Why Cases of Children Who Kill Haunt Us - why these crimes strike such a primal chord, reopening questions about innocence, culpability, and whether someone raised in violence is doomed to repeat it. A reflection on the cultural obsession with “child killers” and what it reveals about us.
Writer Abigail Hood self penned piece explores these themes ahead of play Monster running at Seven Dials Playhouse in London.
Cases of children who kill seem to haunt us in a way that other crimes do not. There is something profoundly wrong about them, which arouses in us a mixture of shock, disbelief, horror, and a deep need to understand how such a thing could happen. We are confronted with a person who is still legally a child, someone we instinctively associate with innocence, yet they have committed an act of unspeakable violence. It raises questions of culpability: How much of this child is responsible for what they have done? What experiences or traumas might have shaped a child capable of such an act? And perhaps most unsettling of all, what does it say about our society if we have allowed this to happen?
Part of the reason these cases grip us is that they force us to examine our ideas of innocence. Childhood is usually seen as a time of protection, a period of exploration, play, and relative safety. When a child kills, that sense of innocence is shattered. We are faced with a jarring contradiction: someone who should be innocent acting in ways that are undeniably and terrifyingly guilty. In reading about cases like Mary Bell or John Venables and Robert Thompson, it becomes clear how the public struggles to reconcile these extremes. There is horror, but also a compulsive need to understand. We want to know how it could happen, what went wrong, and whether it could have been prevented.
Another reason these crimes resonate so strongly is that they make us confront questions of culpability in a more complicated way than adult crimes. A child’s brain, their emotional regulation, and their exposure to trauma all come into play. Parents, teachers, social workers, and the wider system all influence the trajectory of a child’s life. When something goes tragically wrong, it is rarely the product of a single moment or person. Yet society often wants a simple answer: guilty or innocent. The tension between what feels morally obvious and what is legally and psychologically complex is what makes these cases so uncomfortable.
Reading about these cases, one thing that repeatedly comes up is the role of environment. Many of the children who commit murder have themselves been subjected to neglect, abuse, or extreme hardship. They are often children who slipped through the cracks, whose early lives were shaped by trauma and a lack of care. That does not excuse what they did, but it does give context. And that context forces us to ask uncomfortable questions: If society had done more, intervened sooner, could this have been prevented? It is not an easy question, because the answer isn’t simple. But it is a question we instinctively want to ask.
I think another reason these cases linger in the public imagination is because it is terrifying to think that someone so young could be capable of something so destructive. Yet these cases show that children are complex, shaped by experiences and circumstances beyond their control, but still able to make choices. The tension between innocence and responsibility is part of what makes these stories so haunting.
Media coverage plays a huge role, too. Stories about child killers are sensationalised in ways that adult crimes often are not. There is a moral panic that accompanies every new case, a public fascination that borders on obsession. Some of it is curiosity - we want to know who this child is, what they looked like, what their home life was like. Some of it is fear - fear that our understanding of childhood is wrong, that the rules we rely on to keep children safe don’t always apply. And some of it is moral wrestling; we read these stories over and over, trying to find an answer that satisfies our need for justice and meaning.
But there is also something about these stories that forces us to confront our own society. Cases of children who kill are often symptomatic of wider failings - poverty, abuse, neglect, overburdened social services, families under unimaginable strain. When we obsess over the crime itself, we risk losing sight of the factors that created it. And yet, the fascination does not let us look away, partly because it asks a question we all carry inside us: how much of who we become is determined by our environment, and how much by choice?
It is also impossible to ignore the way culture responds to these cases. Terms like “monster”, “evil” or “feral” get used to demonise and distance the offender. It is a way of containing the horror, saying “this is so extreme, it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen to someone like us.” But it oversimplifies. Behind every headline is a human being, and as hard as it is to accept, that person is often both a victim of circumstance and a perpetrator of harm. That duality is what makes these cases stay with us long after the headlines fade.
Some of the most haunting aspects are the long-term consequences, for both the victim’s family and the offender. In reading biographies, watching documentaries, and following news stories, you see how one act can reverberate across decades. Victims’ families carry unimaginable grief, while offenders often live with guilt, shame, and public vilification for the rest of their lives. Yet in some cases, you see attempts at redemption, attempts at rehabilitation, glimpses of a life rebuilt. It does not erase the harm, but it complicates our understanding of what justice, forgiveness, and healing might look like.
These cases force us to confront questions that do not have easy answers. Should a child who kills be treated as a child or as an adult? How do we balance punishment with the possibility of rehabilitation? Can we offer rehabilitation without losing sight of justice for the victims? They also reveal our cultural obsession with innocence and culpability, and the uneasy way we try to reconcile the two.
I think these stories stay with us because they hit something deep, our fears, our hopes, the things we want to believe about childhood and innocence. They make us ask hard questions: who is responsible, what role does society play, and are cycles of violence inevitable? They push us to rethink what we assume about childhood, morality, and choice. And they remind us that even in the darkest situations, things are rarely simple. There are always human stories, always complexities, and rarely any neat answers.
We are drawn to these cases not just because they shock us but because they force us to face the fact that childhood is not a shield. They make us wrestle with the limits of our compassion, our understanding, and the justice system.
In the end, our fascination with children who kill says as much about us as it does about them. It reflects our need to understand, our fear of the unknown, and our desire to see the world as ordered and sensible. These cases push us to think harder about society, childhood, and morality, and to confront questions we’d often rather avoid.
Monsters runs at Seven Dials Playhouse from 24th September to 18th October. Show information and tickets here: https://www.sevendialsplayhouse.co.uk/shows/monster
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