THE aftermath has been sad, disturbing and strange. The death of a child is terrible and the murder of a golden eight-year-old girl is heinous beyond imagination. So it is that Sarah Payne's short life and brutal death have seeped into what you might call the nation's soul.

Such a death, and such a crime, has moved many people in many ways, some easy to understand, others harder to comprehend. In the face of such emotion it is difficult, heretical almost, to wonder if this is the right way to react. For who can not have been shaken by what they have seen on the television, read on the papers, heard on the radio?

Sarah Payne's murder reaches inside and touches our primal fears. Stranger danger is potent because unknown menace is the stuff of nightmares and dark fairy tales. Every parent has been seized by fears of what might have happened, fears that, thank God, are mostly unfounded.

Yet while we mourn for Sarah, other questions have to be raised, and I make no claim to being the first to point this out. In an average year, 80 children will be murdered out of a population of 60 million. Of those lost children, 73 will have been murdered by their parents or close relatives, leaving seven to die at the hands of strangers.

While those seven deaths are truly terrible, so too are those of children who die within the supposedly safe embrace of home. Yet such murders do not lead to the same emotional response, perhaps because they speak of uncomfortable facts we would rather not face. Since the discovery of Sarah Payne's body, there have been two incidents where children have apparently been murdered by their father, and while these cases have received coverage, the response has been muted, a gulp of horror rather than the public sobbing.

I said earlier that some of the very public grieving over Sarah Payne was puzzling, and I have in mind the flowers, cards, teddy bears and fluffy animal toys laid on the A29 in Sussex close to where Sarah's body was found.

This Diana-style outpouring of grief can be explained by people trying to express what seems to be beyond expression, yet the flowers and the messages are strange in a way, and there is a point at which this second-hand grief, this vicarious sorrow, makes me feel uncomfortable.

This is not to doubt the heartfelt nature of what is being expressed, but it is to wonder when we crossed over from keeping our sadness closer to our hearts, crying quietly at home when a terrible event in the news upsets us, rather than taking to the streets with teddy bears and flowers.

I don't claim to know the answers to this puzzle, but I do know that I wouldn't take my own children along to such a roadside memorial. Surely it is unwise to expose children to what might be a psychologically damaging experience. Newspaper pictures showed a five-year-old girl crying by the flowers, but why would anyone submit such a young child to this memorial?

With the sorrow there is anger too. The News of the World exploited this rage to its own irresponsible ends by publishing a 'Named, Shamed' list of paedophiles (as discussed fully in this slot yesterday by Chris Titley).

And, predictable as rain, letters calling for the death penalty have started falling on the Evening Press. Heather Causnett was cheer-leader for the capital punishment lobby, with backing vocals from Lew Speight.

Mr Speight yesterday rebuked the "do-good brigade". As a card-carrying member of the liberally minded, I will just say that I still don't approve of the death penalty, as judicial murder seems to be no way for a civilised country to conduct its affairs, and - yes, the oldest doubt of all - if the State has its facts wrong, an innocent man or woman will have been executed.