Deborah Orr: Our gossip-hungry culture is as immature as those it demonises

A shocking photograph this week showed pre-teenage children wrecking a car in a residential area, unchallenged because the watching adults were too frightened to intervene or even to call the police. Instead, one of them pluckily dared to shoot footage of the incident and offered it to the press, which obliged this active citizen by publishing it.

I bet those boys are sorry now that their vandalism has resulted in their picture being plastered all over the papers. They'll no doubt be full of shame, and not feeling remotely like bigged-up local celebrities, finally getting a horribly contorted and mediated version of the attention they crave and, as children, deserve.

How did we reach such a parlous state, whereby entire neighbourhoods and their police forces are unable to control the behaviour of small children, yet appear to believe that the problem lies entirely with the children and has nothing do to with any aspect of their own voyeuristic, selfish, detached, opportunistic, petty eye to exploitation?

It doesn't help that it is normal for the press to reward such behaviour, whether the pictures are of children committing crimes or adults doing so. The pictures of Kate Moss obtained by the Daily Mirror recently are a case in point.

The idea is that Moss deserves her humiliation because of her position as a "role model" who has let down her young fans. Yet Ms Moss did not ask to be a "role model" when she was recruited by an agency at 14. Instead she is a fashion model, and one with an enduringly racy image.

Nevertheless, responsibly enough, she has taken reasonable care in the past to make sure that any recreational use by her of illegal drugs remains private. Much as it might annoy people who think it hypocritical, the fact is that for the impressionable young people who admire her, her amoral habits would have been better kept secret, as they have been for some years.

I'm not saying that drug use is not sometimes problematic. Of course Ms Moss was being provocative in aligning herself so publicly with Mr Peter Doherty who himself flaunts drug use and finds himself much in media demand because of it. The relationship, and its flamboyant decadence, does suggest that they both have some troubles, and also points to increasing recklessness on the part of Ms Moss.

But the public humiliation she has been put through - and the prescribed performative arc she is now expected to undertake before she is "forgiven" - is nothing but a vile modern kangaroo court.

Any truly concerned citizen would have handed the video of Moss to the police, not to the newspapers. In a decently functioning society a public figure such as Moss would have been cautioned very quietly by public servants of dire consequences if she did not mend her ways.

A quiet caution would have been just as effective in checking Moss's behaviour. For her own sake, and for the sake of those young people we're supposed to have such concern for, it would have been better to give Moss a chance to sort herself out in private.

Instead, the private life of Ms Moss has been commodified as completely as her face and body have. The boys on the estate in this week's pictures were shown in a frenzy of destruction. The pictures of Moss last week - and again and again - showed her partaking in mildly self-destructive behaviour and signalled destruction to come, by a gossip-ravenous culture as confused and immature as the feral children, and the beautiful ones, that it seeks to demonise.

One crushing irony of the Kate Moss case is that her use of cocaine has alerted the police to the novel idea that Pete Doherty might also be a "middle-class drug user", along with Mick Jones, formerly of the popular beat combo The Clash. Who will they question next? Shane MacGowan? Hunter S Thompson, below, must be out there in orbit, relieved that he had the good sense to shoot himself before the Met started cracking down. What next? A hard line on upper-class drug use? No. The police doesn't have the manpower for that, do they?

Return of the epic western

All those despairing of how, in recent years, "the movies just got smaller", can finally cheer up. John Hillcoat, the Brighton-based director best known for Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead, has done what no one does any more and made an ensemble mood-piece that also happens to be an elegiac epic.

Set in Victorian Australia, The Proposition stars Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Danny Huston and Emily Watson. They're all great. But even they are blown out of the water by Guy Pearce, left, who plays an outlaw asked to choose which of his brothers should live, and which should die.

The Proposition, like a number of modern films, features extremely graphic violence, something I usually hate. But here it is a necessary element of a film that styles itself as an Australian western, and succeeds entirely in portraying male violence as a brutal spiral of retribution based on the inability to accept that all men really are equal. The film it most reminded me of is Clint Eastwood's The Unforgiven. Except that it's more strange, more beautiful and more profound. It's released in November.

Pedestrian power can be a scary thing

Intervening personally when a member of the public is out of order may not be such a risky strategy as people make out. In Brixton this week a man blundered into the path of a cyclist, nearly causing the guy to crash. Rather than saying sorry, he then shouted after the rider: "You wanker."

A bold citizen then took up the challenge. "No, mate," he said. "You're the wanker. You should wait for the green man!" He gestured into the suddenly empty road, where the red man was still shining authoritatively.

Suddenly, in contravention of the cautious advice of the crossing lights, a uniformed squaddie of impressive physical dimensions stepped out regardless.

"Or you could join the army," ad-libbed the chap. "Then you'll be a green man every time you get dressed and you can cross the road when you like."

Both men then broke into muffled laughter, accompanied by many of the rest of us patient pedestrians. Hilarity was only tempered by the fact that we each were perfectly aware that gesturing at big soldiers, gawping at big soldiers then guffawing with unrestrained laughter might not be the best idea.