This is the text of an article requested by the Yorkshire Post and published this morning. I wrote it before the latest violence in English cities.
Southport is a place of grief and tragedy. It is a place I knew very well when I was young and growing up in Liverpool. Outings to Southport were slightly exotic – even if we thought we could dig deep enough into the sand to find oil. Stupid maybe, but it kept us occupied for hours and out of the adults’ hair.
Why has the violent and lethal attack on children in Southport had such a powerful impact on so many of us? Maybe it’s just that it has happened so close to home – it is the familiarity that makes it real.
A few weeks ago I was in Port Sudan visiting our link dioceses there. Up to 11 million people have been displaced in Sudan in the last year. Ethnic cleansing is going on while I write, and the whole world knows about it. Children are being slaughtered, driven out, brutalised and destroyed on the altar of other men’s ambitions for power and wealth. And the world looks on.
Children were horribly slaughtered in Israel on 7 October 2023. The subsequent onslaught in Gaza has filled our screens with images of terror and helpless terror and destruction. It seems as if violence against children is everywhere – and there is no escape. But, however powerful and moving the stories we hear, they don’t always have the same impact as one closer to home – to ‘our’ people and on ‘our’ soil.
It is not surprising that people are struggling to imagine and understand this attack on children in an English coastal town. No wonder that emotions run high as the story unwinds day by day. But, that is part of the challenge: there is not a single story here, there are many.
At the heart of it is a story about individual children being brutalised. Each one has a name. And a family. And friends. And a story of life thus far – of hopes and dreams and expectations. And now each of these has been shockingly changed for ever. The trauma for those caught up in these appalling events will not be quickly soothed.
Yet, however hard we try to keep these stories at the heart of our attention, there are other stories that cannot, or should not, be passed over or ignored.
Take the genuine heroism of those adults who tried to intervene and, in some cases, received grave injuries themselves. Motivated by what we might call a reflex of sacrificial selflessness – love, even? – these people demonstrated the best of humanity. This goes beyond any sense of mere altruism and opens up a narrative that has been described in several cultures as: saving the life of one person is to save the world. In this sense, the response of people who walk towards personal danger needs to be noted by those of us who are mere observers. What might I have done had I been there?
However, another story is that of social media, deliberate and targeted mis- and dis-information. Within minutes of these horrific events taking place, social media were awash with suggestions, accusations, provocations and threats. Prejudiced insinuations and charges were communicated at speed as if they knew the truth of what was happening. And the usual targets were in the crosshairs: immigrants, minorities, people ‘not like us’. The language of victimhood, violence and threat was dominant … and being propagated by people who knew nothing about the facts.
Why do we not understand that such speculation and provocation should be resisted? The alternative is to pave the way for further violence, justified as righteous vengeance. And there can be no complaint about the spread of violence if the language of violence is not challenged, resisted and rejected. If our society is becoming brutalised, then we need to examine ourselves before we start pointing fingers at the usual suspects.
This is not a trivial point. Social media enabled people who want to foment chaos to descend on the streets of Southport – very quickly. These people are not interested in the wellbeing or thriving of the town. They are not passionate about justice and peace. They have no idea what they are ‘for’, just what they are against. They know that it is easy to destroy, but take no responsibility for building up. They are not investing in humanity or prosperity; they merely take advantage of trauma to exploit insecurity and fear. They care not one whit about law and order or social cohesion (however you define it); they attack anyone they want to. Fifty three police officers were injured and huge costs incurred both to infrastructure and property.
So, there are multiple stories at play here. I haven’t even mentioned the people of Southport who now find themselves associated not with seaside, sand and Taylor Swift dance parties, but, rather, with inexplicable horror.
I began this reflection with the wider context of a world in which violence is given free rein. I could have expanded even further. But, the point isn’t to relativise the shocking terror and pain of Southport, but to raise a question about why otherwise civilised human beings so easily descend into cruelty – or, hearing what they want to hear, join in the crusade of chaos which some people create in order to satisfy their own personal grievances.
‘Thoughts and prayers’ has become a phrase of mockery in recent years. But, nobody can avoid being struck in the heart and mind by this criminal tragedy. And prayers are part of our toolbox. Not the sort of prayer that demands an instant answer (or retribution), but the sort that offers a vocabulary of lament and honest shame; the sort that drops human illusions and faces the horrors; the prayer that seeks to look through the eyes of the God who loves free human beings and faces us with our own hard questions.