Extremes

Today was sentencing day for the court case I sat in on three weeks ago. I didn’t go but got a call from my friends – seven years prison, life on the sex offenders register and 10 years sexual prevention order. An 'end' of something that can never really end. How do you deal with that?

In an unsettling coincidence I learnt yesterday evening that another paedophilia case, heard in Oxford Crown Court at the same time as I was there, involves a family my brother knows. That defendant has gone on the run and was convicted in his absence.
 
I’ve spent most of my life persuading myself and others that the world is a mostly safe place. It doesn’t feel that way right now.