Not for a minute. But imagine, nonetheless, that your son has disappeared. Imagine his friend arrives, filled with concern and practical action. Imagine this young man searches for your son throughout the days during which your fear becomes a dread certainty. Imagine you hear him desperately leaving messages on your son's phone.

Then your son's lifeless body is found. Then you learn he died at the hands of the young friend who was so concerned, so sympathetic, so caring.

So duplicitous. So disgustingly duplicitous.

You would want that young man punished forever. Damned and downed, incarcerated and pursued for the rest of his life. How could you not? How could any individual, putting themselves in Majella Holohan's shoes, not want the convicted man seen for what she knows him to be?

How could any mother . . . experiencing what Prof Sarah Buel of the University of Texas's Domestic Violence Clinic calls the "acculturated non-empathy" of judges . . . fail to use the only instrument available to her to strike back?

Suffering that unimaginable grief, that justified outrage, any individual would say "Vengeance is mine."

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Therein lies the logical equation, going back to primeval times, for the individual.

Except that we live in times where . . . in the interests of the common good . . . we cede some of our individual rights. To law makers. To law enforcers. To the interpreters of the law. To law itself.

The victim of a crime . . . or the mother of a victim . . . gains no extra rights because of their victimhood.

Maybe they should. Those who believe they should must campaign to change the law. But, as the law stands, the victim of a crime has the same rights as the rest of the population. No more. No less.

However, in media terms, the victim can be accorded iconic status by media. It happened, in the aftermath of 9/11, to the bereaved firefighters shifting the pile of debris where the Twin Towers had fallen.

"Some had lost family when the Trade Center fell, and nearly all had lost friends, " wrote William Langewiesche, who studied the workers at Ground Zero. "Their bereavement was real. Still, for nearly two months they had let their collective emotions run unchecked, and they had been indulged and encouraged in this by society at large . . . the presumption being something like, 'It helps to cry.'

"The effect had turned out to be quite the opposite: rather than serving a cathartic purpose, the emotionalism seemed to have heightened the firemen's sense of righteousness and loss."

That heightened sense of outrage led to disgraceful exhibitions of partisanship when remains of bodies identified as police officers, as opposed to firefighters, were found.

It led to scuffles, enmities and indiscipline. The reality was that publicly accredited victimhood actually damaged the victims.

The same was also true of other victims.

"The firemen's widows were victims of victimisation itself, " Langewiesche wrote. "In their agony and myopia they were starting to blunder around; moreover, they clearly did not represent the thousands of others who had lost family on September 11 and were coming to terms with the events more stoically."

Again, the inescapable truth was that accredited victimhood ultimately damaged the victims.

The most damaging form of victimhood is permanent, definitive and paradoxically rewarding. That's the kind of victimhood which defines the individual as valuable only because of what a crime or a tragic circumstance has done to them, rewarding all public actions and communications about that crime or circumstance.

One famous rape case resulted in more than a decade of destructive coverage of the victim. Coverage sought by the victim. Coverage which fuelled the victim's potentially lethal eating disorder. Coverage which died away when the victim achieved a normal weight.

Media never sets out, with malign forethought, to deal with victims in a way which rewards their failure to recover, heal or forgive. It's just that victims who suffer overtly and articulately are simply more interesting to media than victims who seek to understand, forgive and achieve silent serenity.

That can . . . in rare situations . . . give the victim the power to subvert the decisions of a court. Under our legal system, the victim cannot decide the punishment meted out to the convict. That's the law. The law says, "This person goes to prison.

They serve their time. When their time is served, they become a free citizen again and are permitted to reconstruct their life within this country."

Majella Holohan's statement objecting to Justice Carney's speech missed this point.

"I do not believe it is appropriate to censor victims, " she wrote, "as to what they can say so that it can be palatable for the judge or the offender." She's absolutely right. It would never be appropriate to censor victims for that purpose.

Neither, however, is it appropriate to empower a victim to deliver a life sentence, when the courts have not delivered such a sentence. By telling the public shockingly memorable details of what was found on her son's clothing, Majella Holohan recharacterised her son's killer.

"By the time I got to my chambers, " Justice Carney has said, "the word 'semen' was already on the airwaves and the accused was being branded as a paedophile killer, which he was not."

By so characterising him in the minds of the public (including the prison public), Holohan passed a life sentence.

Putting yourself in her shoes, you would do the same. As the victim, of course you would.

Except that being the individual victim would not give you that right.

A civilized society allows the law to take its course. It empowers judges and juries to make decisions a grievously wounded individual victim would not make. In the interests of the common good.

And, ultimately, in the interests of the victim. Because the assumed entitlement to vengeance is false, damaging and diminishing to everybody.

Including the victim.