This excellent little book offers an examination of the relationship between the murder of James Bulger and the culture of masculinity and the expectations created around being male. It is the first demonstration of the relationship of gender to the behaviour and attitudes of the boys who committed the murder, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. From this perspective, far from being the evil monsters depicted in much of the media coverage, they are revealed as two young boys whose response to these gender pressures in the context of deprived family and social environments became in this instance suddenly brutal and horrifyingly extreme, yet neither irrational nor absurd.
Jackson shows both the roots of much male violence as well as demonstrating how said violence can be exacerbated to an extreme degree by such social conditions of neglect, brutality and general deprivation. In this the title says it all. How many of us as men were pressurised to brutalise and destroy the baby in ourselves? And how many boys are still being socialised in the same way? This is to neither excuse nor justify individual acts of violence but to recognise how as a society we create the very conditions in boys that encourage such violence.
This book deserves more exposure than it will probably receive. I would recommend it as essential reading for anyone working in the field of male violence prevention, whatever perspective or approach they may be using. And useful reading for anyone else, particularly parents of boys.
Paul Wolf-Light
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