Kerre McIvor: Despicable act to slaughter children

The summer I sat School C, everyone was going to the Sweetwaters Festival.

Everyone but me.

Mum and Dad decided 15 was too young to head off with a group of friends for three days of music and fun without a parent around to curb our enthusiasms.

Nothing I could say, promise or threaten would sway them. Everyone went away for the weekend and I was left alone to sulk in my room for the entire long weekend.

Mum says she still feels a wee bit guilty about it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think she and Dad made the right decision.

I had spent three years in a Catholic boarding school and my experience of life was limited to the Judith Krantz books I managed to smuggle in to read after dark.

I was pretty clueless - I told a boy dancing with me at the sixth form ball that his car keys were sticking into me (he hadn't driven to the dance) and when I finally did make it to Sweetwaters as a journalist, I was offered what I thought was a stick of double mint gum and was about to pop it in my mouth when a passing policeman took it out of my hand.

I don't think so, he said, as he grabbed the rest from the man who'd offered it to me and tore it up and threw it in the bin. Apparently it was LSD.

So, yes. Had I managed to inveigle my parents into letting me head off to Sweetwaters four years earlier, I have no doubt it would have ended badly.

When my daughter was a teenager, it was a lot easier to give her the freedom she needed to grow.

I occasionally worried about parties getting out of hand (but I wasn't drinking so I was on call to pick her up, no questions asked). And I never gave a moment's thought to her safety at the concerts she went to.

I loved watching the girls getting ready. They were so young and so beautiful - pulsing with energy and excitement, luminous with the joy of being alive.

They would stride off, heads in the air, wobbling ever so slightly on high heels, confident and proud and ready for the wonderfully sublime experience that comes with a shared music experience.

I'd pick them up and they'd be exhilarated and exhausted, spent from pouring their hearts out into every song. I'd get my girl home and off would come the high heels and lacy bra and this baby woman in waiting would get into bed and fall asleep almost immediately, snuggled next to the stuffed toy she'd had since she was little.

To target children at a concert surely has to be the most despicable form of terrorism there is. To target children anywhere.

According to the Manchester bomber's sister, the man decided to target young kids at the Ariana Grande concert because children had been bombed in Syria.

Two wrongs never make a right, but the slaughter of children in a tit for tat is especially heart-rending.

A pop concert is such a soft target. We're not talking brilliant military strategy and breathtaking heroism.

It's cowardly and cruel and it only succeeds because most right-thinking people would never consider committing such an atrocity so they can't imagine anyone else would either.

I cannot even imagine the terror of the parents as they waited to hear news of their children after the bombing and I don't know how you would survive the pain of losing a child in such a brutal, senseless way.

I do know the answer is not to kill more children.

Nor is it to lock away your children to keep them out of harm's way. There is evil everywhere in the world. But there is so much more good.

Look at the response from so many decent people in the wake of the bombing.

Kindness and compassion and empathy prevailed. Not violence in the streets.

It's a parent's job to protect their children as far as they are able. But it's also their job to teach them hatred is not the answer and it will never triumph over love.

• Kerre McIvor is on NewstalkZB, Monday-Friday, noon to 4pm.