Alison Mau:
Let's forget this killer's name
I’m going to write about the vile work of the Manchester bomber, but I won’t be saying his name. I won’t be clicking on online articles headlined ‘‘Everything we know about ...’’ I do not want to help drive the fame he sought. In a perfect world, his name would die on everyone’s lips before it’s uttered (in a perfect world, we’d never have reason to utter it at all). This a tiny, potentially useless gesture I’ve borrowed from the ‘‘No Notoriety’’ campaign, which was set up after 12 people were shot dead in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. I’m not a criminal psychologist so I don’t know whether suicide bombers have the same desire for infamy as mass shooters; perhaps they don’t, but I’m not taking the chance. Manchester hit me right in the guts. The early video of children scrambling over pink balloons to escape the arena, the teenaged girls in makeup and party clothes who cannot ever unsee what they saw in that foyer. I’m still trying to work out why this attack carries more emotional weight than others. It’s not just the deliberate targeting of children; in mid-April 126 were killed when a car bomb blew up a bus convoy filled with refugees from villages under siege in Syria. More than half of the dead were children. There’s a name for this – the empathy gap. It tries to explain why we appear to care so much more about, say, Mancunian teenagers killed at a concert venue than dozens of Syrian families fleeing their homes. There are plenty of potential factors. There’s the sense that Britain is a peaceful place with stable government, Syria is not; in Manchester the horror happened in a ‘‘new’’ place. And maybe most powerfully, familiarity. Most of us cannot place ourselves in a bus on a dusty road in the Middle East, nerves jangling as the convoy approaches the crossover point between rebel and government-held territory, hoping that wherever we end up there will be food after years of siege conditions. Our imaginations are simply not that elastic.
We can however, easily put ourselves in Manchester. Some of us were born there or near there, we might have visited or perhaps, as I have, walked down Coro St and marvelled at how wee the three quarter scale houses were.
We can even more easily put ourselves in that Arena. Those first-concert memories stay with you for life.
Mine was Abba, Melbourne, 1977 (forgive me, I was only 12).
On a warm March evening we were dropped at the outdoor venue by our parents. There was no discernable crowd security, which meant my 14-year-old sister and I were able to break from our seats and run to the stage.
We spent the entire set less than a metre from the swishing white satin flares of Anni and Agnetha. It was our first time out alone.
The joy and freedom we felt in those two hours is so clear, even 40 years on, that I can bring it to mind in detail at will.
A generation later, a concert was my daughter’s first solo outing, too. Vector Arena, to see Hot Chelle Rae, a group of friends waiting for hours to make sure they’d be right up the front.
Dropped off and picked up by me, she was to stay with her friends at all times. The next day she told me she’d been pulled from the crowd at the stage barrier by security guards wary of crush conditions; by the end of the concert her group had separated and her phone had died.
She wasn’t allowed another concert until she understood that the rules were for her safety and they weren’t to be broken.
The irony’s obvious. Of all the dangerous situations your kids can put themselves in, of all the nightmarish things that could happen to a teenager, a concert by a former Nickelodeon star where baby pink balloons rained from the ceiling during the encore would never have ranked.
As a parent I’ve always thought a concert, with the proper rules in place, is probably the safest way they can spread their wings a little. Although I won’t be changing my behaviour or locking my teenagers inside as a result of Manchester, today I no longer feel that way.
Ali Mau is the host of RadioLIVE Drive, 3-6pm weekdays.