Last Acceptable Form of Discrimination?

Though there is still evidence of institutionalised prejudice in this country - for example, racism in the police - most people would accept that in general discrimination is far less publicly acceptable than it used to be, and there are more people fighting inequality than in previous decades.

Though they still exist, few successful comedians would make jokes trivialising domestic abuse and homophobic 'humour' is rare. 

But there is one minority in this country who still don't have equality and for obvious reasons can never have, in some respects. Children. 

No one with half a brain thinks children should have the vote or be allowed to apply for whatever job they want whilst they're still underage. Children should not be allowed to marry. 

But children should be entitled to respect.  They should be entitled to safety and justice. This is basic stuff that most people assume children have. 

But we live in a country where, in a BBC documentary, Tom Jones can excuse Jerry Lee Lewis's marrying a thirteen-year-old as the pious refusal to have sex with her outside of wedlock, and Cliff Richard on the same show can state that he didn't care who Lewis had married and wouldn't have missed Lewis's concert because of it. 

We live in a country where Phil Jupitus and Stephen Fry can laugh on QI about how the former's passport photo makes him look like a paedophile, when recent celebrity trials show that if one could tell a paedophile by looking at them, the public wouldn't have been so shocked by these high-profile arrests. 

In wider western society we even have a children's film (Megamind) in which a main character tells another "I'll be watching you like a dingo watches a human baby," alluding, for the 'amusement' of the adults watching the film with their children, to the tragic case of Azaria Chamberlain who was killed by a dingo but whose mother was initially blamed and jailed for the crime. 

Many will believe that my position is too drastic, leaving no room for harmless fun. But there were things in our far darker (yet recent) past that our ancestors thought harmless fun, and which we now would baulk at. And for those who use anti-child humour to allegedly poke fun at abusers or make the subject more open in society, perhaps instead of trying to find the fun in such grim situations, those in positions of influence should be lobbying for tougher sentences, making people aware that children are just as at risk as they've ever been, or raising money for charity. Someone else's pain is never funny.