What does the appetite for stories about child killers say about us?

North and south of the Border, the default position is that children accused of crimes can’t be identified by the media. Last week, the Scottish Parliament was scrutinising new proposals to update these rules for the social media age – and not before time.

In England as in Scotland, judges can be persuaded to set aside these media ­constraints, allowing the identities and faces of the child perpetrators to lead ­national news broadcasts and fill the front pages of every newspaper in the country.

Nowadays, this often includes extensive follow-up footage from suspects’ police ­interviews, dubious commentary from “body language experts”, and screeds of column inches devoted to everything from the perpetrators’ educational attainment in school to their career aspirations, music preferences and social media presence.

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Even where restrictions aren’t lifted, it’s now a familiar feature of media reporting across the UK that a child killer’s 18th birthday is marked in the press by their ­picture being published in the papers and their identities being disclosed.

I can only imagine editors must keep some kind of grim stopwatch in these cases, counting down the hours and days till the reporting restrictions evaporate and they can run a second wave of splashes about a once high-profile case.

The media is often criticised for ­shining an outsize focus on the perpetrators of crimes at the expense of victims. ­Naming child perpetrators powerfully contributes to this. Diligent reporters dig into every ­facet of their lives, piecing together ­sometimes speculative and pseudoscientific theories about who they are and how they came to commit the offences they’ll be indelibly connected with.

There’s clearly a public appetite for this content. Demands to “name and shame” child perpetrators are now routine in high-profile cases. Among researchers, there’s a perception this is becoming “more ­common” in the UK than once it was.

But why, exactly? In these harrowing ­cases, why does it seem so important to us to put a name and a face to the ­children who commit these crimes? What ­psychological need is it feeding?

These are questions I often ask my ­media students – and they often find them surprisingly difficult to answer.

Lifting restrictions is sometimes ­presented as a legitimate form of ­secondary punishment for ­perpetrators. As academics Kate Fitz-Gibbon and ­Wendy O’Brien argue, “allowing media vilification of an offender” is often ­presented “as a ‘normal consequence’ of the child’s actions” – tearing the “mask” from a perpetrator’s face, and with it, their unearned protection from publicity.

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In the social media age, these consequences are lifelong. As Dr Di Hart points out: “Once a child has been named, they will never be able to escape the ­repercussions of their criminal or ­antisocial behaviour however much they have matured or changed” years later.

But there are other considerations in play too. The drive to name perpetrators can be based on open justice. ­Journalists have legitimate interests in telling all about cases which have stirred up ­significant public sympathy and outrage.

Nobody wants to say it out loud, but the considerations increasingly look ­commercial too. News organisations want to earn their market share of the public’s morbid curiosity which is now serviced not only by meticulously ­detailed pulp about the lives of serial killers, but live feeds and podcasts whose modus ­operandi is ­turning tragedy into a bleak and ­sometimes gratuitous form of entertainment – often with modest regard for the impact all this detail has on the real people involved.

It is extremely difficult to ­sympathise with the two 15-year-olds convicted of killing Brianna Ghey. But as the ­Sundays rush for exclusive splashes ­revealing fresh insights into the depraved ­motivations and social media history of the two ­perpetrators, we should take this ­moment to reflect on our own motives and appetites around stories like this. I always find them a bit strange.

Granting the media application to name the pair, Justice Yip said: “The public will naturally wish to know the identities of the young people responsible as they seek to understand how children could do something so dreadful. Continuing restrictions inhibit full and informed debate and restrict the full reporting of the case.”

Does the public really gain a better understanding of the causes of this behaviour by seeing photographs and knowing the names of the young people involved? And if so, how exactly?

IN Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), the author wrote about how fear of the unknown is often the essence of horror. He quotes William F Nolan – “nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door”. “What’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself,” King argues.

In Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the xenomorph appears on screen for little more than three minutes of the film’s 116-minute run time. You learn about the creature from its edges and corners – the gobbet of drool, the flash of teeth, light playing on the edge of a claw, snaking under the door. Other horror filmmakers have lifted the trope, recognising the basic human fact that the unknown and the half-seen are often much more frightening than the monster revealed.

Psychologically, I don’t think murder cases are so different. Presented with a huge shadow where the child ­perpetrator’s identity ought to be, we project all our fears and anxieties onto the dark shape, our imaginations filling in the disturbing detail.

When the images of child perpetrators finally hit the newsstands, there’s often a whiff of old-fashioned Victorian phrenology about responses – as if you spot the capacity to do wrong in a person’s face or can see the criminal intent in their eyes.

But of course you can’t. It’s superstitious hokum based on backwards thinking. Once you know a person has committed murder, it is amazing how readily folk convince themselves they can spot the signs of evil in the lines and planes of faces which would have looked perfectly innocuous moments before.

Because of this, I often think that ­pulling off the disguises the law puts around child perpetrators is often much less satisfying than it seems – seeding ­rather than ­unrooting public anxieties about the extremely rare situations in which young people act in these ways.

A few years back, I sent some law ­students off to experience the reality of one of the city’s criminal courts. Some opted to visit the city’s busy Sheriff Court; more chose to visit a more ­sober ­institution on the other bank of the River Clyde, where murderers and rapists are prosecuted. The High Court of Justiciary in Glasgow has a sterile calm to it. With its blonde sandstone walls and polished floors, the High Court has something of the airport about it, or a modern urban church.

Its whispering quiet is interrupted by intermittent Tannoy bursts announcing that this case or that has begun in this or that courtroom, hushed conversations of often intimidated-looking civilians, and the crisp report of brogues and heels as advocates bustle to their business.

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That year, a number sat through elements of a case involving a child accused of serious offences. Many reflected on how surreal it felt to be sitting in court only a few metres away from the alleged perpetrator.

One thoughtful student told me what troubled and surprised them more than anything else was how ordinary – how ­unremarkable – the teenager looked in the dock, just a handful of years younger than they were. They might readily have been sat across from them in a train carriage or a coffee shop or a classroom, they said.

Unmasking child killers may seem to soothe our anxieties about the unknown. But psychologically? It confronts us with the disturbing fact that they look just like everyone else.