ROUND our way, many people have stopped going through the park. It is the most important public space in the area, the place where the generations kids on roller blades, young couples holding hands, sweaty fathers trying to hold back the years in Sunday soccer teams, old people walking their dogs are most obviously in each other's presence.
"Community" is a slippery word, but if it has a simple meaning, it is most obvious here in the park, people of different ages, classes and genders sharing the same space. And in a very real way that meaning is being lost.
On bank holiday Monday last week, at half nine in the morning, one of the neighbours was walk.ing her dog in the park when she was pulled into the bushes. She was punched hard in the face, so hard that her nose and jaw were broken. She was raped. She is 74.
Nobody can ever know what she is suffering, but in smaller ways, everyone is changed by what happened to her.
For now, at the height of summer, with the kids on their school holidays, the park has suddenly become a dangerous place. For three kinds of people women, children and the elderly, between them probably about three quarters of the local population it is as if the gates had been shut in their faces.
It makes no difference that a crime of such enormity is unlikely to happen in the same place twice. It doesn't matter that, crawling as it is with detectives, the place is probably safer at the moment than it ever was before. There might as well be a sign on the gate saying "Only those who fancy their chances of beating off a vicious attacker may enter here." A public space has been in effect privatised, open only to able bodied men and those accompanying them.
It is right and proper to keep violent crime in perspective, to remember that hysteria about the "crime wave" is generated for cynical and manipulative purposes. It is right to point to the latest crime statistics, and to show that they don't support the notion of a once idyllic society slipping into chaos and anarchy. But it is also necessary to remember what the statistics can never measure the ripples of fear that spread outwards from every act of violence.
Every serious assault has one specific victim but many effects. The victim's life may be changed profoundly and for ever, but many other lives are changed more subtly, less tangibly or traumatically. The changes happen slowly and incrementally. A place that was safe becomes unsafe. It ceases to be a public place and becomes a kind of private territory. And the idea of a community, too, becomes that little bit less of a public reality, as its members withdraw that little bit further into themselves and their own families.
What happens to public places like our local park (an open space that becomes out of bounds) is repeated inside the private places of individual minds. One of the things that we don't acknowledge, let alone discuss, is the way we search through the details of the news stories for clues that might help us to categorise acts of violence, and to put ourselves beyond their reach.
The process follows a pattern. First there is the shock of the news a man has been stabbed, a woman's body has been found. Then there are the furtive questions. What kind of man? Was he a gouger or a respectable person? Did he know his attacker? Are these the kind of unsteady people you expect to get into trouble? Was the woman killed by her husband, or was it a random act of mania? Could it have been me, or is it just the sort of thing that happens to Them the unfortunate others who live on the edge of danger and sometimes topple off into the abyss?
LAST May, when a womans body was found across the road from my house, we went through this awful interrogation in our own heads. First there was numbness, then a strange feeling of unreality. And then the questions critical for survival, the need to know how to categorise this terrible event.
Was it the random act of a sex killer on the loose? Or does it have a specific explanation? Can we put a face to the deed? Or does it retain its dark and terrifying mystery?
Within a day, the collective, inanimate knowledge of the community had been stirred into life. The things that people hardly knew they knew began to float to the surface of consciousness. Meaningless details began to cohere. The noise of the car that someone had heard. The face that a neighbour had seen at an odd hour. The bits and pieces of a woman's life that had seeped through the borders of domestic privacy.
Within a week, the whole neighbourhood had in its head a scenario for the murder. No one has been charged, but people think they know, not just who did it, but how and why.
That belief brings a horribly guilty kind of comfort. You become sickened by your own feeling of relief that the cruel death of a young woman doesn't threaten you and yours. I have seen the same process at work in the North at a time when sectarian killings were rife.
Sitting in someone's home, you would hear the announcement over the radio that someone had been shot. You would sense the question is it someone we know? Then, the relief at finding that it wasn't, followed almost immediately by the guilt of having asked the question, with its implied ranking of human suffering in an order of importance, in the first place.
There is something shameful about the search for reassurance that follows a hideous act. The act of violence ends up diminishing the community in two ways directly, by the hurt inflicted on the victim, and then indirectly, by the sour knowledge that your own feelings of shock and sympathy are mixed with the selfish instincts of self preservation.
VIOLENT crime hits, in other words, at the basic human qualities that make society itself possible. It destroys the idea of public space, the feeling that at the simplest, most mundane level we share territory.
It introduces exclusion and inequality into the most ordinary realms of existence being in the street, walking in the park closing down, for women, children and the elderly, spaces that ought to be open. It pollutes the simple gut feeling of compassion for another human being with meaner emotions of self interested relief and self contemptuous guilt.
And when this happens, society itself becomes less and less able to assert the values by which it survives. The public spaces, as they shrink, become the property of the violent. The crowding out of compassion and generosity makes for a meaner nastier political sphere, which in turn helps to create a more violent and degraded society.
It becomes harder and harder to remember that the purpose of law and order is not just the punishment of individuals but the preservation of the qualities that make society possible. It becomes harder to say that the only way to keep those qualities alive is to bring them to bear on the whole debate about crime.