The quiet French town of Jonzac has just lowered into the earth a boy who should never have died. The murder of 12-year-old Matisse, allegedly at the hands of a neighbour with a known history of sexual violence, has reopened a familiar wound in the Republic: the failure of its institutions to protect the most vulnerable. And as the French look inward with grief and rage, the British press has, predictably, pointed across the Channel with a smugness that borders on the indecent. 'UK policing praised for child protection protocols,' the headlines read, as if we had solved the riddle of safeguarding once and for all. But let us pause before we pat ourselves on the back. The French tragedy is not an exception to the rule of Western child protection; it is a mirror held up to our own complacency.
The details are harrowing. The suspect, a 45-year-old man already under judicial supervision for previous sexual offences, was able to befriend the boy, gain his trust, and ultimately take his life. Questions are being asked of the French gendarmerie and social services: how was this man not monitored more closely? Why were warning signs missed? The French press, in turn, has spoken of a "systeme en panne" — a system in breakdown. But is this not the same system that Britons have been warned about for years? The same institutional blindness that allowed the grooming gangs of Rotherham and Rochdale to operate unmolested for a generation? The same bureaucratic cowardice that prioritised reputation over rescue?
To claim that UK policing is somehow superior in this domain is to indulge in a dangerous national myth. The British child protection system is not a fortress; it is a patchwork of underfunded local authorities, overstretched social workers, and police forces that have been gutted by a decade of austerity. The truth is that both France and Britain suffer from the same malady: the modern state has become expert at generating leads, creating databases, and writing protocols, but utterly incompetent at the human task of noticing the dangerous man on the street and removing him from society. We have created a bureaucratic labyrinth where every missed meeting, every overlooked report, every unreturned phone call becomes a potential tombstone.
The British commentator, however, will not see this. He will instead invoke the glorious image of the British bobby — a cultural fixture that, like the Victorian sewer system, has not kept pace with modern demands. He will contrast the admirable speed with which an NSPCC helpline will be answered with the alleged lethargy of the French justice system. But these are games the rational mind must reject. The French mothers and fathers mourning a lost child today are not comforted by the news that some town in the Midlands has a faster response time. They want to know why the man who killed their boy was still walking free.
What is happening in France is a tragedy of classical proportions: the failure of reason and order in the face of irrational evil. It is a reminder that no amount of safeguarding legislation can replace the simple act of paying attention. In Victorian Britain, the murder of a child by a known offender would have provoked moral outrage and calls for the restoration of the birch. Today, we produce a new initiative. We commission a review. We appoint a tsar. And then, because the memory of a dead child is inconvenient for a system that must process cases, we move on.
The proper response to Jonzac is not self-congratulation but self-examination. Let the Home Office ask itself: how many Matisses are we currently failing? How many men are slipping through our own porous net? The French will dig deep into their cultural habit of centralisation and ask how the gendarmerie failed. We, in our more fragmented kingdom, must ask whether our own institutions are any better. The answer, I suspect, is that we are all sliding, together, into the moral decadence that has always preceded the fall of civilisations. When we fail to protect our children, we fail to protect the future. And a society that fails its future has already begun to die.
