Our fear of child killers mirrors our own fragility of innocence and control

Evidence

What is it that we fear? Not the loss to the victim, but the loss of innocence in ourselves; not Mary outside, but Mary inside; not her loss of control, but the fragility of it in ourselves. We can, as Gitta Sereny suggests, “use” Mary, less to confirm our faith in society than to confirm the daily wonder that we believe in society at all. We can, with effort, see Mary not as alien, but Mary as kin, as a stained and transgressive being like us: with the malady of being human, and with no hope of a cure. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 500

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle on how the most monstrous figures are read as mirrors rather than aliens, and what that projection says about the reader.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 500
• XREF: connects to: People fear child murderers because they reveal human fragility within themselves — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 500; Phobic objects are overdetermined by infantile affect and resist rational correction — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 589

Broader Connections

• Phobic objects are overdetermined by infantile affect and resist rational correction #expands (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 589