After Soham – the blood-lust is wrong

It would be presumptuous in the extreme to believe that we can even begin to imagine the depths of the agonies suffered by the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the murdered ten year-old girls from Soham in England.

Most parents will, at some stage, have experienced the first feelings of dread that accompany the realization that a child has gone missing or hasn’t arrived home at the expected hour. It is one of the great benefits of mobile phones that the sense of mounting anxiety is often much more easily assuaged now than might have been the case in the past. But when contact is impossible to make, it is almost inevitable that the worst fears begin to crowd the imagination. Someone waits by the phone. Someone else – if there is a someone else – goes out on the bike or in the car, searching. The later it gets, the worse the spectres that infest the imagination become. Even to live through a few hours of this is an excruciating trial.

99% of the time, the fears prove to be unfounded. The child turns up or is found before it becomes necessary to involve the authorities. But when it goes on, and the stakes get higher, the impending sense of apprehension can be – no, is – almost unbearable. To be locked in that awful place where there is a feeling of terrible certainty that something unthinkable, something appalling, has happened is the worst form of torture. The immediate possible leads exhausted, you know that there is nothing that you can do except wait. You can’t think about anything else. You can’t function. And when night falls, you can’t sleep. Your stomach churns. You break out in cold sweats. And if or when you do finally sleep from exhaustion, you are invaded by the most twisted and chilling of dreams.

You cling to the vestiges of hope because there is no choice. But in your heart you know. Sometimes, just sometimes, events take a benign turn. But mostly, there is just the waiting and the waiting and the waiting – until the need to know becomes the dominant emotion. Even if that means finally accepting that there is no hope – that the worst has come to the worst.

But to describe it is not even to begin to scratch the surface of the horror that is involved, when a black twist of fate picks you out to be the locus of these wretched anxieties. Most people know what genuine tragedy feels like. But the particular kind of tragedy visited on the Wells and the Chapman families ranks among the worst, and the most difficult to bear, that ordinary people in an ordinary place are ever likely to have inflicted on them.

There is little or nothing that we can do to mitigate that. The expressions of sympathy and of love that have been directed towards them by tens of thousands of other ordinary people undoubtedly help. For those who are at the centre of tragic events of this kind to know that they are not entirely alone in their feelings of grief and torment, and that others are capable of expressing their care and their solidarity, offers a welcome support. But it is a small one when such a wanton crime has ripped away from you the flesh and blood that you cared for – that you still care for – more than anything else in the world.

In many respects, then, the response of the public to events in Soham has been a good and a helpful one. But there are other ways in which certain things done in the aftermath of the murder of the two ten-year olds have been deeply disturbing and wrong. Inevitably, at the heart of this is the response of the media. It would be futile to try to suggest that the disappearance of the girls was not a major story, and that coverage of it was anything other than mandatory as far as news media were concerned. However, the British press in particular went much further, by attempting to become involved in the police-work. The Express offered a reward of £1,000,000, for information that might lead to an arrest. The Sun put a figure of £150,000 on the same thing.

The potential of this kind of distraction to create false leads or to prevent individuals going to the police at the earliest possible moment is obvious. In the guise of do-goodery and concern about the girls and their families, both papers were involved in the worst kind of cynicism, exploiting the tragedy for their own commercial ends.

Other aspects of the media’s involvement were even more repellent. When Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested, the presumption of their guilt in newspapers all over Britain and Ireland seemed to be automatic. It happened on radio in Ireland too, in a way that was completely indefensible. I heard a number of different broadcasters extemporise about how these people had no right to live after what they had done. People phoned in with similar messages. One woman on The Gerry Ryan Show cheerfully spelled out that a bullet in the head would be too good for them. It was the kind of utterly intemperate thing which was being said on phone-ins all over the country, and presumably in Britain too.

It isn’t enough for professional broadcasters to say that they are merely reflecting public opinion. In a situation like this, rather than allowing – and especially rather than engaging in – careless and extreme gut reactions, it is even more important than ever to exercise caution. It is not essential to take telephone calls on a subject as sensitive as this. Alternatively, if a conscientious decision is made to take calls, it is certainly not necessary for a presenter to give their personal prejudices an airing. To facilitate a discussion it may indeed help people to address their sense of horror and revulsion – but the onus is on those who promote this (a) to ensure that there is the appropriate balance and sensitivity in the views that are being expressed and (b) that those who have been charged are at least presumed innocent until found guilty.

On the morning after they had been arrested, for some a bullet in the head would not have been good enough for Ian Huntley’s partner, the temporary school teacher Maxine Carr. As we go to press a week later, she has not been charged with the murders. When she appeared in court, on the lesser charge of perverting the course of justice, crowds gathered around the courthouse, some of them baying for her blood. Having been charged with murder, meanwhile, Ian Huntley was immediately sent for psychiatric assessment – and the reaction from some was that this was some kind of a fake, a get-out clause to avoid ever facing trial. The possibility that he might genuinely be suffering from a serious psychiatric illness apparently was not worth considering.

The blood-lust that seems to have taken hold is utterly wrong and misplaced. Let justice take its considered course, and if they are fit to be tried, let those responsible for the murders be held accountable. But the cause of justice will never be advanced by a lynch-mob mentality. Indeed there is the real possibility that it will be frustrated – and anyone in the media who encourages it bears responsibility for that.

On the balance of things, what compassion we feel must go first to the primary victims of whatever grotesque sequence of events unfolded in Soham – most particularly to the families of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, who must live with the worst imaginable lacerations to their spirits. It is heartbreaking to think of what they have been living – and will continue to have to live – through. But it may be that other innocents have been sucked into this gruesome nightmare, and for them it is right to have compassion too.

The hysteria drummed up in the media, around the abductions, about the internet, paedophilia and the safety of children is also misplaced. Tragedy of this kind is random and, in some ways, all the more terrible for the fact that it is. But you cannot live your life in fear. The best thing any of us can do is to go on trying to do the intelligent and the decent thing ourselves, to love our children (and our parents) as fully and as well as we can. If enough of us do it successfully, then the world will be a better place.

Far from helping us to achieve that, witch-hunts and paranoia will have precisely the opposite effect.