Everyone brings to him the meaning they want to find. He proves everybody's case for them. For moral conservatives, his murder is obviously to do with some kind of collapse of decency, four years after Labour came to power. They argue that there is not enough policing, and that lawlessness rages in housing estates like the one in Peckham, south London, where Damilola briefly lived. They argue, too, that broken parenting is the root cause of male aggression and purposelessness.
Boys brought up by single mothers go wrong more easily.
The traditional family must be restored. On the other side of the fence, liberal critics point to social exclusion and poverty. The gulf that divides the increasingly wealthy from the disenfranchised poor deepens. The youths who are disruptive at school, who are excluded, who wander around the streets with knives, who scuffle on pavements and whose status rises with each act of brutal cool are victims as well as bullies. The culture of mindless machismo, where Damilola was called 'gay' and pushed around because he was eager to learn, is a culture which traps everybody.