Sometimes I wonder what kind of world we are becoming. I find myself asking this question whenever I read some of the stories that appear on the internet—stories so horrifying that, for a moment, you want to believe they cannot possibly be true. Then you read the details, and you realize they are. A husband and wife murdered in their own home. An elderly person attacked by the very person employed to care for them. A child harmed by someone the family trusted. A business owner betrayed by an employee. A friend turning against a friend.
What troubles me most is that, in many of these stories, the person responsible is not a complete stranger. It is someone who had been allowed into the home, someone who knew the family's routines and vulnerabilities, someone who had been trusted. Recently, I came across a story about a man and his wife who were allegedly murdered by their houseboy. I read it once, then found myself going back to it. The details stayed with me long after I had stopped reading. It was not only the horror of two people losing their lives; it was the thought of what it means when the person accused of taking those lives was someone who had been welcomed into their home.
A home is supposed to be the place where we feel safest. It is where we close the gates, lock the doors and allow ourselves to relax. We sleep there believing that the people and things within those walls are familiar and secure. Yet sometimes, the danger we spend so much time looking for outside may already be inside. That thought is frightening, but it also raises another question: how are we supposed to live if we become afraid of everyone we allow into our lives?
We cannot regard every house help as a potential murderer, every employee as a potential thief, every neighbour as a possible threat or every stranger as an enemy. Trust is woven into almost every part of human life. A mother must trust someone to care for her child while she works; families depend on people to help run their homes; employers entrust their businesses to employees; neighbours depend on one another; friends share things they would never tell strangers; and husbands and wives build their lives around the belief that they can rely on each other. Without trust, relationships become impossible. But perhaps these disturbing stories remind us that trust should never mean blindness. We can trust people while maintaining sensible boundaries, give opportunities without surrendering our judgment, and remain compassionate without becoming careless. We can believe in the goodness of people while accepting that we will never know everything about another human being.
Human beings are complicated. We often see only the part of someone they choose to show us. We may know how a person behaves at work, how they speak to us in the morning or how respectfully they treat our family, but we may know very little about what they are carrying inside. Someone may be struggling with anger, disappointment, resentment, financial pressure or personal pain that we know nothing about. None of these things makes a person dangerous, and it would be wrong to assume that they do. They simply remind us that the person we think we know may have a private world we cannot fully see.
That is why the aftermath of tragedy can be so painful. People often say, “I never thought he could do that,” or “She was such a nice person,” or “There was nothing to suggest this would happen.” Sometimes, that is undoubtedly true. People can commit terrible acts without giving those around them any obvious warning. But sometimes, when the shock begins to settle, people remember things they had previously dismissed—a strange comment, an unusual change in behaviour, growing resentment or an incident that seemed too insignificant to matter. Then comes the question that can haunt people for years: Why didn't we see it?
Perhaps because we do not expect darkness from people we have welcomed into the light. Familiarity makes us comfortable. We see someone every day, watch them perform their duties, exchange greetings with them and gradually stop thinking of them as someone we need to know more about. They become part of the background of our lives, and in that familiarity we may forget that every person has a private world we cannot fully see.
The horrifying stories we encounter online therefore deserve more than a moment of shock before we scroll to the next story. They should make us think about the fragile arrangements on which much of our everyday lives depend. They remind us that life can change unexpectedly, that people can surprise us, and that the people around us may have stories we know nothing about.
I do not ask these questions because I want us to become suspicious of one another. I ask them because perhaps we have sometimes confused familiarity with knowledge, kindness with safety and trust with certainty. There must be a way to remain compassionate without becoming careless and trusting without becoming blind.
Maybe that is where this journey begins.
Because sometimes the stranger we fear is not standing outside the gate.
Sometimes, the stranger was never outside.
Sometimes, we invited them in.