Some years ago, I vowed I would never write another column in this newspaper about another dead baby, murdered by the very people who were supposed to be protecting and caring for them. I couldn't. It seemed almost disrespectful to the baby to be wringing my hands, exploding with anger, railing against families that closed ranks to protect the perpetrator of appalling violence from being brought to justice when nothing happened to change things. Nada. Zip.
I felt better for venting my spleen but babies kept being broken and pulverised and shattered and my columns were utterly irrelevant in the face of that. Word + word + word might equal power in Margaret Atwood's world, but I'd love to see how a woman even as skilled as she could use words to bring reason to the sorts of men and women who kill their babies.
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And when you read of the horrific injuries they suffer, this is not a man or woman having a momentary rush of blood to the head and lashing out once. These children are tortured over a period of time, and any number of adults must have known what was going on. Yet they made the choice to do nothing.
It was the Salvation Army's State of the Nation report released this week that shocked me enough to take to the keyboard again. Among its findings, the authors reported that serious assaults on children resulting in serious injury had risen 40 per cent over the past four years.