Children are getting stabbed to death on our streets – we can do more to tackle these senseless tragedies

There are certain news stories involving the suffering of strangers that hit you hard, and it’s tricky to know where to put those feelings so that you can get on with your day. After all, awful tragedy and cruelty happens every day, all over the world, and to beat your breast and howl every time is impractical.

Some, though, stay with me and I long for a rewind button to undo a family’s agony. Lee Pomeroy’s murder soon after Christmas was a horror that I still haven’t been able to get out of my mind.

Lee Pomeroy was stabbed on a train, by a stranger, as he travelled home with his teenage son. Absolutely heartbreaking. Senseless. That poor lad. Whatever happened and whatever was said between the two men, the fact that there are people bouncing on and off buses and trains, or wandering into the supermarket with knives in their pockets willing to end a life over some nonsense or other is chilling.

If you can’t keep your temper, or if your ego is so fragile that you have to stab someone to win an argument, then no one is safe around you.

More and more people seem to keep a knife handy as they are going about their business. It’s frightening, especially as I find it hard to back down during any sort of to-do with a stranger. A push, a shove, rudeness, and I have been known to wade in.

But you never know who you are dealing with. I got into an ugly scenario last year when a woman was awful to me in a shop as I was comforting my child. Her “get out of my way” led to my “can’t you see my daughter is distressed?”, which led to her “doesn’t mean you should block the aisle”, then my “go around the other side”, and finally her “do you want a smack in the mouth?”.

I should have left it – I am a happy person, with a nice life and lots of good things to look forward to – but when you have been bullied as a small, skittish child (which I was) by exactly the sort of person this woman was, it can be difficult to rein in your ego and rise above it. Also, 20 years of being a standup have trained me to look calm even when I’m fuming so in an argument, passive-aggression is my weapon.

The lady in the shop lost our war of words. I left, but I felt terrible, so I returned to find the woman and say sorry. She was crying. Clearly she was already having a bad day. I hugged her. It was awkward, but OK. When I went back outside, a huge man was on his phone barking: “What did she look like? The woman who was rude to you?” Then a pause and: “What do you mean you don’t know?” I scuttled off quickly. The two things might have been unconnected but, given the man’s size and rage, the incident could have been a lot nastier.

The first I heard of the stabbing of Jayden Moodie was on Twitter. He was 14 years old and riding a moped when he was hit by a car and stabbed multiple times by the car’s occupants as he lay unconscious in the street. The story was all over the news.

One of the things with motherhood that they don’t warn you about is that, when a child is harmed, you imagine he or she was your own and it can send you to a dark, agonising place. That’s not to say, of course, that empathy is the preserve of mothers, but to see that this level of cruelty exists out in the same world where our own children roam is a horrifying reminder of what we have created to lose.

Jayden was a black child and, because of this, on social media and in the press, the words “gang” and “gang-related” have been scattered about with abandon – without evidence, and without giving his family a moment to grieve. It seems to me that some people are seeking reassurance by asserting that, somehow, this child had brought it on himself. No, he did not. He was 14. He wasn’t a “young man” – he was a boy. It is the duty of all of us to protect children without first inspecting the colour of their skin or the area they live in and making judgements that serve only to make ourselves feel safer by somehow putting the victims at fault, and that certainly won’t do anything to prevent further suffering.

That Jayden’s world was so dangerous at such a young age is a very broad failure of society that shames us all. His MP, Stella Creasy, has called for the government to properly address violent crime, saying that “communities like mine are crying out for support”. She’s right.

If we want to call ourselves a remotely compassionate country, then we all have to grasp the thought that this is not just someone else’s problem. These communities need our help. The solutions to these issues need adequate funding and concern.

When ruthlessness has extended to murdering dads on days out with their boys and 14-year-old children on the street, we need to start properly tackling it, and with utmost urgency.