Based on the 2005 prizewinning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, the author presents a modern discussion of the attachment difficulties that informed John Bowlby's famous 1944 paper ‘Forty-four juvenile thieves’. The author singles out the failure of early attachments as the key to Bowlby's introduction of the idea of the affectionless character as the central aetiological factor in crime, where a third of the people in prison have grown up in the care system. Rejecting the simplistic version of maternal deprivation as being Mother blaming, the author calls for a recognition of the fact that it takes a whole community to raise children, to meet their attachment needs, and calls for a reexamination of our approaches to looked-after children, the mental health system, and the criminal justice system, using the basic principles of attachment theory as laid down by John Bowlby three generations ago as our guide.