In paving the way for the possible early release of the killers of James Bulger, Britain's Lord Chief Justice has brought still more pain to the parents of the Liverpool toddler killed in 1993.

That they should want the then 10-year-olds - now 18-year-olds - who abducted and killed their child to be locked up for good is entirely understandable. Yet yesterday's decision was the right one. James Bulger's killers were not, for want of a better word, "normal" and cannot be judged as if they were.

One of these 10-year-olds, Robert Thompson, came out of a background of violence towards younger children. In his family the older children beat up the younger children to the extent that their school had made several complaints to the social services.

His mother was savagely and routinely beaten by her father and was later unable to remember a single good thing about her parents. When she started working she wore two pairs of black tights on a Monday morning to hide the bruises administered by her father.

She went straight into a marriage in which she was beaten routinely by her husband and had one miscarriage following an attack by her in-laws in the presence of her mother-in-law.

This is what Robert Thompson came out of.

The other killer, Jon Venables, came from a background without violence. However, he behaved in apparently deranged ways at school, on one occasion attempting to kill another child. This behaviour may have been prompted by the break-up of his parents' marriage. Whatever the cause, his school unsuccessfully attempted to get help for him from the psychological service.

For these reasons it is impossible to suggest that these two boys should be treated as if they had come out of "normal" circumstances. One was going through a psychological upheaval and one was living in a twisted and dark situation of violence which the wider world was not prepared to do anything about.

Had this information been given to the court at the time of the trial it might have led to a different outcome for both children. But according to Blake Morrison's book on the case, As If, the information was withheld on the insistence of social workers who argued that to provide it would have amounted to a breach of confidentiality.

The Bulger killing was treated by the media at the time as something unique but this was not, in fact, the case. Journalist David James Smith, in The Sleep of Reason, the best book on the murder, outlined examples going back to the 18th century of murders of children by other children. In what was, in many ways, a harsher age than this, juries tended to treat these child murderers relatively leniently.

It was in the 20th century, with the advent of the tabloid press and other mass media, that sentencing became tougher. What was really different about the case of James Bulger was that his abduction was captured on camera and broadcast on television.

Children, as it happens, murder children every day of the week but it doesn't occur in the sort of way we are familiar with and it isn't on television, so we're not going to lose any sleep over it.

Here's an extract from an Amnesty International report published last year: "In northern Uganda, thousands of boys and girls have been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and forced to fight the Ugandan army. The children are subjected to a violent regime . . . and both boys and girls are brutalised by being made to kill other children."

In Rwanda, children as young as five were involved in fighting and children took part in the massacre of other children.

Where else does this sort of thing go on? Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, according to Amnesty International.

Right now children are being brutalised in this way and some of it is being done by other children. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen on camera and has not had a fraction of the coverage given to the James Bulger case.

Could the James Bulger case happen here? Yes, without a doubt.

The report of the Commission on Children and Violence convened by the Gulbenkian Foundation said this about children who kill children: "A recent review of the backgrounds of a large sample of children who have killed or committed other grave (usually violent) crimes . . . found that 72 per cent had experienced abuse, and 57 per cent significant loss (death or loss of contact with someone important). Thirty-five per cent had experienced both phenomena and a total of 91 per cent had experienced one or both."

The report emphasises that not all children with this background become violent and not all violent children have this background. Nevertheless, this background of abuse or loss is a common feature of children who kill.

That we have such children here is pretty obvious. That is why it is worth our while to reflect on the James Bulger case and to learn what we can from it. And perhaps one lesson we can learn is to listen to what schools are telling us. Had the teachers in Thompson's and Venables's school in Liverpool been listened to, James Bulger would be alive today.

Yesterday's decision does not necessarily mean the imminent release of Thompson and Venables. It means they have served their minimum sentence. Whether they can be released, and when this should be done, is up to the parole boards dealing with the institutions at which they have been separately held.

If it is thought they are no longer a threat to others, they may very well be released in the next few months.

But the parents of James Bulger will never be released from their pain. And the generation which saw the security footage of James's kidnapping will never quite regain the innocence it lost at the hands of two 10-year-olds in 1993.

pomorain@irish-times.ie