What there CAN BE is a system in which fair laws, enacted with rational thinking, with the open possibility of being changed if the facts so warrrant, are fairly executed. That’s the best we can hope for. If things don’t seem “fair” after that you have to accept the determination and make efforts to change the law if you believe it is faulty. But your individual, anecdotal, situation is fairly poor evidence that a law needs to be changed. There must always be a wide array of evidence for such change.

But seriously what is it with the tabloids and stirring up fear and emotions? One of the reasons I despise papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, is because I can imagine them salivating over the disappearence of another young child, like Madeline McCann or Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, because of the boost to sales it offers. It allows them to do massive spreads and front pages which are guranteed to sell. Call me cynical but I truly believe they love these tragic events; like vultures they swoop in on the first sign of tragedy. The also love to further emotionalise these cases by given the children even more child-like names: James Bulger became Jamie, and Madeline became Maddie.

And of course all this massive media attention on a few tragic, yet rare, cases, means that the actual risk to children is blown massively out of proportion. The same happens with fear of ‘youths’ and ‘yobs’. Not every teenager is some boozed up druggy, looking to stab you for your mobile. And yet the majority of articles about teenagers are negative. They create more and more sensationlised reports which create more fear and loathing, as can be seen in what you wrote.

The Stephen Lawrence case was tragic, but I totally agree that we cannot allow the victims of such crimes to decide the punishments, else we revert back to ‘An eye for an eye’, that was so beloved by the Old Testament.

Okay, this comment kind of jumped around the place, but I think we can all take away from it: ‘Tabloids bad, thinking good’.