TO say the least, our society has a rather confused attitude towards raising children.

On the one hand, we are so puritanical that we forbid parents to take photographs of the school nativity play and children’s sports day in case these fall into the hands of paedophiles. On the other hand, we encourage our young children to dress themselves up as sex objects.

Some actual examples are beyond belief. I found an advert for a little girl’s T-shirt bearing a picture of a Playboy bunny. Maybe I should lighten up? Maybe that’s only a bit of fun and just about passable? But then I discovered another with the slogan Porn Star In The Making. Another, So Many Boys, So Little Time. And yet another, Don’t Touch What You Can’t Afford. I have seen padded bras and wired bras for pre-teens, pole dancing kits for the same age group and a girls’ bedroom furniture range with the trademark Lolita. There was, until recently, an advert for trainers featuring the pop star Christina Aguilera dressed as a schoolgirl with her blouse unbuttoned and sucking a lollipop.

There is a dressing-up kit containing a tiara, mobile phone and stilettos.

I have long protested against rap lyrics and videos with their sadistic sentiments directed at women, but last week I found something even worse. Writing in a national newspaper, Rowan Pelling described how, on an Easter seaside holiday with her young family, two of her eight-year-old nieces started singing, word perfect, a Katy Perry song: “Infect me with your love and fill me with your poison/Take me, take me, wanna be a victim/ Ready for abduction”.

Rowan then discovered that her 11-year-old nephew had some music videos on an iPhone consisting of his girl cousins clad only in swimming costumes, gyrating to Perry’s California Girls: “Kiss her, touch her, squeeze her buns.” Rowan added: “Katy Perry is marketed like a kooky Technicolor cup-cake fairy. Little girls adore her, but have no sense of the connotations. It’s insidious.”

The only word I would disagree with there is “insidious”. This sort of stuff is not insidious, it’s blatant and it’s everywhere. So where does the blame lie for this corruption of childhood? Cynical manufacturers and opportunist pop-singers who know that sex sells should take their share of the blame.

But what are parents doing when they allow their offspring to get near this stuff? Oh, I know many will say they can’t do anything to prevent them, that they can’t be watching them all the time. But parenting used to mean providing good influences for children and shielding them from those that are harmful.

It’s a weird world in which little boys are not allowed to play with cap guns and pretend rifles any longer, but little girls are encouraged to play with what amount to sex toys and to dress themselves up as pre-pubescent temptresses. Of course, the lumpen intelligentsia is horrified by the suggestion of censorship. But there is a proper sensitivity and we do have a duty to protect children from evil influences.

The ancient Greeks were not prudes. Classical dramas featured incestuous relationships, characters being murdered or their eyes put out. But these terrible events were not seen, they were hinted at. They happened offstage. And that word – offstage – is the literal meaning of “obscene”. For the sake of our children, we must recover our sense of disgust for obscenities.