In 1993 a young politician called Tony Blair, at the time shadow home secretary, responded to the news that toddler James Bulger had been murdered by two older children by suggesting that this horrific crime was "a hammer blow against the sleeping conscience of a nation".
In the months and years to come, the murder would lead to fundamental changes in our youth and criminal justice systems: everything from the abolition of doli incapax – the presumption that children between the ages of 10 and 14 lack the necessary criminal intent to be fully responsible for their actions – the introduction of secure training centres, and the beginning of the now seemingly unstoppable rise in the prison population. The sleeping conscience of a nation had quite clearly been stirred.
It has yet to be seen what broader consequences will emerge from the April Jones case, but her disappearance has similarly resonated deeply with the public – not just those who knew her, but strangers too, and not just in Machynlleth, where she lived with her family, but throughout the country.
Within hours of her abduction, an army of volunteers had flooded into Wales to help the local community and the police search for April. Perhaps we might also think of this as a show of public solidarity with the police, in a week that saw two young officers buried, after they had been gunned down in awful circumstances in Manchester. As welcome as this public support must have been, what can we really do to help – not just when these tragic events happen, but more broadly, day in, day out?
On a practical level, for April and her family, not much, and I sensed that the police were rather embarrassed that they had to quite quickly ask the public to stop searching – their well-meaning efforts were increasingly seen as threatening the experts' attempts to find the child.
However, there's a lot that they – and we – could be doing, especially when we remember that children are the group most likely to be murdered in our society, with the under-twos most at risk.
First, let's start to confront the myths that exist about murder, and especially about the murder of children. We could face up to some uncomfortable truths and stop naively colluding with, for example, ideas about "stranger danger".
Shortly after April's disappearance, people were asserting – particularly on social media – that April must have been abducted by a stranger, or a "foreigner", because it was believed that nobody in the close-knit community in which she lived would have taken the child.
I remember the same being said in Ipswich in 2006, when I was in the town during a spate of murders of young women who sold sexual services. It seemed to provide a form of comfort to imagine these and other murders were committed by "strangers" – an ever-changing cast of "others", who somehow slip into communities to do deadly harm to the people who live there.
Pick a recent murder investigation and analyse who was first viewed as a likely suspect, and I can almost guarantee you that some local, regional or national "other" figure would have been the most immediate suspect.
But we know for a fact that in nearly all cases a murder victim and the perpetrator are either related, or known to each other. Indeed, that's why our clear-up rate for murder is so high – consistently around 90%: because, frankly, you don't need to look too far for the likely culprit. Most murders are "self-solvers".
That reality is also true for child victims of murder – most children are at risk from their parents, carers, step-parents or someone known to the family of the child. On average since the early 1970s, only six children per year have been abducted and murdered by strangers, and while that is still six children too many, this sad statistic is put into perspective when we remember that two children a week are murdered within the home.
But, here's the good news – the numbers of murders are falling, and they are falling for one specific reason. Partly in response to pressure from campaigners, the police now treat domestic violence much more seriously than they once did. And if a man is hitting his female partner, it is probable that he will be physically, emotionally or sexually abusing his children too. So by insisting that the authorities take domestic violence seriously, we are protecting not only women, but children too.
We could also help further by starting to listen to what children say. This seems like a trite point to make, but all too often we tend to ignore what children describe about their lives, and indeed until recently actively preferred them to be "seen and not heard". However, listening to children will let us into their world where they have hopes, aspirations and, sometimes, fears about who it is that might actually be harming them.
Above all, we could stop treating children as possessions of the adult world – mini-me, designer accessories and appendages – that merely become used as symbols of the adult's wealth, status, or culture, and instead begin to recognise children as individual, sentient beings in their own right and therefore valued for themselves.
Nothing brings this idea home for me more clearly than the dreadful crime of "family annihilation". An ugly, if accurate, phrase that describes what happens when the usually divorcing parent (almost always the father) seems to be saying, "If I can't have them, no one can", and so he kills his kids and then himself, in a fit of deadly pique and as if his children were of no greater value than a car, or a laptop. His children reduced to mere symbols of his power to do as he pleased and to hurt his partner, no matter what the consequences.
Hope for April has all but gone; still, the outpouring of public feeling that followed her abduction proves there is a huge communal desire to keep our children safe. Though we cannot save every child, we can take steps to save a great many – not through waking some "sleeping conscience", but by recreating the space that we once called "childhood" and letting children determine for themselves how they would like that space to be filled.
