The rising number of murdered children

The stabbing or shooting of children is becoming more common in this country and the seriousness with which we contemplate the finality of the victims’ lives is declining.

The cost of living in Britain is expensive, but life itself is cheap. Last week a fifteen-year-old boy was stabbed outside his school in Huddersfield and died in hospital. It was the fourteenth major knife attack in that town alone so far this year.

Horrific killings have occurred recently in Liverpool, including that of a nine-year-old girl, and the statistics for the capital city make for incredibly bleak reading. Young lives flung into the abyss with no warning whatsoever. Parents left to bear the loss and overcome the guilt at having outlived their children.

Watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II reminded me of the profundity of death, in her case more than others given how she straddled such a vast expanse of historical change (can someone’s life really have crossed over with both Herbert Asquith and Greta Thunberg?). Was there any consolation as she reached the end of her life? Or did she truly face death alone, confronting it with nothing but her own mettle?

After the church service on the bank holiday Monday, I travelled to Sutton Courtenay. The cemetery at All Saints Church in that handsome Oxfordshire village is home to the graves of George Orwell, David Astor, and Asquith himself.

Finding Mr Orwell’s place of rest, located towards the back of the green, forced me to peruse the other stones placed there. It is remarkable how many have fresh flowers despite the date of death being thirty or forty years ago. There was much sorrow in those that read something to the effect of ‘Here lies Angela, died 1988, and Arthur, died 2006, now reunited’. The pathos contemplating those eighteen years is almost unbearable.

I saw a stone for a couple who died around the turn of the twentieth century engraved with ‘erected by their children Jack, Fred, and Victoria’ and was struck that the living people who arranged for those words to be chiselled into the stone as they retrospectively considered their dead parents, have themselves long completed their voyage as well now.

As the famous epitaph puts it “As ye are now, so once was I, as I am now, so shall you be”. We cannot escape the insurmountable horizon of existence and will be forced to travel to that unchartered territory eventually. Perhaps we accept this finitude, as the only alternative - an excess of immortality - is a fate worse than death.

Whilst death may ultimately be acceptable, there is nothing acceptable about the stabbing or shooting of children. It is becoming more common in this country and the seriousness with which we contemplate the finality of the victims’ lives is declining. The less time we spend thinking about it, the less we will be motivated to find the real solutions. Hopefully the solemn funeral for the late Elizabeth will remind us of what death is and why the murder rate should rightly be treated as intolerable.