They want to change the whole school culture, and many feel that teachers simply do not take bullying seriously enough, in spite of the widespread introduction of anti-bullying policies and of the subject of personal and social relations to the national curriculum. We own so much now - we spend more of our money on leisure and entertainment than anything else. Religious leaders talk about a vacuum, where God once was, and faith. The blame shifts queasily from individual to family to state and all the way back again. Everyone's to blame.
Nobody's to blame.
There are no shared moral assumptions here, no dialogue between different ideologies. We are poles apart, sharing only the visceral pity at the thought of Damilola crawling along the road looking for help and never finding it. We search for reasons, desperately wanting a simple one that will unite us again. We feel that something has gone wrong, but we don't know what it is. It is hard to accept that there is no single reason in this bleak tale, and therefore no easy solution.