February 08, 2021
THE outrage expressed by many people over the most recent case of the abduction and murder of a young woman is understandable.
We cannot believe that there exist among us depraved people who are capable of committing atrocities, inflicting extreme violence on women with seemingly consummate ease and callous detachment. It’s as if they are cast in some science fiction horror movie, acting out their darkest obsessions and cruellest fantasies, except the victims are real live people who end up very dead, sometimes mutilated and tortured before they die.
But the frenzied calls for “swift justice”, for the arrest of the perpetrator or perpetrators, the “return of the hangman” and such emotional responses will amount to nothing if we, the citizens, leave our destiny in the hands of those who benefit from broken systems at all levels of crime-fighting, rendering the populace powerless in our pursuit of justice that is both elusive and an illusion.