It seems a pity that you have to die to get attention, but it does sometimes feel as if only coroners ask the right questions. We had it in Oxfordshire over avoidable military deaths; now we have the forthright remarks of the Loughbourough coroner Olivia Davison. She presides at the inquest into the death of Fiona Pilkington, apparently driven to suicide by fire with her disabled daughter and pet rabbit alongside her. We are forced to contemplate the stark possibility that Britain is no longer competent to defend the weak from persecution. Even by children.

Mrs Pilkington, a shy woman coping with a severely handicapped child and a teenage son with a history of being violently bullied, nerved herself to report her tormentors to the police 33 times. In her last ten months, police logs show, she appealed 13 times.

The arrogant brats who broke her windows, mocked her daughter, beat up her son, screamed abuse and invaded her garden, told her that they could do what they wanted and “there was nothing she could do about it”.

Which apparently, in Leicestershire, is true. With steely insistence, the coroner repeatedly asked the police why they did not invoke the eight relevant criminal Acts, why they never linked the complaints and saw this as serious persecution, and why several times they sent no officer round (on one occasion leaving four days to respond to reports from a neighbour of a “siege”). She also asked why they downgraded the attacks to “antisocial behaviour”, not crime.

The usual answers come — things have improved since 2007, training is better, tum ti tum. Most enragingly, the acting chief constable explained that today, given the girl’s disability, such a persecution would be classified as “hate crime” and treated seriously. How dare he hide behind this political novelty? You shouldn’t have to be black, Muslim, gay or disabled to expect protection from vandalism, threat and mockery. You shouldn’t need to be a “minority” to get a response from the police. No citizen of a heavily taxed and regulated country should meet shrugs and accusations of “over-reacting” when they daren’t step out of their front door.

Yet they do. There are bad streets and estates all over Britain. There are places where old people won’t go out, and where anyone labelled as a “weirdo” suffers miserably. Children in packs can be cruel: we don’t need the new biography of William Golding to tell us that. We might, however, glance nostalgically at the closing page of his Lord of the Flies, where the crisp naval officer lands in his white-topped cap and says to the murderous, filthy lads: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys — you’re all British, aren’t you? — would have been able to put up a better show than that . . .”

Well, the Leicestershire tormentors were British, and nobody, including the police, seems to have expected anything of them but savagery. Any kid who ever barracked the Pilkingtons, down to the youngest sneering ten-year-old, should be forced to stand an hour in silence (as should their parents) beside the burnt-out car, to see and smell what happened to their victim. They didn’t mean to be angels of death but they played their part. Let them share the nightmare now.

The police, of course, get close to nightmare every day, and nobody is saying that their job is easy. However, we know from a hundred awful stories that ASBOs are mocked, cruel children know their rights all too well, and police can’t cope. (Indeed, so accustomed are we to well documented tales of dangerous children that my husband saw a headline “Axe child benefits” and momentarily wondered who the axe child was, and what he had managed to benefit from.) So what’s to be done? Pushing children through the legal system and into prisons, which make them worse, is no answer. Besides, in a fearful, feuding community it can be impossible to disentangle evidence solid enough for a criminal court. The long-term solutions include parenting orders and training, not to mention a more robust and humane care system to dismantle truly hopeless families. But when the stones hit your windows you want a quicker solution. You want police. You yearn to live, however briefly, in a virtual Singapore where even dropping a crisp packet lands one in a fluorescent “shame tabard”, cleaning the streets.

If we want short-term alleviation, I suppose there are two routes. The first is to treble street policing and throw resources around until any incident, anywhere, gets promptly answered (and not by a community support officer coming to “chat” to the persecutors, as per Leicestershire). That is the expensive answer, but Britain is broke. A cheaper answer is to remove, at risk of mild illiberalism, a great many of the safeguards, rights and procedures now covering under-18s. It is to abolish a swath of the paperwork it takes for an officer to accost, arrest and generally frighten the bejasus out of youths. Never mind whether they are Bog Street Boys or sub-Bullingdon toffs: take away their mobiles and iPods to sell for charity, dress them in orange jumpsuits, set them to work scrubbing the pavements. Deter. Make gang fun a lot less fun. And yes, then you can bring on the therapy, the understanding, the community rebuilding, the deep Kids-Company solution to their demons. But first of all, stop them storing up misery for others and lifelong shame for themselves.

It is not often that I feel like rowing back on our well-meant liberalism. History suggests that draconian rules tend to put the poor too much at the mercy of the police. But given that so many of them are already at the mercy of their neighbours’ children, that might be a necessary risk. At least the police have rules of conduct. And thinking the unthinkable becomes easier when I contemplate that shy, worried woman and her daughter, mental age four years (old enough for fear); when I think of her orphaned son and even the poor damn rabbit, and then remember the scores of others who this very day will suffer similar misery. Though not, pray God, a similar end.

Maybe ultra-cautious policing and a culture of rights before duties are luxuries we can’t afford. Shall it be far more police, or far less tolerance? At the moment we have a stretched force hampered by bureaucracy, political correctness, stupid government targets and back-covering. It doesn’t work. Not for the weak, the frightened, the timid.

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