THE killing of James Bulger, who was two, by a pair of ten-year-old boys in 1993 became one of the most infamous crimes in recent British history. The CCTV image of the toddler being led to his death from a Liverpool shopping centre came to symbolise a complex of anxieties over crime and social breakdown, as Tony Blair, then shadow home secretary, understood.

There are echoes of that horror in the alleged attempted murder in South Yorkshire of two more small boys by two brothers, aged ten and 11. The assault is said to have taken place on scrub land near a former mining village, where the alleged perpetrators were being fostered. The victims were reportedly attacked with knives and bricks and burned with cigarettes. Their biological mother is said to have disavowed responsibility for them.

Thankfully, in this case, the victims survived. But the outrage over it will nevertheless be intense. And, in a sense, the country's shocked fascination with heinous crimes committed by children is understandable, because they are rare and seem so outlandish.

In another way, though, it is odd, even irrational. Most of the time, children are expected and allowed to be more unruly and noisier than adults; society implicitly agrees that they are not fully developed moral actors, not responsible for their behaviour in the way that adults are held to be. Yet when they commit awful crimes, a reverse view of childhood seems to take over in some quarters: that any child who could so depart from the ideal of innocent childhood and behave in such a way must be monstrously evil.

This Manichean way of thinking about crime by children can obscure the real lessons of these cases. It has the effect of partially exonerating the assorted adults whose job it was to care for the accused children, from some of whom, presumably, they learned that violence is acceptable.