The murder of an angelic-looking 10-year-old – allegedly at the hands of her mother on the Gold Coast this week – is utterly impossible to fathom.

We can shed tears for Sophie Wang’s stolen future. We can wonder why and when and how this could possibly happen in a suburb built on community?

And we can hold our own children a tad tighter.

But before we know it, the countless questions demanding answers will be lost in another cruel act, perpetrated on someone, somewhere.

Just a few days before Sophie’s life was ended, a helicopter was stolen and crashed into a luxury Cairns hotel in the dead of night.

The questions demanding answers in that case remain. But we’ve already moved on.

What will be the catalyst for us to stop for more than a moment and ponder what needs to be done when the headlines deliver atrocities we’d find hard to imagine just a generation ago?

Perhaps September 11 changed all that by setting a new bar in what is seen as truly atrocious.

Now a murdered mother in a trash bin or a family of young children set alight in a deliberate homicide or other countless stories of savagery are just part of a crime menu that fills our........

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