to give up the names of their accomplices, the two men faced just 15-years in jail. But they refused the advice of their legal team and turned, instead, to their mothers.

“Their story paints a terrible irony, some defense experts argue. They are boys old enough to be charged as adults under Michigan’s stringent get-tough-on-juveniles laws. Yet they are children who deferred to their mothers for the most important decision in their young lives — a decision that put them behind bars for life.

But those who have lost loved ones because of violent teens say some youths belong in prison forever.”

The men are remorseful. They want to turn back the clock.

Part of the reason the Republicans want the treaty rejected is because they seem to think, at some base level, that children can be monsters. And they want to be able to lock away their monsters without Congress getting in the road. If they ratify the convention, than Congress has the legislative power to make sure the United States is tackling its international obligations, taking away the rights of the state to enforce the law as it sees fit.

They would, at some level, have in their minds the case of the killers of British toddler James Bulger.

James, or Jamie as the media are fond of calling him, was just two years old when he was led from a shopping centre, by the hands of two 10-year-old boys Jon Venebles and Robert Thompson. They took him to the railway tracks, tortured and bludgeoned him to death and left his body on the tracks in the hopes it would be hit by a train and made to look like an accident.

The judge at their trial labelled the crime as one of ‘unparalleled evil and barbarity’.

Venebles and Thompson were the youngest children to be charged with murder in Britain in the 20th Century. It was 1993 and they were free by their 18th birthdays in 2001. Venebles, at age 27, re-offended. He was allegedly sent back to prison for possessing child pornography.

The new identities of Venebles and Thompson were never released. Only a select few within the relevant authorities know what the ‘children’ look like now, or how their lives are progressing. There is no way to know whether the other, Thompson, was rehabilitated or not. The mother of little Jamie Bulger said in 2001 that the two, now men, should never have been released.

Was she right?

Recently, the killer formally known as Venables was given a second new identity after a ‘serious security breach’ revealed some of the details of his new life. But what details? How have these children changed, if at all?

Is it even possible?

In Australia the age of criminal responsibility has recently been made uniform at the age of 10. A child under this age cannot be charged with a criminal offence. Between the ages of 10 and 14 courts rely on a principle that requires prosecution to prove the children knew what they were doing was wrong.

The interesting thing, of course, is that this age has been lower in some countries in the past. It was seven and eight in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory in 1997 when the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended that it be increased.

Which, at a human level, makes sense. They’re kids. When Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released a report titled The Rest of Their Lives: Life Without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States in 2005, they had this to say:

“Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are releasing The Rest of Their Lives at a critical time: while fewer youth are committing serious crimes such as murder, states are increasingly sentencing them to life without parole. In 1990, for example, 2,234 children were convicted of murder and 2.9 percent sentenced to life without parole. By 2000, the conviction rate had dropped by nearly 55 percent (1,006), yet the percentage of children receiving LWOP sentences rose by 216 percent (to nine percent).

“Untie the hands of state and federal judges and prosecutors,” said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA). “Give them options other than turning the courts into assembly lines that mass produce mandatory life without parole sentences for children, that ignore their enormous potential for change and rob them of all hopes for redemption.”

But there are those opposite with the familiar rebuttal. If they’re old enough to do the crime, they’re old enough to do the time.

Where do you draw the line between safety and humanity? Are people born ‘monsters’ or are they created?

And if they’re created, can they be reformed?