An almost unbearable stunt will open tomorrow’s football match between England and Israel: two 11-year-old boys, Jamie Dorrian and Sean Geoghegan, generally private little souls who are famous for nothing save having witnessed the death of their friend Rhys Jones, will take centre stage as England mascots. It has been explained in detail how this will happen: one will clutch hold of the captain, the other the goalkeeper and the introduction to thousands of strangers will be, “Rhys’s proud teammates”. What has not been explained is why it will happen.

So traumatised is Jamie Dorrian that, according to one newspaper, he has neither spoken a word since the killing, nor left his home; it is hard to imagine a professional advising this is as therapy. Still, at least the boys knew Rhys — which is more than you can say for the hundreds of children who did not, but who have been forced into ritualistic “memorial” at the secondary school he should have started this week.

This is also the week when Madeleine McCann was to have started her first school. In her enforced absence, its head teacher has decreed the tot’s very own shrine: an empty desk, peg and locker, together with a burning candle, thus ensuring that dozens of other four-year-olds who never knew Madeleine nevertheless will be reminded daily that there really are bogeymen who steal innocents from their beds, their mummies and their daddies.

This degree of immersion of children in our baser obsessions is recent — almost certainly inspired by the tons of Cellophane-wrapped, rotting foliage outside Kensington Palace a decade ago, when mass mourning first became a family day out. Before that, I remember deciding (correctly, I still think) that my three-year-old should not attend the funeral of my mother whom she knew and loved; after it, I remember aching (as indeed, I still do) at the blazing terror in the eyes of a girl, perhaps 8, being urged by her day-tripping mother to lay her teddy in the ditch where Sarah Payne’s body had been found.

Whatever, you wonder, is the adult justification? What are they thinking, as they urge a hurry-up with that picnic, there’s another dead kiddie to gawp over? They cannot even pretend it to be a lesson in self-protection; would “being careful” have helped Sarah? Or Rhys? Or Madeleine?

No. They may dress it up with fancy words — “tribute” is a favourite — but the cruder truth is that ersatz grief is now the new pornography; like the worst of hard-core, it is stimulus by proxy, voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private, for no better reason than frisson and the quickening of an otherwise jaded pulse. The only difference is that with old pornography at least we do our best to keep it away from children.

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