ABSTRACT
The family snapshot of a murdered child has become one of the most forceful icons of a decade preoccupied by its own failure to maintain a baseline of moral decency. Pictures of children in their homes and schools represent an innocence and security which we have failed to protect, like the class pictures of the murdered children of Dunblane embodying an unimaginable violation of places of security and protection. Certain images even become a shorthand for the moral anxiety stirred up by tragic events, like the face of 2-year-old James Bulger. His smiling tilted face on the corner of numerous articles on violence and children became a symbol of a profound moral crisis. Perhaps more than any other images, these photos sum up a fundamental problem in modern society: they ask how have we allowed hate to violate love?
