There was a programme on Channel 5 this week that highlights an unlooked-for result of our national terror of being accused of being a paedophile.

Back in the 60s, when I was studying law at a college in Bayswater, I was spending an afternoon with my law books in Hyde Park. I saw a little girl distressed and crying, and asked what the matter was. She told me that she had lost her mummy. I took her by the hand and said I would help her.

After some minutes of searching without success, I spotted a policeman and went over with my little friend to enrol his assistance. He took charge and I can only assume that he eventually reunited her with her mother. I had no qualms back then in thinking that was the right and only thing to do. Certainly, the possibility of being accused of abduction and worse never crossed my mind as a valid reason not to help the child.

This week’s programme Little Girl Lost showed us child actresses aged seven and five standing alone and forlorn near Victoria Station, as over 600 adults passed by, many giving each child as wide a berth as possible, before one woman in her 70s finally checked on the well-being of the five-year-old.

The reason for the 600 non-Samaritans couldn’t be clearer.

For some it may have been a selfish desire not to get involved in the hassle of stopping what they were doing to help, but I suspect that most people today would be reluctant to engage with a young child in case it might be misinterpreted. And that is a terrible indictment of our society.

In my lifetime, incidents of child abduction and murder by strangers have not changed from around six or seven a year. That it happens at all is sickening and vile, but the threat is clearly diminishing as the population has grown considerably during that time.

But we are all bombarded with defensive rules and regulations that result in a kind of mass paralysis of the decent human behaviour those rules are trying to safeguard.

I would do the same today as I did 50 years ago. I might try to enlist the help of a female passer-by quickly to protect myself (sadly) but that would only be after I had tried to reassure and secure the safety of the child.