About eight stories down on the UK section of the BBC news website, a small link reads ‘Teenager murdered near home named’. It is sad but unsurprising that such a tragic event should merit only a lowly position in the national spotlight: knife crime seems to have become an almost everyday occurrence in much of Britain over the past decade.

Yet this story deserves more recognition as it is especially poignant in the current climate. It reports on Danny O’Shea, an eighteen-year-old from Canning Town in East London, who was chased and stabbed to death on his own doorstep by a group of black men on Friday evening. The police have not said that the attack was racially motivated, but at a time when the Stephen Lawrence murder is once more at the forefront of the national consciousness there are nonetheless abhorrent parallels. Despite this, you are only likely to stumbled upon the report by pure chance. Check the websites of the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent and you will find no mention of this murder whatsoever. The Sun, Daily Mail and Mirror do carry small reports, but they’re buried deep within a sea of other articles. The story didn’t make the BBC’s Ten O’Clock news at all. You can’t help but get the distinct impression that nobody really wants to report on it. You can perhaps understand why – it is certainly a sensitive topic. But it is also despicably unjust that a fear of affronting political sensibilities has so easily cowed our media who, it seems, would rather walk away from an awkward subject than confront it. The legacy of Stephen Lawrence has taught us nothing if we are not to treat all potential cases of racism equally, regardless of the perpetrators. He deserves better. Danny O’Shea and his grieving family deserve better. And frankly, the public, which relies on the media for a fair and accurate coverage of the news, deserves better too.