By now, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need.    No one can seriously be against it. Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing "child poverty". The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all like kids.  Except maybe we don't. For there is too much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not look after, and perhaps does not even like, children.   At its mildest, it's the shock any visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we give to kids here. It can be formal: the "Sorry, no children" signs that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent.   At its most extreme, there is the staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer - and what lies beneath.   For even in those places far away from the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their childhood.   Of course it is essential that British kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play, draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom, as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them.   We can hardly blame the schools; they are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the same game - depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a Stars in their Eyes "kids special" where the sight of a hair-gelled nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their child to victory - and to imagined riches for their own pockets.   But let's not be snobbish about this. Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would doubtless cite "irony" in defence of its Little Friends comedy show, which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them about their sex lives and beginning one question, "My Dad says he'd bet his cock... "   This horrible little programme is queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a childish need - to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks - and exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them as old before their years.   Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist provide healthy, valuable sex education - but which look sleazy and pressuring to the naked eye. "Why don't you have a boyfriend," nags Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful instructive tale: "He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to lose him." And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys and its "seven ways to make him come back for more". The advice inside may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having it - but these magazines are making good money out of that angst.    Or it can be the new US-made Bratz dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are miniature J-Los and Beyoncs. They are sexualised, and so cannot help but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror "a society in which we're treating really young children as if they were much older".   It's hard to work out what's behind this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose, mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces "Fuckface" or "Two-Faced Cunt" seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual objects.   For artists and magazine editors, this doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos, unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites, neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need - of a society that will care for them properly.