In mourning for innocence, not for Damilola

He has become known simply as Dami to millions of people who never met him and would be hard pushed to locate Nigeria, the country where he was born, on a map. His death in south London has been endlessly discussed and dissected, creating all kinds of narratives: the tragic family who arrived in Britain to better themselves, the studious lad whose face did not fit on a rough council estate, the African boy who fell victim to West Indian racism. People who have never been to Peckham talk knowledgeably about sink estates and conflicts between ethnic minorities, seemingly unaware that their speculation reveals more about themselves than the crime.

He has become known simply as Dami to millions of people who never met him and would be hard pushed to locate Nigeria, the country where he was born, on a map. His death in south London has been endlessly discussed and dissected, creating all kinds of narratives: the tragic family who arrived in Britain to better themselves, the studious lad whose face did not fit on a rough council estate, the African boy who fell victim to West Indian racism. People who have never been to Peckham talk knowledgeably about sink estates and conflicts between ethnic minorities, seemingly unaware that their speculation reveals more about themselves than the crime.

For this is one of those murders, like those of James Bulger and Sarah Payne, that carries an extra weight of meaning. Unlike, say, the killing of a young woman on her way home from a nightclub, the murders of children are automatically assumed to expose something about the culture we live in, even if we cannot agree on the precise nature of the message. In the Bulger case, it was about the breakdown of the family, a horrible reflection of a society that no longer knows where its children are or what they are doing, and has every reason to be afraid of them. Alternatively, it was about perpetrators who were themselves victims, too young to understand the consequences of their actions. Or it was about the influence of video nasties, dragged into the case on the slenderest of excuses by the trial judge.

The significance of the Payne case was, at first glance, straightforward: our children are at risk from roving paedophiles, set loose by an ineffectual criminal justice system. For weeks in the summer, Sarah's guileless face was everywhere, as Damilola Taylor's has been since the end of last month. In both cases, though, the conclusions drawn from the killings go well beyond the known facts. It is likely that Sarah Payne was murdered by a paedophile, but we have no idea whether he fits the hysterical tabloid scenario of a man with a string of convictions who has been released to offend again. The case of Damilola Taylor is more complex; the intense media attention is almost certainly a response, conscious or otherwise, to previous failures to take crimes against black people seriously.

In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for newspapers which in the past have shamelessly characterised black people as perpetrators of crime rather than ordinary citizens and sometimes victims themselves. Yet the shallowness of this Pauline conversion was demonstrated by Friday's Sun: the paper sent a reporter to record her impressions of the arrests of 11 boys in connection with the Taylor inquiry - eight black, two of "Mediterranean" appearance - and then complained in a leader that the police are afraid to arrest black people. It may be that this accusation, which reflects the paper's long-standing hostility to the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, was a factor when the police decided to allow the media to watch as 200 officers converged on the North Peckham estate at dawn on Thursday. The melodramatic exercise, which resulted in the widespread use of a photograph of a hooded black youth being led away, looked more like an exercise in manipulation - on both sides - than an absolutely necessary step in the investigation.

What seems to be happening in these cases is a process in which the proper goal of the inquiry quickly gets sidelined. The police, inundated with demands from the media for developments, go in for stunts of various kinds, from dawn swoops to maudlin press conferences involving grieving members of the family or embarrassed celebrities. At the same time, in a culture that is increasingly scared of children, the victims become the focus for ideas about childhood innocence and perfection, a yearning encapsulated by the pastor who described Damilola Taylor as a star.

The impulse of parents and grandparents to idealise the boy or girl they have lost is natural. But in a culture where racist impulses regularly reveal themselves in ugly tirades against asylum-seekers, its replication elsewhere is less benign. In effect, Damilola Taylor and his family are "acceptable" immigrants, black people whose aspirations everyone can admire while secretly congratulating themselves on their liberal attitudes. In that sense, the obsession with this poor dead child is as unhealthy, in its own way, as the indifference encountered for so many years by the parents of that other murdered black boy, Stephen Lawrence.