It is not possible to hurry the imagining. A tiny baby gushed blood - haemorrhaged, in the words of the verdict of the Coroner's Court jury - from multiple stab wounds. She presumably wailed as she was gouged again and again, and then, I suppose, her cries became more feeble and the life that had taken nine months to grow in the child Cynthia's womb was extinguished in - what? Would it even have taken nine minutes?

Before the dead piece of flesh was thrown wherever it was thrown.

Details distract from this central picture. What dream of glamour was in Cynthia's mother's head when she named her daughter Cynthia?

And was Cynthia herself still bleeding when the baby was bleeding to death? And what happened about her milk? And who cleaned up the blood? And how much noise did the whole grotesque event make?

Move away from the specific scene in Dalkey, 34 years ago. Then and now, there are many other such child-killings. They are horribly expressive of the perpetrator's own state. When an infant is killed with madly disproportionate violence - when a show is made of the killing - what is being expressed but rage and self-hatred and hatred of children and glee in destruction and contempt for personality and a savage, willed derangement from even the basic animal instinct of protectiveness towards small beings? And are these not exactly the same characteristics of sex abuse? They're the logical outcome of what was being done, for example, to the child Cynthia.

Until quite recent times in Ireland, the words weren't used - incest, paedophile, sex abuser. Now they're so familiar that they trip off the tongue without the imagination being engaged. But the reality of raping a child and sodomising a child and inducing or terrifying children into providing sexual excitement is a thing on a spectrum with death. It is about flesh.

It hurts. It is often accompanied by blood and screams and mucus and sperm and saliva and half-suffocation, and it is always accompanied by lies and furtiveness and by the desire of the perpetrator to corrupt innocence - a purely human source of sexual gratification. Animals are not capable of such hatred and contempt for each other.

The corruption implicit in denying the spirit is contagious. In the incest case in Kilkenny (which was reported on in 1993) the men the criminal father drank with, to whom he boasted of what he did to his daughter in front of his wife, used to ring up the home and make dirty suggestions to the wife. I bet some of those men were perfectly nice men in other ways. But then, a not just nice but good man said to me, around the time of the Kilkenny case: "There was none of this, you know, until you women got going." What he insultingly meant was that feminism had more or less invented child sexual abuse so as to be unkind to men.

"There was none of that when I was growing up, " he said. There was loads of it going on when he was growing up. That baby of an 11year-old girl - to take just one episode from the tip of the iceberg - was stabbed to death 20 years earlier.

Women may not have the same capacity to do physical harm as men. They don't actually get children pregnant, for one thing.

But some women would hold the child down.

There's no gender difference when it comes to the capacity for evil. Nevertheless, a particular resistance to imagining - the desire to deny shameful things that undermine the authority some men believe they are entitled to - is amazingly strong and influential.

There has not been a case of the sexual abuse of children in this country, even when it amounted to torture, where it cannot be shown that neighbours, friends and other family members managed to turn away and deny. Even after court cases, even after admissions of guilt, they manage to go on denying.

That's why Michael McDowell's appointment of a barrister to "review the file" on the slaughter of Cynthia Owen's baby is in some ways an irrelevance. Of course society has appointed, as protection from evil, 'the authorities'. Since that is the case, of course 'the authorities' must be held to account when there's a question about how well they protected. Left undisciplined by the standards of their professions, 'the authorities' would, like us, decline into treating the complaints of the poor and the different and people they think are trash and what they decide are hysterical women with something between carelessness and contempt.

As for when an authority himself is an abuser - well then, we and the children are in awful trouble.

But we can't shove the protection of children off onto authority. Somebody always knows what's going on. Somebody hears.

Somebody sees. It is a mystery to me how an 11-year-old girl could have a full pregnancy in the city of Dublin in modern times and it not be noticed. That's why we need to allow into our imaginations the real horror of this and similar cases - we need to be outraged into watchfulness and made unafraid to intervene. We have no protection against each other except each other.