Everyone in Britain has now heard of Damilola Taylor, a 10-year-old Nigerian boy murdered on a London estate. The glare of the media has not always illuminated the reality. An Anglican vicar who has the estate as part of his parish contributes his inside view.

On 27 November 2000 I was in my study with a group of parishioners, going through the final details of my induction service scheduled for three days later. I had just arrived as vicar of a south London parish, St George?s, on the border between Camberwell and north Peckham. At eight p.m. there was a phone call. ?I thought you ought to know?, said the voice. ?A child from your parish has been killed.?

Now, a year and a half later, you need only say his Christian name. He is not the only child to have been killed recently, either here in Camberwell and north Peckham or elsewhere. Within days of Damilola?s death, another teenager was murdered in my parish, an event that went virtually unnoticed. But alone among them Damilola has become an icon. Alone among these murdered children Damilola?s death became an event for a nation. But what kind of an event, what kind of symbol?

It was the media who made the Damilola tragedy a symbol. They began to assemble in the days after that phone call, scouring for stories of drugs, guns, gangs and squalor. The TV cameras found decay, and fed it live to their viewers. Sky News billeted themselves on the doorstep of St George?s, and switched on the spotlights. Community tensions, school exclusions, family breakdown, mistrust of the police ? all the concerns that had been around for years on the north Peckham estate were suddenly in the glare. But the media?s narrative had big holes in it.

A nearby Methodist minister gathered together journalists in St George?s to meet local priests and pastors. We tried to put Damilola into a wider context, to counter the myths that were being spun. We explained that the images of decay that were now being transmitted to the nation were in many ways misleading. The area is in the very last stages of a huge scheme of demolition and redevelopment. Blocks of lawless 1970s-80s flats, packed into warrens linked by concrete walkways, and many boarded up, await demolition. They are being replaced with well-planned terraces of houses designed to resurrect the Victorian streets eradicated by an earlier generation of town planners. There was a sense in the community that a better and more hopeful future awaited us. Then, just as the community had started to stand on its feet, Damilola?s tragedy eviscerated it.

We spoke to the journalists about the community, not for it. In the past, or in another setting, we Anglicans might confidently have claimed such a role, as spokespeople of the community. But in north Peckham, African churches mushroom overnight in halls and on shop fronts and our Anglican parish is one of many. Nor did we know of the church connections of Damilola Taylor?s family (as it happens, they have found their home in an Anglican parish further south in London, impressing us all deeply with their quiet dignity).

But we needed to find our trust in each other, and in God. The weekend after the murder, several hundred people walked in reflective silence to St Luke?s Church, pausing on the way to make a station of the Cross at the spot where Damilola died. The following week, a community meeting was called in a local sports hall. Parents spoke of the fear of bullying in and out of school. They said the violence and intimidation, the gang and knife-carrying culture of some teenagers had been ignored for too long. The police were ineffective, they complained, and the council and redevelopment board were deaf to locals? views. And schools couldn?t cope with ?problem? black teenagers. The issues were not new, and their solution no clearer now than before. But people felt there was a point now in speaking up. Maybe now they would be heard.

In our own church every parent spoke of the fears they had for their own children, and the ways they sought to protect them. Some people said they resented how the media had painted us. Who was interested in our church school with its fine ethos and excellent results? People used to think of Peckham as full of people like Del Boy, the amiable rascal from Only Fools and Horses; now it was fixed firmly in the nation?s minds as a gun-toting gangland, the South Bronx of south London. Even the new Peckham library, that shiny, phoenix-like symbol of hope, was dragged into the image: it was featured, endlessly, in the close-circuit camera pictures of Damilola skipping on his last journey towards home.

But his death brought some swift changes. Local police had become remote, locked in their patrol cars; after Damilola, they were suddenly everywhere, patrolling on foot in bright fluorescent jackets. The numbers have abated somewhat, but they continue, reassuringly, to walk the streets. I recently commented to a superintendent that his officers didn?t say ?Hello? as they passed me by on the pavement. After having been so long cocooned in their cars, some constables, he explained, need to be trained in talking informally to the public.

