Do you remember?

What was the name of the little girl kidnapped off the street in the Borders by Robert Black and abused and murdered by him in his delivery van in 1981?

What was the name of the little girl Black abducted and murdered from a fun fair in Portobello in 1983?

What was the name of the little girl raped and murdered on the island of Bute last year? What was the name of her murderer?

No, I can't answer some of these questions either. This isn't an IQ test. I'm not trying to get one over on you or to make anyone feel stupid.

The point I'm trying to make is this: every murder is absolutely awful for everyone involved. In the case of Alesha MacPhail, raped and murdered by Aaron Campbell, there are two families and maybe a whole community destroyed. Alesha's family will spend the rest of their lives asking what they did to deserve this and whether they could have prevented it. Aaron's family will be asking what went wrong and why didn't they recognise what was happening with this boy - and yes, he is a boy. The community will be asking what happened and why forever.

The rest of us are not involved. It's only TV news, the papers and social media that make us think we're involved. We're just onlookers - and we should be glad about that. The very least we can do is respect the wishes of Alesha's mother and only publish photos of her daughter- not the murderer. 

The murder of little children in Scotland is very, very rare. But as I've suggested here it does happen: Caroline Hogg and Susan Maxwell were two of the many victims of Robert Black, a prolific serial killer. But that was in the early 1980s.

Yesterday a 'friend' sent me a photo of Alesha MacPhail's murderer and asked me to spread it as far as possible. I gather the intention is to make sure Aaron Campbell never feels safe, even in solitary in a Scottish jail. Because that's where he'll be for the rest of his life. The judge said so. I refuse to pass on his photo because it  would be - in my opinion - an incitement to violence.

I don't know why Aaron Campbell abducted, raped and murdered Alesha MacPhail.

After a lifetime working with teenagers, I don't believe anyone is born 'evil.' Things happen to people that shape their lives - and the younger people are, the worse the effects on them are of poor education, parental neglect, domestic violence, bullying, poor family support, and the rest. If there was an easy way to track this kind of abuse and 'cure' it, we'd have done it by now.

And here's a big question for everyone: a year from now, will you personally - not the state, not society, not the doctors, not the social workers or the teachers - have done anything to make sure there are no more murders like that of Alesha MacPhail?

No, you won't because it's not that easy.