This was the year of the war against children. I live not that far from Newtown, Connecticut, so the small-town scenery of our freshest butchery, executed by someone who was himself not much beyond childhood years, is my back yard: picket fences, intensively tended lawns, a plethora of churches and those schools with their locker-lined polished corridors and the smell of cafeteria pizza. Since Columbine we have wearily come to expect that when carnage erupts, it will do so in the habitat of American domesticity – a shopping mall, a movie theatre, a college and, over and over again, a school. If you live outside the US and do not belong to a nation where there are more guns than people, you may just shrug this off as a peculiarly American blight.
But 2012 was also the year when the war against children went global. At the end of May, photographs of more than 30 Syrian children under the age of 10 in Sunni villages near Homs, either shot, stabbed or both, apparently by shabiha militia, held up the world’s business as usual for, oh, a few days of righteous venting. Just this month in Chenpeng, China, 22 primary schoolchildren were attacked by a knife-wielding assailant slicing off fingers and ears. Bear in mind how close the attacker has to be to the kids to manage that. On Christmas Eve, a father in Hebei province expressed his indignation at what he felt was the lenient sentencing of those responsible for his daughter’s killing by ploughing into a crowd of lunching high school pupils with his car, fracturing skulls and crushing limbs.
After the family home, school is meant to be the second great shelter and nurturer of children. If there is trouble or hardship at home, the safety, kindness and wisdom of schools takes on an even greater meaning for their charges. It is the home of their young minds. Perhaps because they want to maximise the drama of their evil, schools – and, in the case of the unrepentant Norwegian monster Anders Breivik, a holiday camp – are magnets for the morally impaired. It is not just that they house large numbers of defenceless victims. In some of the worst crimes, it is actually the ideal of education itself that is the target. The great heroine of 2012 – perhaps of our decade – Malala Yousafzai, now 15, but a campaigner for girls’ education since she was 11 – was shot point-blank on her school bus in Pakistan by the Taliban as an act of annihilationist hatred against the mere possibility of an educated woman. When we “transition out” from Afghanistan it behoves us to acknowledge that in all likelihood we will be handing that country to an army whose primary enemy are educated girls.