You only showed part of my post there Ian as i finished it off with as a mother i wish i could gather those children and put them somewhere safe. (meaning those abroad suffering).
I only quoted the part to which I was responding, Linda. My point was that we're extremely parochial when it comes to crime and we only seem interested in crimes that happen in our locality, unless it's something massive, like a terrorist attack. It's curious: why do we care more about an event involving people none of use knows because it's on our doorstep instead of much, much worse events taking place miles away? But we want debate about things like this, because debate helps clarify the issues surrounding the events.
In this case, for instance, the initial reports suggested some sort of predatory paedophile, and it took the detective work of Fatandy to find out the relevant details which then cast the case in a whole new light. My point throughout has been that we all tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to stories well before we know the full facts. This isn't an isolated incident: some years ago a mob attacked the home and person of a Paediatric consultant after the News of the World named him as an abuser.
If we live in a society that wants to be called civilised, then we have to ensure that the Law deals with crime, and not the lynch mob. We might not like the sentence, because we don't know all the facts, but sentences can be (and often are) appealed.
There's more at stake than simple revenge. Throughout history - even as far back as Genesis - there have been people saying that we have to be cautious when dealing with criminal allegations and subsequent penalties, the most famous being Blackstone's formulation ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"). I have two children - now grown, as are your own, but had anyone ever injured them when they were young I would have wanted to tear them limb from limb. But I recognise that's the hindbrain talking, and not the forebrain.
