The most touching detail of those horrible events in Austria has been the pictures of childish decorations in the cellar bathroom. Those homely touches are signs of hope, a reminder that human beings are capable of great love as well as of great evil. For Elisabeth to try to improve the environment for her children, to show them that there are good things in the world as well as bad, to tell a little boy who has never seen them, about the Sun and stars and flowers, a snail, an elephant, an octopus - that is love. And it is hope: she must have believed that one day her children would see those things, that they wouldn't spend their entire lives in that miserable cellar, witnessing their mother's torture. It is a triumph of the human spirit. Elisabeth Fritzl is a remarkable woman.

The appalling tale of her life is a jolt to the system, a sickening reminder that humans are capable of wickedness. In the absence of anything constructive to say about the horror, it is too easy to take refuge in cliché and banality - Thought for the Day musing yesterday, for instance, on Josef Fritzl's failings in paternal responsibility. You could argue that, yes. Well done for spotting it as an issue.

Then there are the attempts to pinpoint this as a peculiarly Austrian problem. There are suggestions that Austria's character has been uniquely crafted, perhaps warped, by its Nazi past, when neighbour was encouraged to spy on neighbour, so that elderly Austrians are insular and wary of familiarity. This may be true - I was struck by one neighbour of the Fritzl family who described herself as a close friend but then admitted that she didn't know their first names. But it's also a dangerous temptation; we all would like to be reassured, wouldn't we, that this could never happen here?

Confronted with evil, it is natural to want it explained so that we can rationalise away the chances of it ever happening to us. The case of Madeleine McCann became, and has remained, a national obsession because we got no answer to that. Every parent wants to know what happened to Madeleine, so that he or she can make sure it never happens to their child: was it planned, was it just chance? Could they, could we have prevented it?

The truth is, even if the McCanns had never left their kids alone that night, another child, somewhere, playing in a garden or wandering down to an ice-cream van, will always be vulnerable. You cannot protect them completely without ruining them in other ways.

Harold Shipman? We console ourselves with new rules allowing people to ask for second opinions on death certificates. Victoria Climbié? A registration system for private foster carers, a whole new national children's register. Fred West? Rose? I imagine there was some “crackdown” on something or other after that horror.

And none of it can give us the total assurance some seek. Youth workers in Austria were in contact with the Fritzl family, remember, just as they were with Victoria Climbié's family in Britain. The visible Fritzl children seemed healthy and well-looked-after.

There always will be bad people. There always will be perpetrators whose crimes will be unpredictable, because they are rightly beyond our comprehension. As the Austrian authorities pleaded yesterday, they couldn't have foreseen what has happened to the Fritzl family because such a crime would have been thought impossible until a few days ago.

Forecast and prevent one crime and another will happen. Record doubts about Ian Huntley in one part of the country and he will move elsewhere. Evil people will always be able to think of things that you and I couldn't have conceived of. We cannot predict what they might do.

There are plenty of communities in Britain, and plenty of houses, where neighbours do not know what goes on next door, where wives never enter the cellar, where husbands are abusive behind respectable front doors. “One is used to things happening in the big city, but this is down the road,” said a woman in Amstetten yesterday. Which is what the people of Soham thought, or Gloucester, or indeed Praia da Luz. I'm sure they thought it in Kingston Gorse, too, when Sarah Payne went missing.

If we cannot and should not worry about the completely off-the-scale, unpredictable, there are plenty of things we can and should worry about, scandals we already know about, abuses we can affect. What worries me about the outpouring of horror in a case like that of Elisabeth Fritzl or the McCanns is that it can cloak our failure to be horrified by so many things that we ought to be concerned about here, and now, every day.

I am as guilty as the next reader. How much do we agitate over the treatment of the elderly, for instance, which is without question a national scandal? Or the institutional child abuse that is the care system? Or conditions for asylum-seekers, and the locking up of children in detention centres? These things are not fashionable, they may not make for jaw-dropping dinner party conversations, but they are abuses and scandals nonetheless.

And their very familiarity can turn them acceptable, when they shouldn't be. They are in their way so many smaller evils, one after another after another. So many cruelties, often inflicted by the state, with our collusion because we choose to look the other way. And then gorge ourselves on the uniquely incomprehensible wickedness of a Rose West or a Josef Fritzl.

It is prurient intrusion really, our obsession with Elisabeth. None of us has anything useful to add, there is nothing we can do to help, except to leave the family in peace. And maybe then try to affect the lives, especially of vulnerable children, that we have got it in our power to change. Surely that would be a more fitting tribute to the terrified mother who taught her imprisoned children to dream of stars, than any more gawping at their unique misery.

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