Good Article from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/07/april-jones-myths-ri...
In 1993 a young politician called Tony Blair, at the time shadow home secretary, responded to the news that toddler James Bulger had been murdered by two older children by suggesting that this horrific crime was "a hammer blow against the sleeping conscience of a nation".
In the months and years to come, the murder would lead to fundamental changes in our youth and criminal justice systems: everything from the abolition of doli incapax – the presumption that children between the ages of 10 and 14 lack the necessary criminal intent to be fully responsible for their actions – the introduction of secure training centres, and the beginning of the now seemingly unstoppable rise in the prison population. The sleeping conscience of a nation had quite clearly been stirred.
It has yet to be seen what broader consequences will emerge from the April Jones case, but her disappearance has similarly resonated deeply with the public – not just those who knew her, but strangers too, and not just in Machynlleth, where she lived with her family, but throughout the country.
Within hours of her abduction, an army of volunteers had flooded into Wales to help the local community and the police search for April. Perhaps we might also think of this as a show of public solidarity with the police, in a week that saw two young officers buried, after they had been gunned down in awful circumstances in Manchester. As welcome as this public support must have been, what can we really do to help – not just when these tragic events happen, but more broadly, day in, day out?
On a practical level, for April and her family, not much, and I sensed that the police were rather embarrassed that they had to quite quickly ask the public to stop searching – their well-meaning efforts were increasingly seen as threatening the experts' attempts to find the child.
However, there's a lot that they – and we – could be doing, especially when we remember that children are the group most likely to be murdered in our society, with the under-twos most at risk.
First, let's start to confront the myths that exist about murder, and especially about the murder of children. We could face up to some uncomfortable truths and stop naively colluding with, for example, ideas about "stranger danger".
Shortly after April's disappearance, people were asserting – particularly on social media – that April must have been abducted by a stranger, or a "foreigner", because it was believed that nobody in the close-knit community in which she lived would have taken the child.
I remember the same being said in Ipswich in 2006, when I was in the town during a spate of murders of young women who sold sexual services. It seemed to provide a form of comfort to imagine these and other murders were committed by "strangers" – an ever-changing cast of "others", who somehow slip into communities to do deadly harm to the people who live there.
Pick a recent murder investigation and analyse who was first viewed as a likely suspect, and I can almost guarantee you that some local, regional or national "other" figure would have been the most immediate suspect.
But we know for a fact that in nearly all cases a murder victim and the perpetrator are either related, or known to each other. Indeed, that's why our clear-up rate for murder is so high – consistently around 90%: because, frankly, you don't need to look too far for the likely culprit. Most murders are "self-solvers".
That reality is also true for child victims of murder – most children are at risk from their parents, carers, step-parents or someone known to the family of the child. On average since the early 1970s, only six children per year have been abducted and murdered by strangers, and while that is still six children too many, this sad statistic is put into perspective when we remember that two children a week are murdered within the home.
But, here's the good news – the numbers of murders are falling, and they are falling for one specific reason. Partly in response to pressure from campaigners, the police now treat domestic violence much more seriously than they once did. And if a man is hitting his female partner, it is probable that he will be physically, emotionally or sexually abusing his children too. So by insisting that the authorities take domestic violence seriously, we are protecting not only women, but children too.
We could also help further by starting to listen to what children say. This seems like a trite point to make, but all too often we tend to ignore what children describe about their lives, and indeed until recently actively preferred them to be "seen and not heard". However, listening to children will let us into their world where they have hopes, aspirations and, sometimes, fears about who it is that might actually be harming them.
Above all, we could stop treating children as possessions of the adult world – mini-me, designer accessories and appendages – that merely become used as symbols of the adult's wealth, status, or culture, and instead begin to recognise children as individual, sentient beings in their own right and therefore valued for themselves.
Nothing brings this idea home for me more clearly than the dreadful crime of "family annihilation". An ugly, if accurate, phrase that describes what happens when the usually divorcing parent (almost always the father) seems to be saying, "If I can't have them, no one can", and so he kills his kids and then himself, in a fit of deadly pique and as if his children were of no greater value than a car, or a laptop. His children reduced to mere symbols of his power to do as he pleased and to hurt his partner, no matter what the consequences.
Hope for April has all but gone; still, the outpouring of public feeling that followed her abduction proves there is a huge communal desire to keep our children safe. Though we cannot save every child, we can take steps to save a great many – not through waking some "sleeping conscience", but by recreating the space that we once called "childhood" and letting children determine for themselves how they would like that space to be filled.