Mr A has made us face some uncomfortable facts

I don't know if Mary Leland of the Sunday Independent has ever read the Biblical proverb "Train up a child in the way it should go and when it is old it will not depart from it" Proverbs 22:6. Her article in this weeks edition however is sober reading for a society that thinks it can have "Sexual Freedom" and protect it's children along the way. Here it is

"We are all guilty of the sexualisation of our young children"



I SIMPLY can't get too worked up about it. In fact, I can't get worked up about it at all, this hysterical fusillade of abuse at the Government, the judiciary, the courts and anyone else at all in the wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling on the offence of carnal knowledge of a minor.

In the first place, I couldn't get outraged because the legal issue was no sooner identified than it was lost in a welter of scatter-gun abuse. Here was a matter which had to be defined before it could be interpreted, and in neither case was the Irish public well served by its media. It's true that the Supreme Court's decision is a complex argument simplified to its most austere significance: Section 1 of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1935, under which it is an offence to have sex with a girl under 15, has been declared unconstitutional from its origin and as a result was not translated into law and therefore - cutting to the quick - did not, and does not, exist. So anyone convicted under that section was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully detained. A bad law has been struck down.

Does this mean that our streets will shortly be steaming with men rampant with lust for teenage virgins, or indeed, for even younger girls? It does not. When will we have a little bit of common sense? Or a little bit of self-respect? But even if such were the case, I believe that we would have no one to blame but ourselves. I speak now in my David Cameron alter ego; like the Tory leader I have been made more and more aware of our own willing sexualisation of children, especially of girls.

I speak as the stunned old bat flapping about in Eason's, asking out loud why on earth young well-dressed and well-spoken mothers should be purchasing for their first-year daughters school stationery loudly decorated with Bunny Girl images, paying over money which goes to Hugh Hefner, colluding in a commercial enterprise which glamorises prostitution and runs on the organised exploitation of women.

I have seen pre-teen girls wearing clothes with logos which would shame a hooker skipping happily alongside their parents. With (and even without) the warm weather, 10- and 12-year olds strut about the country in jeans and shorts sheared down to the pubic bone. Skirts as short as peplums swivel around adolescent backsides, swirling with an invitation which must never be accepted. To buy the daily paper, to buy a school copybook, is to run a pornographic gauntlet of magazines placed within easy reach of today's well-fed pre-teens. For many, even the daily paper itself - one UK tabloid is owned by a known pornographer - offers sexual titillation as casually as a cup of breakfast coffee. We are running "say no" programmes in our schools, and dressing our children like little whores.

We tolerate - we even encourage - the notion of ordinary life as a supermarket of sex. Everything is on

'We are dressing our children like little whores'

display. How can we pretend that this means that everything is not for sale or for stealing? With so much young flesh polished and put out on show how can we imagine that there won't be someone, somewhere, sometime unable to resist the allure?

It's not that we should insist on burkas for our youngsters, but we should insist on some restraint, or some sense of what is appropriate to age and occasion. We are slow to insist on anything now - except on the faults of others and the imperatives of reparation. A Dublin computer technician has been convicted of possession of child pornography of stunning depravity, depicting the suffering, fear and degradation of children as young as two. Do we ask ourselves - where does this come from? Who are these children? And above all, how is the appetite for such material and such gratification aroused in the first place?

This is the dark and dangerous side of a healthy sexual nature. We ignore it because it interferes with our comforting ideas of sex as funny, warming, satisfying and more or less readily available. And for most of us, it is all of those things, with the exception of the last. But to tolerate sex as commonplace and indiscriminate is to invite trouble. Which is what we have, although not quite as we imagine it to be.

The trouble, the real trouble, lies not with the law or the Supreme Court or even Mr 'A' and his like, but with ourselves. It is what we accept as normal which defines the limits both to the law and to our lives. It is our responsibility, and no one else's, to make those definitions both protective and demonstrable, clearly understood by our children and by those who come in contact with them, and endorsed rather than invented by the laws of the land.

Mary Leland