IT would be easy enough for anyone who has seen the worst of human nature to give up on people altogether. This is particularly true of anyone who has seen and heard, on a daily basis, the vile, terrible things people do to each other.

I’m thinking particularly of people who have prolonged contact with the courts and by extension with criminals - police, probation officers, barristers, clerks, people in the witness service, CPS staff, prison officers, ushers, judges and, to a lesser extent, the press.

It would be easy enough in the face of man’s inhumanity to man (and worst of all to children) to give up, to hide away, to curl up in the corner of some dark and empty room with a bottle of whisky (or whatever poison you prefer) and work your way through it. Before you get the wrong idea, I haven’t turned to drink. But I understand now, which I never did before, that desire to blot memories out, to seek a sort of oblivion. Once you have glimpsed this murky world it’s hard to see people in the same way again, harder still to trust them.

So God knows what it must be like for the victims in many of these harrowing cases, those who have had to bear an unbearable burden sometimes for decades, sometimes alone.

One of the victims of Abberley Hall School paedophile Paul Stevens died in 2010 after developing an alcohol related condition in the wake of abuse. In court you come face-to-face with so many wrecked lives and damaged people and I always wonder what kind of man or woman they would have become had they not suffered so much. Our past, it seems, can rob us of both our present and our future. Perhaps. because of this. I found the words of judge Andrew Lockhart QC, the presiding judge in the Stevens trial, so powerful.

He urged the jury to trust people, not to suspect their fellow man, in effect not to give up on humanity. He told the panel men like Stevens were ‘vanishingly rare.’ Bear in mind please that this is an experienced judge who has seen more than most of the very worst of humanity, enforced the law in countless criminal cases from murders and robberies to rapes and drugs conspiracies.

If someone like judge Lockhart, having seen all that he has seen, can still see the light then it gives the rest of us far less excuse to languish in the darkness.