What does it mean when the person who commits an unthinkable crime is still a child?

Few crimes disturb the public imagination more deeply than juvenile homicide. When a child kills, familiar categories seem to collapse. Is the young offender a monster, a victim of circumstance, a developing person capable of change—or some difficult combination of all three?

Children Who Kill examines juvenile homicide without sensationalism, easy excuses, or comforting myths.

Drawing on developmental psychology, neuroscience, criminology, juvenile justice, public records, and landmark cases, Patricia Redmond investigates why some young people commit lethal violence, what science can actually tell us about responsibility and risk, and how society should respond after irreversible harm has occurred.

Inside, the book explores:

Why juvenile homicide is far rarer than headlines make it appear
Mary Bell, the James Bulger case, the Jonesboro school shooting, and other cases
What famous cases reveal—and what they can distort
The adolescent brain, impulse control, reward, peers, and responsibility
Trauma, maltreatment, family violence, attachment, and resilience
Why adversity increases risk without making violence inevitable
Peer pressure, humiliation, status, grievance, and group violence
Conduct problems, callous-unemotional traits, psychosis, depression, and the myth of the “born killer”
Poverty, neighborhood violence, schools, firearms, and opportunity
Warning signs, threat assessment, leakage, and the danger of false positives
Why prediction is never the same as prophecy
Juvenile court, adult transfer, sentencing, confinement, and rehabilitation
Deterrence, reoffending, release, and meaningful review
What happens to young offenders after the sentence
The long aftermath for victims and surviving families
How England and Wales, Germany, Japan, Norway, and New Zealand approach juvenile justice
Technology, AI-assisted risk assessment, reentry, firearms, and the future of juvenile justice

The book rejects two equally misleading ideas: that development excuses homicide, and that one terrible act proves a child is permanently beyond change.

Its central principle is more difficult.

Explanation is not exoneration.

A victim was killed. That harm is permanent. But the person responsible may also have been an adolescent whose judgment, social environment, self-regulation, and future capacity for change differed meaningfully from those of an adult offender.

The book is equally cautious about prediction. Trauma, mental illness, family instability, bullying, violent environments, peer groups, and access to weapons may raise risk, but none can identify a future killer with certainty. Risk factors are probabilities—not verdicts.

Children Who Kill asks readers to hold accountability, victims, development, public safety, uncertainty, punishment, and the possibility of change in the same frame.

For readers of true crime, criminology, forensic psychology, juvenile justice, developmental psychology, criminal law, and behavioral science, this is a serious examination of one of society's most emotionally charged questions:

When a child commits an adult-sized crime, what does justice require?