We just don’t get it, do we? We have simply no idea, us douce middle classes, what the Shannon Matthews story is about. We’ve watched the saga unfold, first with the polite concern we would feel for any missing child, then with mild amazement when she was found alive. We’re delighted there’s been something we can imagine is a fairytale ending, especially so because now we don’t have to feel guilty any more about how little we care.

We don’t understand. At no point have we grasped the horrifying scale of emotional poverty and chaos that Shannon’s story reveals, because we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we are from events in Afghanistan.

For life among the white working class of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country. And because we don’t live there, and are never likely to, we have no concept of the reality in which hundreds of thousands of British children, just like Shannon, grow up.

Since 1997 the middle classes have heard Gordon Brown chunter on about his goals for ending child poverty in Britain, but they have done so with a profound lack of engagement. Poverty? In modern Britain? Yeah, yeah, we all know what that’s really about, don’t we? Feckless parents who waste all their money on widescreen TVs and booze and don’t have enough left for the children. We know the type. But the truth is, we don’t have a clue what modern social deprivation means.

Poverty has a new face now, and it’s called Shannon Matthews. What her sad little story has destroyed, possibly for ever, is the convenient middle-class myth of coherent, material poverty. Instead, it has revealed that what devastates the lives of modern children is something altogether much worse – inner poverty; poverty of the soul.

Although clothed and fed, often with a parent or a stepparent in work, children in Shannon’s world have to exist in a state of pervasive, low-level psychological chaos that is beyond the remedy of any social worker. There are no state palliatives for emotional neglect; or an endemic lack of emotional stability. There is absolutely no cure for the horrors of growing up with adults who exist in a state of permanent volatility.

In a world such as Shannon’s, there are no certainties other than the fact that there are no certainties.

These children are not like our children. Their parents are not adults we would recognise as adults. The children do not come home from school to someone to ask them how their day was. Many are denied anything but fleeting attention, interest and stimulation.

Many, furthermore, spend their lives trying to be invisible in order to cope with the adults in the house – hostile boyfriends; stressed, angry mothers. Any children’s charity will tell you that the biggest threat to children comes from violent boyfriends and lovers; from mothers, in other words, who prioritise their own relationships over their children.

Add to this households where drink and drug abuse by adults is a common factor, and you begin to see how scary and unstable some children’s lives are.

What was so telling about Shannon’s story, so far as it has been revealed, is that her abduction was not the extremely rare act by a stranger, but allegedly by someone she knew. Someone from this lost society in which adults, damaged and isolated, are incapable of adult responsiblities. Most children know those who harm them. Shannon was found concealed in the house of the extended relative – the uncle of her mother’s boyfriend; someone who had apparently played with her at a recent family funeral. Did the nine-year-old go off with someone she knew because he had offered her kindness in the past? Neighbours near to where she was found have spoken of hearing a child laughing and the sound of light footsteps.

Indeed, there were suggestions yesterday that other members from the little girl’s vast, complex network of fragmented family may have been involved. Only time will tell to what degree this was a sinister act, or simply a manifestation of inappropriate behaviour within a dysfunctional family group.

Reports say that Shannon was unhappy at home. She was described as a shy, quiet girl and her maternal grandparents have alleged that not only was her mother, their daughter, unfit to care, but that her live-in boyfriend was violent to the children. He denies this, and other family members support him.

Whatever the truth, there is little doubt the family was chaotic. Shannon’s mother, with seven children from five or even six different fathers – choose which paper to believe – cared for four of them aged between 11 and 2. The others lived with their natural fathers.

Before she disappeared Shannon scribbled a note on her bedroom wall saying that she wanted to live with her father, a man who – fitting perfectly into the pattern of her fractured familial life – lived a short distance away but did not appear to see her with any regularity. Did anyone, we are entitled to wonder, offer this little girl the basic attention and stability a child craves?

Shannon’s story is not, thankfully, a tragedy on the scale of Milly Dowler or Sarah Payne. But it is a tragedy nevertheless – a totemic little tale of everyday childhood misery in Britain, illustrative of so much more widespread suffering. Yes, the child has been found alive, but there is no real fairytale ending. To what does she return? To which version of least chaos? There is no happy-ever-after, and as her name fades from the headlines, and the privileged classes go back to pampering our own beloved offspring, I hope the memory of poor little Shannon stays with us.

Times Recommends

• Farwell to the stiff upper lip
• It’s about who runs the US, not health
• The Iron Lady and her blue felt-tip sympathy