Time we took responsibility for the warped world our children live in

I cringed when I heard a father ask his child last week: “Would you like to go home with that man?”

Fortunately the child knew he was joking. But in the light of the terrible revelations of child abuse in recent years, and the horrific abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jenny Chapman, it was a joke with a dark shadow.

I recall my own mother warning me not to take lifts from strangers. I was given none of the gory details as to why, however. I imagined that another family might want to “steal” me. Or a travelling circus might take me away. Sexual abuse or murder never crossed my innocent mind.

But with saturation news coverage, todays’s parents can’t shield their children from the grim realities of life. Nor can they reassure them that the Soham tragedy couldn’t happen to them. It was all so ordinary. The evil unfolded in a small village, the kind where nothing bad is ever supposed to happen. Jessica and Holly were at home shortly before their disappearance and did not embark on any trip that could be described as unusual. Their parents were in the general vicinity when the girls went out, undetected, from the house. And worst of all, they went out together, but they enjoyed no strength in numbers for all that.

Parents wonder if they can ever be sure their children are safe, short of tagging them electronically, following them everywhere or forbidding them to leave the house.

There is some comfort in statistics. Events like Soham are very rare. But we can never be sure that unspeakable evil won’t come our way. It is a measure of our panic that adults are now being discouraged from even asking children for directions.

On RTÉ’s Morning Ireland this week, clinical psychologist Dr Marie Murray suggested stopping to ask children for directions encourages them to approach strangers in cars and risk abduction.

Dr Murray’s words are undoubtedly very wise, and yet they could sound the death-knell for trust and solidarity in the community.

Children should not talk to strangers nor should they give them directions, she advised. They should run or yell if they feel frightened.

They should never enter a stranger’s house, as so many of us did in the past, for “bob-a-job” or to sell raffle tickets.

In other words, children must be taught to deal with adults in a whole new way. Good parents will know how to transmit this advice while giving reassurance that there is also lots of heroism and goodness in people, and that these rules only exist to protect them from a tiny minority of vicious strangers.

But will that gloss be enough to prevent children becoming suspicious? It’s ironic. We live in a world where children are publicly pampered, with parents being urged by advertisers to pander to their offspring’s every whim.

Children are noisier than ever in public places, and parents no longer seem to care if they make a nuisance of themselves. When children get in trouble at school, many parents are more likely to blame the teacher than to correct the child’s fault.

Yet statistics show big increases in crimes against children. In Britain, indecency against minors has risen by a third since 1990, while child murder has increased by two thirds.

Child pornography has emerged as a huge problem worldwide, with large numbers of people being implicated in Ireland and elsewhere. How can this be, when society preaches that the child is king?

Is it because we are treating the symptoms instead of the disease? These days we put the stress on child welfare and legislation for children’s rights, but these are necessary precisely because we have created a society where the welfare of children is under attack, and where children are exposed to more hostility and violence than ever before.

In recent years our courts have identified the interests of the child as being of “paramount” importance when dealing with issues such as custody and care orders. Yet at the same time we have introduced a no-fault separation and divorce regime which effectively ignores the wishes and interests of children when considering whether couples may split up.

The housing and labour markets also put the squeeze on children’s welfare. Many women, in particular, feel forced into the workplace so that they can afford the family mortgage and pay for the range of luxuries which modern families are supposed to enjoy. Yet children are paying the biggest price because they have less contact with their exhausted parents and more opportunity for unsupervised television, video games and other dead-end behaviour. And many parents succumb to the temptation of pampering them to make up for the fact they are away from home so much.

And then there is the television watershed. We make a pretence of shielding children from ugly scenes of sex and violence, by screening the most explicit material after 9pm. But it’s a nonsense. Apart from the fact that thousands of children stay up late to watch television anyway, gratuitous violence, exploitative relationships and inappropriate language already feature on television programmes much earlier in the evening.

The only issue is the degree of bad taste involved, and our tolerance levels in this area have risen alarmingly.

In Britain, in one typical week, TV screens 400 killings, 119 woundings and 27 sex-attacks on women, and the British Broadcasting Standards Council says that the broadcasts reinforce the fear of violence in women.

It is well known that the video Child’s Play III appears to have being copied by the two 10-year-old murderers of James Bulger. This video was watched by an estimated 110,000 children under 16 years of age when it was shown on Sky TV after the so-called 9pm watershed.

If we really cared about our children we would wake up to the fact that screen violence begets real violence. According to the American Psychological Association, “research clearly demonstrates a correlation between viewing violence and aggressive behaviour”. And Dr Susan Bailey, a consultant psychiatrist who conducted research among adolescent murderers, found that a quarter of the young people she encountered had watched violent and pornographic films during the period immediately prior to committing the crime.

But there is no political will, in Ireland or elsewhere, to discourage the portrayal of exploitative sex and violence in cinema and on TV. One indicator of this is that our departing film censor, Sheamus Smith, only banned seven films between his appointment in 1986 and 2001. While the Office of Film Censor was designed to shield viewers from material deemed “indecent, obscene, blasphemous or tending to inculcate principles contrary to public morality”, Smith could hardly be accused of taking a heavy-handed approach. “Personally, I look upon the office as one of classification and find ‘censorship’ an emotive and unnecessary word. My own policy is not to cut films,” he said.

Can we really afford such liberalism? Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman may not have been murdered by adolescents crazed by TV sex and violence. But it is at least possible that their killers may have derived encouragement from some of the sadism that is now standard fare on the screen. Perhaps even the most good-hearted and balanced among us could do with a little less brutality in our lives. If we care about our children, we should know what to do.