To protect our children we have to assist in their loss of innocence by giving them information we would rather they did not know, writes Kathryn Holmquist
It's 3 a.m. and I'm watching my 10-year-old daughter sleep. In repose, she looks both younger than her years, and much, much older. While counting the freckles on her childish nose, I can also see the beautiful woman she will become. And I remember her as a newborn, when the sheer desire to see her breathing would awaken me at night.
Thinking of those four unimaginably distraught parents in Soham, whose broken daughters are lying in a morgue, I am suddenly aware of the great privilege of seeing my child gracefully emerge from innocence to womanhood. Yet her life is so fragile. My daughter, in her sleep, is as vulnerable as she was as an infant. I feel the danger, as you do at 3 a.m., that I may never see her grow up.
I wonder - just for a second - if there is some way to keep her like this, safely slumbering and wrapped in the innocence she already takes such joy in challenging. A sleeping beauty, protected until her first kiss by a prince who loves her.
It's a ridiculous fantasy and I get angry at myself for even considering that I might deprive my daughter of experience, yet for the first time I can see how the Sleeping Beauty myth appeals to parents. "What do you think of this - so many 10- 11- and 12-year-old girls are disappearing," says my father, who lives in the US where this happens all the time. He has a 12-year-old daughter of his own.
I fear for my daughter, yet she wants, even at the age of 10, to be a teenager. Last week, she went out to dinner with her grandparents and her 12-year-old aunt and she wore lip gloss for the first time. She wants to be independent, yet has little idea of the risks independence brings.
My daughter's path will be fraught with danger, her journey through adolescence more like the prince's battle to the tower through the thorns.
I am awake at 3 a.m. because she has had a nightmare. I have been sitting beside her in the bed reading to her until her breath flowed soft and even. Her nightmare, I know, was triggered by the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, girls her age whose names will be forever linked to evil. Ten-year-old innocents who could not resist the promise of adventure and died for their curiosity.
As a parent, like many others, I worried two weeks ago over whether to tell my daughter that two girls in England had left a family barbecue without telling anyone and had disappeared. I switched off Sky News, which obsessed over the disappearances to a gruesome and irresponsible degree. But there was no way to protect my daughter from the information. The agony was in the ether. I realised that she had to know and she was better off hearing if from me.
We were at a church service 10 days ago when the rector, Gordon Linney, talked about the girls' disappearance and the evil in the heart of man. And again, last Sunday, our rector led us through prayer for the girls' families and all the people of Soham who have to pick up the pieces and convince their children they can feel safe again. My daughter and a 10-year-old friend, also a girl, exchanged a look across the pews.
Privately, I prayed to find a way to speak to my child about these evil deeds. We all need to find ways to make our children understand that the world is not a safe place and that people they know may be the most dangerous of all. Yet we have to do this in language that does not undermine their confidence, or ruin their emerging independence. To protect them, we have to assist in the loss of their innocence by giving them information we would rather they didn't know.
It makes me angry. One mother I know was disgusted at Sky News and ITN, who repeated ad nauseum the stories of the girls' disappearance, details of the search and the discovery of their bodies, over and over again, as if by repeating the details, we could somehow explain them. She commented that as a child growing up in the UK at the time of the Moors murders, she had no inkling of the threat to children felt by adults at the time. The news media 30 years ago didn't ruminate over satellite links scaring parents to death.
But you cannot blame the news media, no matter how critical you are of saturation coverage. So who do you blame? What do you tell your children that could possibly protect them, when a trusted adult could be - and is even most likely to be - the one who harms them?
It grieves me, as it grieves us all, that we have to tell our children, in words they can understand, that in a world where do-it-yourself guides to child abduction and rape are available on the Internet, there are adults who wish them harm. There are adults who fantasise about exploiting them and who will implement their sick plans if given half the chance.
How do I give my daughter this defensive view of reality, while still supporting her faith in humanity? In response to Soham, my second daughter, who is seven, reminded me that on holiday in Kerry, she ran away after our errant dog and got lost. She was afraid that "Lucky" would be hit by a car. She was fearing more for him than for her own safety, when suddenly she found herself around a bend she didn't recognise. Three hundred metres from the house, yet out of view of it, she was terrified.
A German couple, in a car, found her crying even as I was out looking for her. She'd been gone all of five minutes. Next thing I knew, the couple were pulling up with my daughter and the dog in the rear of their car.
"Weren't those people nice, Mom?" she said.
So what was I to say? Never get in a car with strangers? Those people who helped you could as easily have killed you? How do I explain this ambiguity to a child of seven, that adults are there to be trusted and obeyed, but you must always be on the look-out for the pervert, the freak, the evil being that revels in destroying children?
I'm still trying to figure that one out. And so, I suspect, is she.