A question for Ofcom. What on earth does it mean when Channel 4 tells you that an eight-year old, participating in one of its reality shows, has been “screened” by a clinical psychologist?

And does it mean any more or less than when a Channel 4 executive producer, making a buck from selling his or her programme to the broadcasters, and then justifying it to the world, describes the show as a “social experiment”, offering “valuable insight”?

“Boys and Girls Alone,” Richard McKerrow and David Dehaney wrote of their latest four-part effort, in which 20 children were sent to live with each other in two locations for a fortnight, abandoned by any adult authority other than “trained child chaperones” (trained in what?), where they fought, cried and bitched, “has an important educational purpose. From Day 1, careful measures and protocols were in place to ensure the safety and welfare of the children, and to ensure that it was a beneficial experience.”

So they responded in these pages to a previous letter of outrage from a group of psychologists and psychotherapists, some of whom specialise in dealing with children. This collection of correspondents argued that Channel 4's “experiment” - involving children obviously too young to give informed consent to their exploitation in the series - would never have received ethical approval in an academic or scientific setting.

Mr McKerrow and Mr Dehaney may not have had space to deal with this point, preferring to dwell on the “valuable insight” into unsupervised childhood behaviour - an insight enjoyed, they argued, by teachers, but not by parents, “very few of [whom] have seen it at first hand”.

Except, presumably, when they were children. Messrs M and D emphasised that through their “close personal interaction” with parents and children, they “know the outcome” of participating in the series, and everyone, it appears, “had a very positive experience”.

Can you get more complacent than this?

The duo's claim was made after only one episode in the series of four had been broadcast, and before any of the children's friends, classmates, relatives or peers had had time to react.

It may be that Mr McKerrow and Mr Dehaney themselves have children. In which case would they be happy for them to appear in a show like this? If so, when can we expect to see them? Or would they not pass the “screening” by the unnamed shrink? Perhaps their kids were in their 2008 BBC Three series Baby Borrowers in which teenagers were lent babies for three days and which was, of course, “an important social experiment”?

I think not. I wouldn't dream of letting my kids be part of a Channel4 social experiment, and nor, I imagine, would anyone at Channel 4. After all, what exactly was the experiment testing? According to a parent of one boy on the show, it would be “nice for him to learn some respect for what we do, because he does nothing”. The boy was 9 years old. After a few days, on meeting him again, she told him, “your attitude stinks, mate”. The lesson she'd learnt from the experience thus far was the one that she had gone in expecting to learn.

And so it has been with the reviewers. A Hermione opined that “this kind of show forces us to confront the depressing fundamentals of human nature. It isn't just that the children are horrid - they're horrid in such predictable ways.” A Serena complimented the “fascinating and enlightening” programmes that “showed how selfish, spoilt and mollycoddled most of these children were”. Which, I bet a hundred quid, is what friends of Serena had heard her say about modern youth months before she had watched a minute of these programmes.

Of course, what Serena and Hermione don't realise is that things will change towards the end of the series and the “emotional journeys”, we can be sure, will develop into minor personal triumphs. The producers will make absolutely certain of that, either through provocation or editing.

But my God, how some of us hate children to put them through this! It is astounding how people will moan on about CCTV and ID cards, when they are prepared to connive in the invasion of the privacy of minors in this way, simply to be entertained, or to have their prejudices about today's youngsters apparently confirmed.

Consider the case of Alfie Patten, the baby-faced baby-father, who, had he actually been filmed impregnating his 15-year-old girlfriend, might have been said by some broadcasters to be participating in a valuable social experiment. The boy is 13 and is now famous and notorious, even though his case, far from illustrating a common problem, is actually incredibly rare.

It was depressing, if predictable, that the moral declinists should choose to use the Patten baby as a symbol of our broken society. You can scroll though any of their prolonged squeals without once discovering that teenage pregnancy rates in the UK have fallen substantially in the past ten years, even if they are still the highest in Western Europe (not Europe as a whole, as claimed by some Conservative MPs). An odd kind of moral decline, that.

It is even more depressing when polling evidence shows that Britons greatly overestimate the number of teenage pregnancies, with 80 per cent believing that the rate has increased, and a quarter of young people estimating that teenage births are 40 times higher than they actually are.

There is quite a lot of evidence now for the assertion that giving undue publicity or weight to a negative behavioural phenomenon, far from creating a disincentive, is actually more likely to lead to that behaviour being copied. This isn't so very hard to explain - if it is true that all young people are selfish, the young person says, what is the point in me being the odd one out?

So Alfie, a child, has become a pawn in a misleading argument. He is a child whose privacy had been violated and whose welfare we simply don't care about, except in so far as he entertains us or reinforces our pleasurable outrage. Worse, his misused example could very well feed a stereotype that itself leads to undesirable behaviour, as young people assume that his celebrity is both normal and can be emulated.

What are we playing at?

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