The predictable public, press and political reaction to the murder of Rhys Jones (Will UK politicians get the message on child murder? – As if! 20 August 2007) put me in mind of the poet and novelist Blake Morrison's book As If, which uses the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993 as the key to an exploration of childhood and how English society views children.
"On my travels I carry with me a passage from the book that evokes so well parents' fears for their children. I use it when the people I am working with show signs of forgetting that the children they are paid to support are just like their own. Here's an extract. (It follows Morrison's account of his son's survival of meningitis.)"
"The terror – my terror – never left. As my son grew bigger, so the terror grew bigger. The chief meaning of his life was the likelihood of losing it. Danger was all I saw, and I could see it everywhere. He'd wake and want to climb out of his cot, but get his head stuck in the bars, strangling himself, or fall awkwardly over the side, breaking his neck. We'd have forgotten to flick the switch up on one of the plug sockets, and he'd dip his wet finger in. He'd squeeze under a bedroom sash window, and plummet onto the concrete below. He'd drown headfirst in the nappy bucket. He'd find his way to the bottles and packets under the kitchen sink, the bleach, the mouse poison, that unlabelled bottle from who knows where, the contents of which turn out, at the inquest, to be paraquat. Now he's out the back door, face down in the garden pond, or being stung by a bee (that allergy we didn't know about) or climbing inside the chest in the garage, the disused freezer with the self locking lid. No, it's the front door he's through, on to the road, beneath the reversing furniture van, the refuse lorry, in pursuit of his merrily bouncing ball. I pull him clear and teach him to stay on the pavement, a safe place until the day a careering joyrider, or police car in pursuit, mounting the kerb ..."
"Time to eat: what shall it be? A fishbone in the gullet, the chip-pan whose handle he reaches