By Theresa Rézeau

Another stretch of police tape.
Another bouquet slowly wilting beneath a lamppost.
Another family trying to understand how a child who left home that morning never returned.

Within hours, the questions begin.
Who carried the knife?
Who pulled the trigger?
Who should be punished?

These are necessary questions. Justice matters. Families deserve answers. Communities deserve safety.

Yet another question receives far less attention.
What kind of society keeps creating children who believe they need to carry a knife or a gun in the first place?

It is tempting to describe those responsible as monsters. The word creates distance. Monsters belong to another world. They are easier to condemn because they appear fundamentally different from the rest of us.

History offers a far less comforting explanation.
Monsters are rarely born. They are often made.

Nearly three centuries ago, the British artist William Hogarth understood this better than most. His series The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) does not begin with murder. It begins with childhood.

In The First Stage of Cruelty, boys torment animals while others watch. Violence is treated as amusement. Compassion is absent. Cruelty is allowed to grow because no one believes it matters.

By the final engraving, The Reward of Cruelty, the same child has become a murderer. He has been executed, and his body is publicly dissected before a crowd. Society recoils at the horror of the crime, yet Hogarth quietly directs our attention elsewhere.

William Hogarth (1697–1764)
The Reward of Cruelty, 1751.
The final image in The Four Stages of Cruelty. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Where was society when cruelty first appeared?
His answer remains as unsettling today as it was in 1751.

Violence rarely arrives without warning. Every murderer was once a child whose future remained unwritten.

It develops gradually, nurtured by indifference, rewarded by silence and normalised until it no longer shocks.

Before every act of violence, there is a child whom society slowly stopped seeing. The sound of a gunshot or the flash of a knife is often only the final chapter of a story that society stopped reading years earlier.

Every generation likes to believe that knife and gun crime belong to another family, another neighbourhood or another culture. We reassure ourselves that those involved are somehow different from us.

The reality is often far more uncomfortable.

Many children grow up surrounded by instability long before they ever hold a weapon. Some witness violence inside their own homes. Others experience neglect, abuse or abandonment. Some are drawn into gangs that promise protection, belonging and identity where families or communities have failed. Others spend their formative years immersed in a digital world where humiliation becomes entertainment, aggression earns attention and respect is confused with fear.

None of this excuses murder.

Every person remains responsible for the choices they make. But responsibility should never become an excuse to ignore everything that shaped those choices.

A prison sentence may remove an offender from the streets. It cannot repair the conditions that continue to produce another.

Too often, the conversation begins only after blood has stained the pavement. Families search for answers. Schools ask whether warning signs were missed. Police investigate. Politicians promise action. News headlines dominate public attention for a few days before gradually disappearing.

The questions come after the funeral.
Far fewer are asked while the child is still alive.

But there is another cost that rarely appears in crime statistics. Every act of violence leaves an invisible wound upon the conscience of a society. Streets become places where parents grip a child's hand a little tighter. Teenagers learn to mistake vigilance for normality. Trust quietly gives way to suspicion. Fear settles into the ordinary routines of daily life until an entire generation grows up believing that danger is simply the price of being alive. The deepest tragedy is that violence kills long before it takes a life. It first destroys innocence, then trust, and finally the quiet belief that tomorrow will be safer than today.

We have become remarkably skilled at responding to tragedy while steadily losing the ability to prevent it.

We close youth centres and wonder why gangs become communities. We speak more openly about mental health while leaving many young people convinced that asking for help is weakness. We celebrate wealth and status while offering too few examples of dignity, service and character. We allow social media to reward outrage, intimidation and spectacle, then express surprise when violence itself becomes another performance.

The cost is measured not only in lives lost but also in lives transformed.

Every murder creates more than one victim.

There is the person whose life is taken. There is the family left to carry unimaginable grief. There are friends who must live with trauma. And there is the young person whose own humanity has become so damaged that taking another life became imaginable.

That tragedy also has a history.

The greatest illusion is that these are someone else's children.

They are ours.
Our schools. Our streets.
Our neighbourhoods. Our culture.
We should not be surprised when they reflect what they have learned from us.

When compassion disappears from public life, everyone eventually pays the price.

Hogarth understood this nearly three hundred years ago. Cruelty begins quietly. It is ignored because it seems insignificant. It becomes normal because no one interrupts it. Eventually it grows into something that shocks the very society that allowed it to flourish.

Another vigil. Another funeral.
Another child whose name briefly fills the headlines before disappearing into memory.
Another promise that this time things will be different.
Until the next siren.

Every time another teenager is stabbed or shot, we ask who held the knife or pulled the trigger.

Perhaps we should also ask who forged the world in which that weapon came to feel necessary. Because if we only condemn the final act, we will never prevent the next one.

The greatest danger is not that monsters walk among us.

It is that, through indifference, neglect and silence, we continue to create the very monsters we fear.

Author's Note

This essay is not intended to diminish the responsibility of those who commit acts of violence. Every individual remains accountable for their choices. At the same time, many parents, teachers, youth workers, faith leaders, police officers, charities and community organisations work tirelessly to prevent knife and gun crime before it begins.

Their efforts deserve recognition because the greatest success is often invisible: the young person who never picks up a weapon, the life that is never lost, and the future that quietly changes course.