Should you be fumbling for a bank holiday read, your eyes might turn for inspiration to yesterday’s Sunday Times list of best-selling books — and there you will discover what is quite the literary vogue of the moment. Among the top ten paperbacks, you may choose between Don’t Tell Mummy at No 1 and “a memoir of childhood abuse”, Betrayed, in which a little girl accuses both her parents of sexual assault, and Silent Sisters, “siblings on surviving abuse” — especially piquant, this one, given that one of the siblings in question is the mother of erstwhile EastEnders actress Martine McCutcheon, no less, procuring her very own 15 minutes by telling tales on Daddy.

Promote yourself to the hardback top ten and there is yet more: Our Little Secret, “boy molested from age of four”, Daddy’s Little Girl — come on, you’ve guessed already, haven’t you? — and Damaged, wherein we meet a child abused by parents “involved in a sickening paedophile ring”, which suggests that as a nation we must be fearfully fond of feeling sick to have the book nestling right up there at No 7.

It’s not just books, mind. Paedophilia on a plate, with bonuses if it also involves incest, has rocketed in a single generation from suburban taboo to ubiquity. When the film Chinatown came out in 1974, and Faye Dunaway made her legendary confession — “She’s my daughter and my sister” — it was a belter; you could feel the ripple around the cinemas as members of audiences took varying numbers of seconds to grasp what she meant. Yet by the time Prince of Tides appeared, in 1991, you pretty much got to Nick Nolte’s boyhood anal rape before the script did; since then more than 100 films have been released with themes of the sexual abuse of children of both sexes — and as for television, in our house we beg of the screen, oh, no, please don’t make that the ending, please be more original.

Sadly, they rarely are. Lurid little secrets, usually involving a hand-held camera and a heavy foot climbing the stairs at night, have become easy, idle tools of motivation, explanation and exposition. Give us an establishing shot of a children’s home, or a glimpse of the dog collar of a man of the cloth, and we’re all ahead of the game.

The self-righteous defence for such repeated imagery is that these things do happen which, of course, they do, and that none among us would wish to return to the bad old days when they were swept under the carpet — which, of course, we don’t.

Nevertheless, there is something unsettling about the relish with which sexual abuse is turned into sheer entertainment and then enjoyed as such. A good deal of pretence attaches itself to the trend: the pretence, for instance, that readers are not indulging for pleasure but for greater understanding of the psychology or the sociology of a serious human ill. This, however, doesn’t wash; there simply aren’t enough psychologists or sociologists in the country to account for their “textbooks” reaching top tens. The vast bulk of the sales must, therefore, be attributed to the insatiable prurience of those who dress up their interest as an “ology”, thus buying themselves permission to be seen clutching books whose large appeal to them is, in fact, the sex.

This is not to suggest for a moment that those customers who make the books and films and television series so successful are themselves latent or nascent paedophiles. Most of them would never dream of hurting a child — their own or anybody else’s. But there is an unattractive quality, massively pandered to by the tabloid press, which manages to confuse sexual with sexy; in other words, if it involves a sexual organ it automatically becomes titillating.

Why else, after all, read the stuff? You and I might be fully prepared to believe that a delinquent is troubled because of past abuse without needing a jot of how, when or which way up; those who devour the detail, therefore, are not seeking knowledge more useful than yours or mine, they are seeking to get their rocks off.

By itself, that might not matter. Whatever turns you on and all that. But it’s not by itself; this carefully teased public appetite is reinforcing a generalised paedophile hysteria that has already led to riots and effective lynch mobs fuelled by ignorant misunderstanding — a misunderstanding that will not be dented as long as the confusion continues unchallenged.

The fact is that in the stories so salaciously consumed by the apparently concerned, sexual organs might be the implements of the abuse but in the end, as with all rape, what we are really looking at is an abuse of imbalanced power. Not quite the same frisson, I grant you — but by eschewing intelligent analysis in favour of revelling in the frisky physicality of the tales we are told, the more hysterical we become and consequently the less rational.

We see paedophiles on every street corner, we warn our children to disproportionate extent, we leave our “sickening” accounts of “suffering” and “molestation” lying around the house — and in the process, we teach our children that even to those who would not harm a hair on their heads their small bodies are, after all, a currency of excitement.

This does not put the voracious readers of these “memoirs” up there with the properly bad guys. But it is, all the same, an abuse of sorts. Not to mention pretty damned grubby.

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