This week saw more revelations about the Shannon Matthews case, with various relatives of her stepfather and he himself being arrested and questioned over child pornography charges. That has made me think. Is child pornography more prevalent today than it ever has been or do we just hear about it more? I have my own opinion that charges our society with becoming a greed driven, every man for himself hostile environment where the old codes of decency morality and compassion are slowly but surely being broken down. A man is stabbed to death for confronting youths defacing his property, an 80 year old woman is raped in her home, a boy is shot to death on the street, a child is starved to death like a dog in a dustbin outside her home. Shocking, horrifying and soon forgotten once the next lurid headline comes along. Compassion fatigue is a phrase that could only have been coined in this era. A phrase adopted to illustrate the result of bombardment with harrowing scenes from third world countries on a donating public. I would like to add my own phrase for today. Horror fatigue. We are in real danger of accepting as the norm, cases like Shannon’s, Maddie McCann’s, Victoria Climbie, Gary Newlove, Rhys Jones. If stories that gripped us, brought us to tears and horrified us become more and more common our natural human instinct will incline us towards anesthetising ourselves from the pain. What can we do? I don’t know. Care for each other a bit more? Be less ready to take an aggressive stance with that call centre worker, train guard or traffic warden? I really wish I could see an easy answer, but I can’t, can you?