The sound of shrieking in those videos from the attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester was heartbreaking. Girls are supposed to scream at concerts. They are often mocked for it, but who cares? They are giddy and joyful, listening to their favourite pop stars with their moms or their friends by their side. It is a moment of liberation, a rite of passage.
The shrieks are not supposed to result from terror. The videos from Manchester show an obscene upending of that happiness: Girls who should be walking home still singing Dangerous Woman are instead covered in blood, crying. Mothers have their arms around their children, sagging with relief that they still have children to hug.
At this point, 22 people are dead, including an eight-year-old, and more than 50 are wounded. We know there will be more children among them. Children who got Ariana Grande tickets as Christmas presents or saved their pocket money to buy T-shirts, who posted their concert outfits on Instagram, lit with exclamation marks and emojis.
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The insidious thing about terror attacks on children is that they really are irrationally terrifying. You can't reason your way out of them. As an adult, I can tell myself that I am more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine than a suicide bomber. It's much harder to apply the same logic to threats directed at children. I've tried. I'm sure I'm not the only parent who sits on an airplane beside their kids and obsessively counts the rows to the emergency exits while mentally citing the excellent safety record of air flight.
Terror attacks on children and young people are a perversion, a way to attract even more attention in a numbed landscape, which must be the reason they are deployed so often around the world. Not only in concert halls in Manchester and Paris, but in schools and fairgrounds in Pakistan and in marketplaces in Nigeria, where Boko Haram turns children into suicide bombers.
To strike at Ariana Grande's young fans is particularly gruesome. As a collective, they're called Arianators. They are ferociously devoted to her. They are equally devoted to swiping at critics who sneer at the singer and, by extension, her fans for being – I'm not sure what. Too silly? Too girly? Too pop? It's a song as old as time. One of the young women killed in the explosion, 18-year-old Georgina Callander, was an Ariana superfan and had posted a picture she had taken with the singer, their heads close together. Georgina is beaming – you can see her braces.
Will parents see those pictures and think twice about buying concert tickets for Christmas? Will they think the risk is so tiny, but it's still not worth it? That would be understandable, but awful – to deprive these girls (and boys) of a chance to experience the sublime happiness of a moment when the lights go down and the singer comes on stage and they realize what music can do when it's shivering through their bones.
These days, we take our kids to concerts, which our parents never did. When I managed to score tickets to see the Clash when I was 15, it did not occur to me to invite my mother. There were all kinds of dangers then, but different: bad drugs and too much booze and sexual predators in the crowd. The dangers are different now, and smaller, but also louder because they're on every screen. So we accompany our kids, partly out of fear of what might happen to them in a dark concert hall, and partly because we expect to share all our kids' experiences. Are tragedies like Manchester going to make the helicopters hover even closer?
I took my 11-year-old daughter to her first concert last year, to see Adele perform in Toronto. It was a combination Christmas-and-birthday present, and it was worth every penny: Adele rocked, as we knew she would. But I had scoped the exits before we sat down and kept one eye on them the whole time.
I hesitated to mention the Ariana Grande incident to my daughter, but she'd already heard about it. Then I hesitated to ask her the question that was bothering me, but I did anyway: "Would it worry you to go to another concert?" She gave me one of her world-weary looks. "No, Mom," she said. "It's a one-in-a-million thing."
Of course she's right. You have to weigh every decision – benefit against cost: The communion of music versus a tiny but potentially life-changing risk. To my mind, there's not much of a dilemma. Music it is.