IF YOU care about animals at all, nothing paws the heart like a rescue dog. The beast represents perfect moral sense. Here's a mutt that actually needs and wants an owner. Here's a creature that has suffered, as often as not, because some people are thick, careless, cruel, emotionally sterile, or just ineffably lazy. Take Rover home and you can start to make amends. And you'll still get the best of the bargain.

Now and then, of course, you will find yourself remarking that certain members of your species aren't fit to feed a goldfish, far less care for a dog. From time to time, you will mutter that there ought to be a law prohibiting callous halfwits from existing. Failing that, you'll say, there should at least be a simple test of their fitness to own an animal. Or would that be too sensible?

Then, no doubt, you will remind yourself that no-one ever wonders if the human animal is fit to breed and raise young. Same difference. In fact, anyone still wondering how a grown biped could brutalise a dog should cast an eye on some of their neighbours in the company of children. A dog's life is a dog's life, and abuse is abuse.

At this point you say: hold on, children are not animals. I answer: quite right, up to a point. You add: glib, inexact, emotive comparisons only trivialise the issue of child welfare. I respond: I'm not the one treating children as so much trivia.

Or rather, I am not doing, and have not done, unspeakable things to humans too small and vulnerable to defend themselves. The next sentence ought to read "and that goes for most of us", but to say so would be a mistake. Cruelty to children happens in a place where a fiction meets a paradox. The fiction is that abuse and neglect are rare and exceptional. The paradox is that vicious treatment is handed out routinely within a society that venerates children, that obsesses over their safety, and defines the fulfilled life, beginning to end, in terms of parenthood.

The context for the paradox is the stuff of daily news, from fertility treatments to the case of little Madeleine McCann, from the extraordinary ritual of parental devotion - this isn't a joke - that we call Christmas to debates over adoption law. Some people are so desperate for children the pain of "failure" is like a bereavement. Others face hellish daily punishment simply in struggling to care for a child with a disability. And they wouldn't have it any other way.

The rest of us, if parents, make do with the commonplace things, the small stuff that becomes a big deal. Pride, worry, love, exasperation, fun, setbacks, successes, rows, sweat, dreams, the intimate connections of memory and the sense of a journey shared: unique experiences, typical experiences. Billions of lives are shaped around them, and just because humanity reproduces. And because humanity regards reproduction as a responsibility. Sometimes.

Hence the fiction. Some parents are lucky, some not. Some cope, some are overwhelmed. So much is understood. But some, a greater number than a child-besotted world likes to imagine, don't give a shit. Others are worse than that. To put it another way: there is still no precise, explanatory definition for the term psychopath. What some adults will do to children will have to serve.

A society prone to panicking over child safety thinks it knows all about that. These days we are vigilant for any sign of the paedophile. We contrast innocence with the inexplicably monstrous, with grotesque cruelty and the bestial appetites that remain, in point of fact, mercifully rare. We forget the everyday abuse. To put it simplistically, you don't see many TV celeb appeals for rescue kids.

That's a pity, but also odd. Western society in the early 21st century wallows in pity. It gives millions to Children In Need because Dr Wh's David Tennant says it's a good idea. But the instant the young cease to be the picture of unsullied childhood, we have a teenage-hoodie-thug panic. Drugs, vandalism, guns, sex: yesterday's waifs are demonised in a breath. And we catch our demons young. Just look, as someone is liable to say, at the numbers turning up before Children's Hearings.

Just look. It is true, as the annual report from the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration (SCRA) showed last week, that numbers are up. In the past year, in fact, they have achieved, in headline parlance, "record levels", increasing by 4%. That amounts to 56,199 referrals, or 154 each and every day.

Little thugs, obviously. Out of control. Society being on the expressway to hell in a handcart, it is no more than we should expect. But that would be our prejudice, and our ignorance, talking. In fact, according to the SCRA, the number being referred to the reporter for allegedly committing an offence actually fell by 7% over the year. It never formed the bulk of the figures to begin with, but dropped from 17,641 to 16,490. Crime is a separate, if related, issue.

The issue is a mirror, dark and distorting. It is the mirror in which we prefer not to look while surrendering to moral panic over internet chatrooms and the stereotype of the predator. The greatest number of referrals last year (44,629), and the sole reason for the overall increase, involved children who became victims of a "Schedule 1 offence".

Plain language? Cruelty, neglect, physical injury, domestic abuse and sexual offences. The children were in need of "care and protection". For once, the official language is almost pithy, and certainly sufficient. It is insulting to attempt to dramatise the plight of one vulnerable group in terms of another, but imagine if the statistics referred to cruelty to the elderly, or even to dogs.

Somehow, when it comes to child welfare, the parent-child relationship inhibits an adequate response. At all costs we must not "interfere". We are comfortable, too comfortable, politely debating an adult's right to "chastise". One consequence is that we have nothing to say when the child gets a hammering from a feral loser who failed to acquire "skills".

Parenthood is sacred. That's the proposition, and I respect it. The fact remains that a generalised attitude seems to allow cover for particular abuses. Some people devote their lives to the slim hope that one day they might be allowed to adopt. Others, who would regard the hint of criticism as an impertinent slur, think nothing of shipping small people off to boarding schools. We don't call that neglect. Most would not dare to term it abuse. It's a parent's "right". It's even legal.

Attitudes toward children are complicated and contradictory. Reactions to the nightmare of the McCanns exposed that. Nevertheless, even those who seem to derive an extraordinary satisfaction from kicking the couple make an indisputable point. Amid the frenzy over one girl, dozens - hundreds, thousands, millions - of others have been overlooked. Which is to say forgotten. They suffer too. But if public attention is the measure, who cares?

In September, the Scottish government disclosed an increase in the number of children being placed on protection registers. This time the figure was up by 13%, encompassing 2593 children. Picture that in terms of entire schools emptied, whole housing estates fallen silent. Mercifully, sexual abuse had declined somewhat, but the figure for emotional abuse had increased by 26%, for physical neglect by 21%. That's what we call misery; that's what we know as pain.

At the time, the government said, hopefully, that the increases might be due to "greater awareness". True of the professionals, perhaps, but true of the society that loves children, that is populated by people who were children themselves once upon a time? There are brutes still in every city, town and village. And they are not deterred.