«Es fácil matar niños»

«Es fácil matar niños» is the stark proposition at the center of the narrator’s address to the jury: children are unusually vulnerable because they are small, weak, and unable to defend or claim rights for themselves. The phrase turns that physical vulnerability into a wider historical and social argument, while its repetition gives the address the force of an accusation rather than a detached legal explanation. Yet the book also places this certainty beside the limits of what can be known about Alice’s case.

The phrase in the courtroom

The expression appears in a chapter headed “Matar niños,” after an epigraph attributed to Lilian Gish in The Night of the Hunter. Addressing the jurors, the narrator urges them to set aside their immediate scandal and take a historical perspective. The claim that killing children is easy is repeated and sharpened: children cannot organize, assert their rights, rebel, or strike back against the powerful. The wording is intentionally severe, forcing the jury to confront vulnerability as a condition that makes violence possible.

The narrator develops the claim through a contrast between abortion and infanticide. In the address, abortion requires an act, while infanticide can occur through omission: withholding warmth, food, or care, abandoning a child, or leaving one confined and forgotten. The list makes the argument concrete and unsettling. It also shifts attention from a single dramatic act to the less visible violence of neglect and abandonment.

A historical and social argument

The address argues that killing one’s own children was not always treated as a crime because children, like women and enslaved people, were historically regarded as the property of others—in this case, their parents. It presents infanticide as a longstanding means of controlling births, when reliable contraception was recent and abortion was dangerous for mothers well into the twentieth century, and remains so in much of the world. As an example, it points to ancient Rome, where families seeking to adopt a baby could go to a refuse dump, where newborns were left and some might still be alive.

The narrator then widens the frame beyond private households. The address cites the killing of four hundred children in Gaza during the summer of 2014, the claim that a child under five is murdered every other day in Mexico City, and estimates that children make up twenty-seven percent of deaths in each attack in Syria. Images of children killed in war can make violence visible, the narrator argues, without stopping either the killing or the war. The example of a three-year-old drowned child whose image brought the refugee crisis to newspaper front pages likewise leads to a contrast: the attention did not open Europe’s borders, apart perhaps from a brief breach that was quickly sealed.

Turning from war to what the address calls the supposedly peaceful West, the narrator locates danger inside the home and cites domestic violence as killing 3,500 children a year in Europe. The passage invokes Medea, the mother who kills her children to wound the man who has abandoned her, but argues that in contemporary Spain the corresponding violence is more often committed by men. It refers to more than fifty men going through divorce who killed their children in Spain during the preceding decade, hoping to devastate the mother. The contrast unsettles the familiar image of Medea: the address describes modern interpretations as dividing the figure into masculine and feminine aspects, with the masculine associated with violent action and sacrifice of the children for a supposedly greater cause.

Certainty and the case’s silences

The expression’s force belongs to a courtroom address, but the book’s investigative narrative also tests what confident explanations can achieve. The narrator says the first days of the case are clearly documented, as a properly conducted judicial process requires, and wonders whether the abundance of detail helps or hinders the search for a complete account. After reviewing newspaper archives, lawyers’ social media, successive criminal codes, legal forums, forensic procedures, and the investigating judge’s steps, the narrator finds the immediate aftermath and standard police conduct legible. Ritxi’s initial withdrawal and shock also seem comprehensible through accounts of grief.

That documentary clarity does not extend indefinitely. At a certain point, the narrator says, manuals and official records no longer provide a way forward. Ritxi’s decision to do everything possible to keep Alice out of prison, rather than seek the harshest sentence, resists an easy explanation. The narrator raises possible interpretations—including love, compassion, denial, or even moral complicity—without settling on one. The blunt assertion that killing children is easy therefore does not make the particular case simple: the act may be starkly described, while the surviving evidence leaves human motives unresolved.

The same limit appears in Alice’s biography. Through Léa, the narrator learns about Alice’s life only up to around the age of twenty-one or twenty-two; the subsequent three or four years disappear from view. At least one significant change occurred in that interval: Jade died as a name and Alice emerged. Léa speculates about why the name changed, but does not attach much importance to it, and the narrator has no definitive explanation. Set beside the narrator’s methodical reconstruction of the case, this biographical gap makes the expression resonate as both a moral challenge and a boundary: it names children’s vulnerability, but cannot supply the missing knowledge needed to explain every person caught up in the crime.