Beyond forgiveness.

I was in India in 1993 when news came through that two-year-old James Bulger had been abducted from a Liverpool shopping mall, tortured and killed by two 10-year-old boys. Such a heinous crime, reported around the world, shook the British to the core and led to a great deal of soul searching about the moral state of the nation. As we go to press Robert Thompson and Jon Venables have been granted release into safe houses, after serving eight years of detention in separate locations. They are living with new identities to protect them from vigilante groups bent on revenge.

One can understand the feelings of Jamie Bulger's mother that the two murderers have not served an adequate sentence. `I am full of hate, anger and fear,' she says. `I never knew I had so much hate in me.' She, like many others, wanted them to serve at least 15 years.

But there is something deeply disturbing and distasteful in reports that vigilante groups and tabloid newspapers aim to track down the two young men and expose their whereabouts. The tabloids know where their bread is buttered. They feed on, as well as feed, the raw emotion of their readers. One Liverpool newspaper conducted a phone-in survey and made money on every phone call. The majority of its readers wanted the two young men to stay behind bars. But other families in Liverpool think that enough is enough, that Thompson's and Venables' eight years was a life sentence from their perspective as children, and that notions of forgiveness and redemption need to be acknowledged. Indeed the lawyer for one of the young men says that his client is deeply remorseful and daily wishes that he could turn the clock back.

In the enormity of their crime, Thompson and Venables have condemned themselves to life sentences of regret and anonymity under new identities. They live in fear for their lives and their freedom remains limited. But above all the case of Thompson and Venables challenges us to the core of our beings on notions of vengeance and justice versus redemption and forgiveness--just as these notions are challenged in Northern Ireland, Palestine and Israel, the Balkans, Chechnya, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and other areas of conflict. Vengeance may give the illusion of justice. But it doesn't necessarily bring closure in the human heart. For that something far deeper is required in all of us. Anyone who has experienced bitterness and hate knows how consuming, how justifying, they can become. Victims need their own release as much as perpetrators.