They listen to adult stories – I just hope it doesn’t rob them of a playful aspect of childhood, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
, a podcast by the Australian journalist Hedley Thomas that has, to date, been downloaded more than 60m times. It is as brilliant and addictive as any TV show, with a list of witnesses – many of whom were never contacted by the police – so willing to share their memories of Lynette’s husband’s wrongdoing that it can make it hard to believe what you’re hearing.
This was a cheerful conversation, as these conversations tend to be. To my children, “1982” is as mythical a place as medieval times and their main takeaway from the story had, seemingly, nothing to do with police failures, or violence against women, or the world being a frightening place, but rather how mad things were in the olden days. I redacted the domestic violence stuff, and the fact that the 16-year-old was still at school when she started seeing Chris Dawson, who was her teacher.
Kids, of course, are interested in cruelty; they experience it the minute they set foot in a classroom. They have a keener, more ferociously patrolled sense of fairness than we do. They’re also capable of moral seriousness that is often missing from modern children’s books.
Still, an anxiety remains that I am bypassing some playful aspect of childhood in which podcasts about men murdering their wives don’t intrude. Chernobyl and the Titanic are one thing, but we’ve done so many plane crashes, plus the Bermuda Triangle, plus when-rollercoasters-go-wrong that I half expect to have ruined air travel and theme parks for them.
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