Edlington brothers: why boredom turns to torture

Two brothers, aged 10 and 11, lure two other boys into empty wasteland near a playground on the pretext of seeing a dead fox. They then savagely attack the two boys, bludgeoning one of them unconscious, after torturing them both and sexually assaulting one of the boys. The brothers, showing no remorse for what they have done, explain they had "nowt to do".
 
This morning, the two brothers from the Edlington suburb of Doncaster were sentenced at Sheffield Crown Court to an indefinite period of detention. Mr Justice Keith called their behaviour "appalling and terrible" and said their detention must last a minimum of five years.

"The fact is, this was prolonged, sadistic violence for no reason other than that you got a real kick out of hurting and humiliating them," said the judge. "The bottom line for the two of you is that I'm sure you both pose a very high risk of serious harm to others."

What has been most shocking for those following the Sheffield court case has been that the brothers have shown no feeling for their victims. They admitted that they only stopped hitting their victims because their "arms were hurting".
 
These were not isolated attacks on the part of the brothers. A string of previous attacks on other children, vandalism and violent behaviour in school had already brought the brothers to the attention of Doncaster social services and the police. While the brothers' behaviour and callousness indicate that they may both be psychopathic, their "toxic" home environment suggests another explanation.
 
The older brother has described "routine aggression, violence and chaos" at home. The father, a heavy drinker, physically abused their mother, threatening in front of the boys to "take a knife to her and slice her face to bits". When the boys, or any of their five brothers, tried to intervene to stop the father's attacks on their mother, their father would turn on them.

On the other hand, the boys seem to have been allowed in many respects to do as they pleased, watching horror movies that were particularly gruesome and having access to their father's pornographic DVDs.
 
The boys' mother has been described as passively suffering at the hands of her husband and sitting at home most of the time doing nothing. A neighbour has also said that she witnessed the mother putting cannabis in the boys' food in order to keep them calm and get them to sleep. Perhaps this was the mother's attempt to medicate her children and herself as a way of not only controlling the boys' aggression but anaesthetising them against the pain and violence they were all subjected to.
 
In the midst of this extreme neglect and violence, what is also striking is the boys' explanation that they attacked their victims because there was "nowt to do". They were bored and looking for excitement.

"Being bored" is complex and can often mask deeper feelings of anxiety, dread, and depression. The boys had witnessed their mother sitting at home with nothing to do and may well have feared becoming mindless and depressed like her.

While the mother may have turned her aggression against herself in a masochistic way, the boys enacted their sadism against others, often in imitation of their father's behaviour.

The older boy was known to have punched and kicked two teachers and to have punched a mother with small children on the street. The younger brother also hit one teacher and head-butted another.
 
For the two brothers, not having anything to do may have faced them with a space in which they had to experience their thoughts and feelings about their relationships and what was happening to them. When there has been no parent to acknowledge or understand these feelings, they are experienced as unbearable and must be expelled in whatever way possible. Otherwise, the child faces the terrible fear of becoming psychotic.
 
As a way of managing the trauma of their lives, the boys may have had to cut off from their own feelings, including their concern for others, and seek relief from their anxiety about their murderous feelings towards their parents by directing their aggression against other adults and children.

In the case of the attacks on other children, it was also a way for the boys to inflict the torture that they had suffered at home on other children. In this way they could triumph mentally by becoming the torturer and negating their own helplessness as victims.
 
There seems to have been no parental limit set on either the violence committed at home or the violent behaviour of the boys. As a result, we can see the boys engaged in a trajectory of increasingly violent 'things to do'.

This may have been an unconscious cry for help, a test to see who would finally stop them, but it also shows an escalation that is very common in perverse forms of behaviour. The violent behaviour only relieves pent-up aggression momentarily and is usually accompanied by guilt which in turn requires punishment and this leads to a further and more intense cycle of violence.
 
Having "nowt to do" can be a dangerous thing. ·