A year after Damilola?s death, it was significant that the civic authorities took the initiative to mark the day. A service was held in St Luke?s, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Members of the Taylor family were present for the commemoration, and later for the opening of the Damilola Taylor Community Centre, for which they were joined by the Prime Minister. ?Perhaps this will bring the matter to a close now?, said more than one person. But we knew that before that could happen, there had to be the trial.

Once the trial began, I was reminded forcibly of experiences in my last parish, where a teenager in our congregation was accused of murder. Having sat with his family throughout the weeks of that trial, I was interested to see how much better the courts have become in the last two years in dealing with young people. The courtroom is less formal; younger witnesses may give evidence screened from the court, not in the open and oppressive witness box; and proper breaks are now held at regular intervals. (I had seen, during the previous trial, how exhausted our teenager became when breaks were at the convenience of barristers alone.)

But our courts still deal with young people as if they were adults. The abstruse culture of a court is deliberately designed to intimidate, and lawyers play their games in a world which even the average adult finds hard to understand. Human rights legislation demands that the accused must understand the process; in cases involving young people in England, that is just not true. And it is not just the accused who get a raw deal. It was appalling to read, day after day, of the way ?Bromley?, the 15-year-old girl who was the prosecution?s main witness, was grilled in the witness box. Because the accused boys? lawyers did not offer a common defence, she had to be cruelly examined by each of them in turn. The most resilient adult would have been devastated by such an onslaught. An already damaged child was further abused by the legal process. Although she had plenty of sympathy on the estate, which applauded her for her feisty performance in the face of several days of hostile and sarcastic cross-examination, I do not expect to see either her or the two main defendants back in Peckham.

The pressure on the police to produce a result was intense. The whispers in the streets and shops was that ?they definitely know who did it but there?s no evidence and no one is brave enough to act as a witness?. The police organised a regular series of meetings with various community and church leaders to inform us of progress, or to explain why there had been none. Churches were given information leaflets so that clergy and others could pass information on: there is a long tradition here of keeping clear of the police. I was impressed by the sincere commitment of the senior officers to challenging the reactionary attitudes of the Metropolitan Police. Since the Stephen Lawrence murder, there really has been a determination to regain the confidence of the black community.

People have not forgotten Stephen Lawrence. A block of flats round the corner from the vicarage is named after him. We were haunted by the thought that, as in the Lawrence case, this community would not get closure. Then we got edgy: overnight the parish was plastered with graffiti threatening reprisals against anyone testifying against the gangs. Just waiting for the result made people nervous. I said in meetings that we should wait as long as possible if that meant a better chance of securing a conviction.

But there was no conviction, and now it feels as if we are unable to move on. The media coverage in the days following the trial included much prerecorded material ? notably from the BBC ? which showed the dereliction of the area as it had been months before, as if nothing was being done to improve the environment. We have also watched opinionated interviews with hitherto unknown people labelled ?community leaders?. The newspapers have each followed their own agenda with little regard for balance or subtlety.

No doubt official enquiries will try to examine what lessons can be learned. But I would rather that energy went into dealing with the root problem of disaffected teenagers in our local schools.

Talking to members of my congregation and other local folk over the past few days, I see them wanting to keep their heads down, hoping that the storm will pass over us in the end. We despair that there has been no justice for Damilola, and no closure for the Taylors. But we are also afraid of being forever fixed in the public mind as the place where Damilola was killed. For the same reason, some people are uneasy at naming the new community centre after him.

Still, good things are happening. The notoriety has sucked in funding for new projects, not all of which respond to local needs. And there are plenty of initiatives: some new, some old, some struggling. Among them is my own at the Trinity College Centre, which is frequented by young black boys who have been excluded from school. One of them said the other day he thought the world had at last begun listening. But ?Why?, he asked me, ?did a boy have to die for the problem to be noticed??

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