It makes bleak reading: mobile phone providers admitting that they can't prevent the transmission of child pornography; mobile phones downloading pornographic images to children; untraceable, pre-paid phones spreading paedophiliac images over a worldwide network.
ou don't have to be especially pessimistic to realise that we are now all servants of technology. It is our master in a detailed and persistent way which has never been known before in the history of the world. In less than a generation, new technology has almost abolished the traditional childhood. Soon - if not already - ancient childhood skipping steps, chants and games will have vanished. The mysterious seasons of playground rituals are perishing. Once dead, they will never return.
A civilisation is perishing before our eyes. It is a little considered civilisation, known to a few anthropologists, and a good many teachers, who have usually wondered about it without being able to penetrate it too closely. For, like an anemone's tentacles, it ceases to exist when closely examined. But it is a civilisation nonetheless: the civilisation of children.
Each civilisation is different. The civilisation of Dublin schoolchildren might well have echoes of Bristol, from which so many English settlers to the capital once came. Belfast children's games and chants probably resonate with the rhythms of Glasgow, and vice versa. Girls are the most devout guardians of this civilisation. Their expressions of it are extremely female: non-competitive, co-operative, complex and deeply musical, most powerfully expressed in the skipping songs and dances of street and playground.
Only occasionally would boys be permitted to play in the skipping games, though only occasionally would boys wish to. Yet, in a forerunner of sexual yearning, boys might sometimes hanker to be in the midst of girls, synchronising with girlish dances for the sake of physical proximity.
But for the most part, boys lived in a parallel universe of competition and physical aggression. It was and is and - since it is dying - will always remain an utterly mysterious world. My childhood world was in Leicester, and the Catholic school I attended was almost entirely first-generation Irish. Yet by some strange process of osmosis, it was able to pick up the English seasons for particular games. The existence of these seasons, with their inflexible calendar, has long mystified anthropologists.
Certain games would start only on a particular day of the year. Only outside observers noted the date; the children themselves were unaware that they were following a timetable. The game of conkers naturally would become fashionable in autumn, but would cease, quite suddenly, long before the supply of conkers dried up. Other games could follow as the months went by, always in the same sequence, and always adhering to a subconscious timetable. Cigarette cards, snobs (a form of jacks), British bulldog (an aggressively physical hopping game), scissors-hands-paper and many other ritualised games arrived, held brief dominion, and then departed.
This was a civilisation which was made possible by adult authority and adult protection, yet it was nonetheless a separate civilisation, with a structure and a culture of its own, in which even the weakest and most inept could play a part. Moreover, the girls were guardians to dance-forms which probably went back many hundreds of years. Each city in Ireland and Britain probably had dialect forms of these skipping-dances and their accompanying songs; and in the twinkling of a silicon chip, they have just about vanished.
Children today have access to a world which most of us know nothing about. We have created no morality nor any cultural tools to cope with it. Almost every child now has a mobile phone; and therefore almost every child has access to pornography. Children are undergoing childhoods which their parents did not live through in any way at all: indeed, parents might be raising little Martians, for all that their experiences have in common.
What is most awesome about this is that there is no going back. We are in deep space, leaving the earth of the past far behind us as we are propelled towards new places, where we will never arrive, because rapidly advancing technology endlessly alters our destination. Flux is the only unchanging feature of this journey: ignorance of what happens next the universal condition.
Did anyone in the great year of the future, 1984, imagine that, 20 years on, children in their school playgrounds could be sent pornographic images on a phone the size of a matchbox? That's happening today. So what will happen in another 20 years' time? What unimaginable horror is being created in the software factories of Silicon Valley, and in the even more Satanic vault of men's minds? Or will the future come from some other unsuspected source? Of course it will, because there's not a single future, but hundreds of futures, emerging from countless different sources. Already a non-national narrative, a violent electronic cartoon culture, largely drawing on Japanese comic traditions, which in themselves are derivatives of US comic culture, is now global, known to almost every child in the "advanced" world, and equally unknown to their parents.
For one characteristic connects the single international childhood culture with the myriad indigenous forms which it is displacing: secrecy. No parents. The protective mental wall which excluded adults from the traditional childhood remains today.
And just as abusers in the past were able to use that wall to shield their crimes from detection, now the global industry of paedophilia is able to manipulate the childhood taboo on disclosure to adults, for its own evil ends.
In other words, welcome to tomorrow. It's here, and will never go away.