This has been a week dominated by murder and children. It began with a furore and fury over the future of Learco Chindamo, who as a 15-year-old gang member stabbed Philip Lawrence to death outside his school in 1995, and it ends with the immense collective grief felt for the parents of Rhys Jones, an 11-year-old boy shot dead while playing football. He was almost certainly killed by a child of a similar age to Chindamo when he committed his crime. Children killing adults is an appalling enough event. Children killing children in this callous fashion is yet more numbing still.

Politicians should be at the forefront of the national conversation that follows such atrocities and not embarrassed on the sidelines. The moment that the death of a child in circumstances such as these is deemed so commonplace that it is not the catalyst for comment is the occasion when a country has lost the struggle against its demons. In a speech yesterday David Cameron sought to place the tragedy of the Jones family in a broader context, that of his claim that Britain has a “broken society” in the same way that 30 years ago it had a broken economy. The comparison is superficially attractive. Yet it is too sweeping, encompassing more of the community than the facts on the ground suggests is valid. Stagflation in the 1970s and youth culture today are different in character. The questions that now have to be addressed are even more complicated.

On one aspect, at least, Mr Cameron and his partisan opponents are in complete agreement. The Conservative leader referred to “fathers who run away from their responsibilities, who don’t stick around to give their sons the discipline they need”. Earlier this week Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, referred similarly to a crisis of fatherlessness in certain places, depriving the sons left behind not simply of figures of authority but also of adult male role models of any form to emulate.

Whether it be council estates at home or failed states abroad, societies dominated by teenaged boys, unrestrained by fathers, are invariably dangerous locations. Gangs rapidly take the place of the orthodox family unit. Loyalties to these institutions undermine traditional respect and values. The ability to generate fear in others becomes a prized social asset. Not only do other young men want to avoid young men but so also do adults of all ages and those bodies, such as the police, that are meant to be a community’s armour. Society loses its self-confidence and with that the ties which bind it together. There are manifestly enclaves in Britain where this has happened.

To concede this is not, though, to admit that society as a whole is “broken”. Not all poor estates have been so afflicted, nor is the damage associated with fatherlessness limited to black rather than white families, or exclusively to working-class ones. It would be more accurate to refer to fractured societies, not a broken society. The dilemma, nonetheless, is that no one has a specific policy solution for compelling or inspiring fathers either to remain with, or exercise a positive influence over, their sons. In truth, there is probably no system of either tax inducements or financial sanctions that can make fathers who have abandoned interest in sons behave in the manner that others would want them to do.

This is not a fatalistic assessment. Attitudes to fatherhood did not change for the worse because of past political activities and they are capable of changing for the better for reasons other than a programme constructed in Whitehall. To an extent, fractures will heal naturally if allowed the opportunity. Mr Cameron and Mr Straw might both have been vague but by speaking out they encourage others to talk about these issues.

But the most effective encouragement for this has to come through schools and not the House of Commons. It requires a remorseless concentration on those in the bottom tenth in the GCSE results in recent years — individuals who are often paying an academic as well as a social price for the absence of their fathers. Children cannot and certainly should never be “nationalised” but the gang and its mentality cannot be the only alternative to the family. Society has not disappeared in the most deprived areas of Britain. Yet it is for its members to choose to reactivate themselves.