This week we have been given a glimpse of a world beyond our knowing: a world of sustained and devious cruelty to a tiny child. The extremity of these episodes rocks the easy comfort we take in believing that ours is a relatively safe and harmonious society. This is happening in homes of our own cities, not a stone’s throw from shops we share, the buses and trains we all use. How can depravity have reached such depths; how can our civic community not have noticed and acted in time?

Only the imagination at the further extent of its power can give us any inkling of what Baby P went through, or how his mother and her two men could be instrumental in such torture. It is as though a great curtain has been lifted on our lives and beyond is this seething mass of misery. Dickens could do it: David Lynch in his abhorrent film Blue Velvet could do it. Read or watch either and the hair begins to prickle on the neck, and saliva to swim in the mouth. Will we be made sick at what we are thinking?

But these are items on the daily news agenda. They come between financial crises and Obamamania. They are packaged and given voice-overs in the deliberate professional ways of broadcasters. No one lurches crazily in front of the camera crying out with outrage: “Do you hear what is going on? This is your city, your country?” We can expect our concerns to crop up in Thought for the Day; on Sunday gentle vicars will speak in sorrowful tones of terrible deeds. Where lies the failure?

Rational examination of the facts has gone into overdrive. The details unravel in a mist of confusion: overloaded casework, not enough social workers, innumerable visits, goodwill abused, millions of police hours wasted. These are coolly analytical reasons explaining why events were not detected and forestalled. But these tragedies are in the realm of unreason: mothers have behaved against all the instinct and tenderness of mothers. Parents have abandoned their children or never known how a true parent behaves. How have they come to be like that? What monster of neglect has distorted them? How has a culture of depravity taken such hold that others – accomplices, liars – have joined in?

I don’t believe it is explained by poverty, if by that we mean solely the absence of money. Plenty of good happy families live on pitiably little and still create warm and loving homes. If we look at relative incomes for an explanation we will not hear the true cry. It is a poverty of feeling that is to blame. People are growing up without knowing love, emotionally crippled themselves and hardened to the care of others. Such people are pitiable: they are the wretched of the Earth. Who is to reach out to them?

Where are the churches, the charities? Where is our own charity? It is there in places. I have seen carloads of people travel to London from suburban churches bringing food for the homeless; Camila Batmanghelidjh’s charity Kids Company does wonders for desperate children. These are glimpses of inspiration. But this week’s revelation from enclaves of misery in our midst cast a long shadow. Their poverty is our own.

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