Cameron: Torture case is part of what's wrong with our broken society

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The Tory leader insisted that such cases could not be treated as individual and unrelated to the wider world.

Speaking at a community centre in Gillingham, Kent, Mr Cameron said: "We have had rising violent crime and I think it's wrong to say that each of these incidents come along and somehow there is no connection to what is going wrong in the rest of our society."

Mr Cameron, who was at a campaign event to talk about what he called Britain's "social recession", acknowledged that the problems went back decades.

He cited the cases of Jamie Bulger, Baby Peter, Damilola Taylor, Garry Newlove and Ben Kinsella, as well as the Edlington torture incident.

He said: "On each occasion, are we just going to say this is an individual case? That there aren't any links to what is going wrong in our wider society, in terms of family breakdown, in terms of drug and alcohol abuse, in terms of violent videos, in terms of many of the things that were going wrong in that particular family?

"I think we should ask these questions."

He said the issue had to be addressed responsibly and he was not trying to blame any particular party or government.

"This has been going on for decades," he said.

"But do we have a problem in Britain with violent crime? Do we have a problem with some aspects of what's going on in childhood? Do we have a problem with our care system? Yes, we do."

He went on to say there had been "incident after incident since 2004" and suggested that not enough had been done quickly enough.

"So, I think it's right to raise it in a responsible way and it's right to have this debate."