Little Arthur and the breakdown of society

Everything about the murder of little Arthur Labinjo-Hughes is distressing. Here was a six-year-old boy tortured, poisoned and assaulted by the people who were supposed to be caring for him. His stepmother, who was today sentenced to life imprisonment for his murder, and his father, who has been jailed for 21 years for manslaughter. They were ‘spiteful and sadistic’ in their violent torment of this child, the judge at Coventry Crown Court said. A video recording of a weakened Arthur trying to make a bed for himself on the floor, and crying out ‘no one loves me… no one is going to feed me’, is harrowing in the extreme. For me, the most distressing detail was an audio recording of Arthur wishing his Uncle Blake would come and rescue him. ‘Please help me uncle… I need some food and a drink’, he cried into the abyss.

The killing of Arthur is first and foremost an act of inhuman depravity carried out by two people who ought never to see sunlight again. But there is something else, too. This horror also feels like a stain on the nation. Like an indictment of society more broadly – or rather of an absence of society which meant that a six-year-old boy could be persecuted and slowly murdered over a period of months. Because the inescapable fact, the fact that should haunt our institutions and our collective conscience, is that this catastrophe could possibly have been prevented. Representatives of the state visited Arthur during his months of torture and poisoning, but they did not recognise the great difficulty he was in. Worse, his extended family, the people who loved him, tried to raise the alarm, to little avail. Most disturbingly of all, they were threatened with arrest if they attempted to visit Arthur during lockdown, when household mixing was banned. It seems possible that Arthur was failed not only by his father and stepmother, but by society itself.

Where were the forces of civilisation? This is the question we must ask.

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