WE are all titillated by violence. Just look at the Christian festival just gone. Our most vivid images of Easter are the scourging of Christ, the crown of thorns pressed into his head, the nails thumped into his wrists.

Graphic expressions of religious torture decorate the walls of our most prestigious galleries. Many a painter has taken the martyr St Sebastian as his subject, his exposed flesh torn by a dozen arrows.

These pictures should make us recoil with horror, yet most scholars also detect erotic undertones. Pleasure and pain, all mingling uncomfortably amid the forceful brushstrokes.

Which only proves that the devoted like their slap and tickle as much as the rest of us. Our macabre fascination with violence is used to sell everything, including newspapers: the Evening Press story yesterday about an 11-year-old boy impaled on an iron railing is only one example.

In the entertainment industry, violence nudges sex as the hottest property. Millions of Hollywood dollars have been spent refining the special effect that makes a man's chest explode realistically when hit by rounds of an AK47.

But at least films are regulated. What about the violence in computer games? There was a 'real' version of Lara Croft pointing her gun and sports bra at us on page two of the Press again yesterday. Unlike the many learned members of her profession in York, archaeologist Miss Croft is the gun-toting sexual fantasy of a million teenagers thanks to the computer game Tomb Raider.

And music, too, is increasingly violent. Eminem is a tedious little nerd who has eked out what little talent he possesses by writing extreme, adolescent lyrics about rape and death. Worldwide success inevitably followed.

Much as we try to pretend they aren't, children are little savages. They love violence as much, if not more, than grown-ups. They certainly inflict pain more readily than most adults.

So we have the crunching slapstick of Tom & Jerry and the satirical duo they spawned, the bloodthirsty Itchy & Scratchy from The Simpsons. So we have the ridiculous popularity of American wrestling, where gross men in leotards bounce off one another for the childish audience's pleasure. So it has been for ever, from the Lone Ranger's pistol to the Dalek's ray gun.

All this blood and guts neither raises my blood pressure nor sticks in my gut. It is fantasy violence, just as many of us - surely I'm not the only one - imagine gruesome consequences happening to the rude shop assistant or arrogant motorist. Just as we would not carry out such silly threats, neither are we provoked into a frenzy of violence just because it explodes all over the media.

So why am I so concerned about the latest silly soap and serial storylines? In EastEnders we have lags with shooters all over the shop. In Coronation Street Toyah Battersby became the victim of a brutal rape.

It worries me because these shows ought to be a welcome break from the horror that fills the rest of the schedules. Soaps are meant to be "escapist normality": that is, normal life with all the very worst bits taken out. All the family should be able to watch them safe from the need of post-show counselling hotlines.

Like much of the London-based media, EastEnders appears to be in awe of those murdering toerags, the Kray twins. That is not family entertainment. And I pity the parent who has to answer questions about Toyah's rape from their seven-year-old daughter or son.

Now we learn that Casualty has filmed an episode featuring a rail crash eerily similar to that which killed ten at Selby recently.

Just as when Emmerdale recreated Lockerbie, that is a case of the broadcasters abandoning all taste to pander to our basest appetites.