Yes, though she had to see a psychiatrist when she decided she wanted to have children -- to determine whether psychologically she could cope with motherhood. Obviously she could have gone ahead and gotten pregnant -- how are you going to stop somebody? -- but the child might have been taken into care if she had been found unable to raise children.

With the Bulger case, there's a lot of debate about whether the young men will be able to remain anonymous when they're released from prison, given that the media seems to be obsessed with them.

Yes, they've been supplied with false identities, but the question of whether they'll be able to keep them is a different matter, because there's a different system of law in different parts of the British Isles, in Ireland and Scotland. So even within the British Isles, not everybody will be bound to secrecy. And of course you have American newspapers online, you have Australian newspapers online -- the Internet is changing this whole area enormously as well. Newspapers in other countries will undoubtedly publish the boys' new names, and people here will have access to them.

Toward the end of "Border Crossing," Danny Miller's new identity is exposed, and he's whisked away and given another. But it's not clear as the book ends whether that new identity will be any safer.

Yes, the position for Danny is that he will always be living in fear, and he will always be under the possibility of this extreme pressure of being hounded by the media and exposed again. That's in addition to all the pressures he has of not being able to tell acquaintances or even friends who he is. So inevitably, in addition to his personality difficulties, he's likely to have very shallowly rooted relationships and to be quite isolated when that pressure hits him. So actually the prognosis for Danny isn't really all that good. And it will be very similar with James Bulger's killers.

One thing few people have talked about in the American case is the role of Lionel Tate's mother, who was in the next room when the little girl died.

Yes, the mother slept through this event. And of course we don't even know what the event really was, do we? The account we've gotten sounds extremely strange.

Do you think something has changed in how we treat children? How much are adults to blame when children do terrible things?

I think we've got two conflicting ideas about children right now. I think there's a great nervousness about children and what they're capable of. The question in the air is, "How did we raise a generation of monsters?" I think that's very new, that degree of anxiety about children, as distinct from adolescents, whom all human societies watch closely, particularly the adolescent male. And they've got good reason, since their aggression is not always contained. Certainly there are gangs of children in run-down areas who do present an actual physical threat for adults, or can do, simply because they operate as a pack.

But at the same time, there's a sort of overprotectiveness among good responsible parents. There's a feeling that a pedophile lurks around every corner. Children in our society are living almost totally couch-potato lives. That, or their mothers and fathers are ferrying them around from class to class after school so that their whole life becomes a matter of being educated. There's no time to sit around and dream. There's certainly no time to go out onto the streets and play with other children, which is how you find out what the limits are the hard way, from the way other children react if you tread on their rights.

I lived a childhood where I was able to wander. I suspect the actual incidence of pedophilia was exactly the same then. But of course, pedophiles were more isolated then -- they were loners -- and now with the Internet no one has to be alone anymore.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"