The fear I now feel for my daughter

Do I want to turn my daughter into a child who is phobic about people? Do I have a choice?

So they are dead, you find yourself saying to yourself, again and again. Those lovely 10-year-olds, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman who have been with us for a fortnight with their bright shirts and bright smiles, will soon be gone from our papers and the screens. Their bodies have apparently been found. Their story, which gripped us for days has ended. Horribly. All those prayers of strangers, the huge collective of people around the country gathered around televisions, willing on better news, made no difference. Evil prevailed.

The things one wishes for at these times. Let them be raped and beaten but, please, not killed. Hard not to despair of God at such moments of clear, absolute brutality. Was He on a lonely planet break somewhere, or is He as helpless as we are before such satanic forces? Two people who knew Holly and Jessica have been arrested, suspected of the murders (though not yet charged and who must be presumed innocent) and they seem, thus far, utterly normal. That too disconcerts, because in real life monstrous events arrive quietly, without ominous music or obvious villains. Once again, as with the murder of Sarah Payne, we are all affected; our sense of security, already too fragile, is torn a bit more.

With all our might, pride, onwards-and-upwards march to progress, human beings have always succumbed to elemental feelings of vulnerability, especially when a child is the victim of a drawn-out tragedy. Remember Radio Days, Woody Allen's loving eulogy to his childhood in 1940s New York? It was the golden age of radio and, in one episode, his family and the country at large are mesmerised for days by minute-by-minute accounts of rescuers trying to find a child who has fallen down a well. They find the victim, dead, just as 10-year-old Joe Needleman, the hero of the film, is about to be walloped by his father, who can only clasp him tightly as the news arrives.

Like parents all over, I hugged my nine-and-a-quarter-year-old daughter repeatedly on Saturday (making her first a little irritated and then uneasy) as if I expected her to vanish any minute, only to reappear a corpse. Bouts of guilt rose intermittently as we tried to carry on as usual, went to the park – though we didn't take our eyes off our daughter and her friend – watched TV, ate a nice supper. Every time I laughed out loud or forgot the dead girls, it seemed discourteous and unseemly. And none of us could bear to turn off the lights knowing how hard it would be to sleep through the whole night; and it was. Don't console me with the statistics. I know my daughter is not in any more danger today than she was a fortnight ago and that she is more likely to be killed by a car or a falling tree than a murderer. But cars (even drunk drivers) and trees and lightning kill without planning the murder of an innocent.

My terror comes from having to accept that corrupt people are out there who can and do, with systematic forethought, hurt and kill young human beings who are helpless, hopeful, optimistic, curious. Whatever Margaret Thatcher said, we are inter-dependent creatures and such a thing as society does exist, and it only works if we can depend on nameless citizens not to harm our families. Our faith in the future depends on this. Crimes against children devastate the basic terms of that contract, which is why it is impossible to forgive the Moors murderers, the Wests, the killers of Sarah Payne and Victoria Climbié and why most of us feel such empathy for the parents of Jessica and Holly. Looking back at the coverage of the Moors murderers, particularly at readers' letters in newspapers in the summer of 1966, you can see that the reactions then were exactly the same as those we are seeing today: horror, disbelief, anger and those big questions about human behaviour.

One RT Oerton from Poole, Dorset, encapsulated this in his letter to the New Statesman (6 May 1966): "It is of immense concern to mid-20th century man to know the things of which his fellow men are capable and thus to understand how precarious are man's defences against his own savagery".

But such waves of national grief have their problems and questions need to be asked. Some of these are hard to answer without hurting those in pain. Why, for example, do we get so involved in chosen, emblematic cases and ignore all those other children who go missing, never to be found, or others killed by cruel manipulators? Is it because some victims are more photogenic than others? The answer lies with the choices made by the media. They would not be this involved, I bet, if an overweight child of a female ex-prisoner and a drug addict had gone missing and had been found dead in some late-summer dry vegetation.

And empathy carries with it a moral dilemma. Am I, in truth, less affected by what the parents of Jessica and Holly are going through than I care to admit? Are these tears and palpable fears really more about my own selfish imaginings about what could happen to my child than about the want-to-die pain of families which have experienced what I fear? Unlike many media cynics I don't think these outpourings, flowers, teddy bears and dolls are mawkish or orgies of sentimentality (only in English would you have such a phrase, such a negative phrase for simple human responses to events).

Paying respect and grieving for those to whom you owe nothing shows the best of people, and I am moved by the way the villagers of Soham are gathering together, just as they did in Dunblane. But perhaps we should be honest with ourselves about what is really in our hearts when it is other people's children. Only then can we begin to sense the endless darkness which the afflicted families have now entered. We can never share that.

Then finally is that difficult question of how much you tell your children about what happened to the girls and what we can warn them against. I don't want to stop smiling at or chatting to children I meet on trains and tubes and the streets, although it has been noticeably harder these last days. I sat for an hour at a café table at the Science Museum with two children and their parents who refused to let them talk to me. Do I want to turn my daughter into a child who is this phobic about people? Do I have a choice?

She is gullible, friendly and open (never known her to be shy – one way, perhaps, that children protect themselves), and as she turns physically into an adolescent – it happens so fast these days and at such a young age – perhaps it is the only way I can teach her to protect herself. Not only to scream if a strange man tries to pull or entice her away, but now to run away if a nice woman smiles and tries to talk to her, a woman who may only be doing what her own mother has done forever.

And what if it turns out that the killers were people who were familiar with the girls? What to do then? Is she to suspect her school gardener, the ladies at the after-school club, her older brother, her father? After all, most murders and child abuse are carried out by trusted members of the family or people already known to the child.

No. Even in this state of high anxiety I can't, I won't, make my daughter fearful of everyone around her. A child must still be free and trusting, else the perverts will truly have won.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk