I've been asked, more times than I can count, how I do this job without losing faith in humanity.

But the ones who did something terrible are rarely incomprehensible. That's the discombobulating part. They're almost always explicable, which does not mean excusable, or forgivable, but explicable. There's usually a thread, however long and tangled, that leads you back to something recognisable and very human.

The cases that play over in my mind are the ones where every system that should have intervened had a blind spot, or perfectly good reason why it wasn't their job. Systems don't usually fail people all at once. They fail each other in small, procedural increments. *Sigh*