Slumdog Millionaire, winner of four Golden Globes, drops its audience into the slums of Mumbai.

Slumdog Millionaire, winner of four Golden Globes, drops its audience into the slums of Mumbai. Director Danny Boyle has viewers sprinting along in a chase scene every bit as breathless as the one at the start of Train-spotting. We run among a gang of gleeful urchins, fleeing from an angry policeman through alleys and over shanty-town roofs. From beginning to end, Slumdog Millionaire moves at whirlwind speed through a vibrant kaleidoscope of landscape and personalities.

I emerged from the cinema feeling mildly euphoric. The Edinburgh night seemed cold and monochrome after the heat, colour and tumult of Mumbai. My daughter, who'd seen the film in London, rang when I got home. "Wasn't that a feel-good film," I said. "A triumph over adversity."

"Weren't you upset by the child abuse," she asked. That's when I remembered the child abuse; and that's why I'm feeling uneasy about my initial reaction to the film as well as its Golden Globe success.

Slumdog Millionaire traces the life of Jamal, an orphan from the streets, who has reached the penultimate question in India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He is accused of cheating. As he recounts how he knew the answers, his life story unfolds.

By the time Jamal is about five years old and his brother about seven, they are left to survive as best they can by scavenging and theft.

We join their journey through a series of random, brutalising traumas that shape their fates. I can recall only one occasion when they were treated with gratuitous kindness by an adult - and that turned out to be fuelled by evil intent. A child is blinded at one point because blind beggars earn three times more than the sighted. Our tiny hero is threatened with "having his eyes removed with a spoon". How could I have forgotten this two hours later?

When a child was tortured in A Cook, the Thief, His Wife and her Lover back in the 1990s, I had to leave the cinema. But in Slumdog the moment twirls past, along with hunger, thirst, kidnap and the grooming of a girl for prostitution.

Boyle could have made it a cautionary tale or a morality tale. Curiously, Slumdog is an engaging romp.

The pace moves at a Bollywood beat so that we pass over and through shocking events at speed en-route to a heady conclusion. Mumbai offers an exotic, ever-shifting backdrop of colour and life where poverty is ubiquitous and picturesque; with never a fly or a rat in sight. As a result the deeper significance of what we have witnessed is almost lost.

Is it Boyle's failure to emphasise the child abuse that had me leaving the cinema almost forgetting it, certainly not dwelling on it? Or is my blunted response a reflection of the frequency with which the subject now appears? Have I grown accustomed to seeing it dramatised? This is what concerns me.

When I was a mother of under 12s I became acutely aware that every video I hired appeared to have an obligatory sex scene. Is the film industry now feasting on child abuse in the same way? Is the brutalisation of children this season's entertainment must-have?

It comes into Angelina Jolie's film, Changeling - the dramatisation of a true story surrounding a missing child. The plot focuses on the way the mother was treated by her local police force. Only towards the end do we discover the horrifying fate of the child.

In The Kite Runner, one boy is raped and another is held captive as a sex slave. Gone Baby Gone centres around, yet doesn't focus on, a neglected child.

And we can expect more. Misery memoirs may have peaked as a literary genre but the latest self-styled detective on the best-seller block is Lisbeth Salander, otherwise known as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The novel by Stieg Larsson sold six million copies and is the first of a trilogy. Its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire came out at Christmas. A film is a near certainty and Salander's childhood won't disappoint. It landed her in a padded cell when she was still 12 years old.

You might say, with justification, that art is just reflecting life.

Small terrified faces peer from our newspapers on a daily basis. Madeleine McCann is still missing, Baby P is dead and on Sunday a newspaper carried case histories of dead babies - two killed by a drug overdose, one found dead in bed with a drink-addicted mother. In modern India, children are still sold into prostitution by their parents. Many are orphaned and subsist on the streets, prey to every form of exploitation. Some really are disfigured before being sent out to beg.

Doesn't it therefore follow that we should have this unpalatable truth brought home to us through film and literature? Popular culture has a greater reach than dry statistics. Why not use it to drag the horror into the light of day?

It's a simple question with a complex answer.

The depiction of exploitation, cruelty and abuse can educate. When it is presented in a way that opens the eyes of the public, it is a powerful force for change.

Look at Dickens. He ripped back a veil to show the plight of children in Victorian England. But he made the children his heroes and heroines. We all went hungry with Oliver Twist and shared David Copperfield's sense of abandonment as he waited for a thrashing from the sadistic Mr Murdoch.

Focusing in an empathetic way on the plight of victimised children has validity. But it is verging on immoral to incorporate their abuse into general entertainment as a run-of-the-mill sub-plot. The added danger is that a violation of trust that we regretfully accept as too common in real life will start to be viewed as normal.

To see the neglect and brutalisation of children depicted frequently and without emphasis might even bring pleasure to minds already twisted. It might bring the comfort of numbers to those guilty of neglect and violent or sexual assault. Could there be a greater disservice to child victims?

I am not calling for censorship. I'm not calling for restrictions on writers and film-makers. I am calling for a responsibility check. We all regard as pariahs those who make a profit from the misery of children. Maybe it is time for the entertainment industry to ask itself if it, too, is cashing in.

In Trainspotting, Boyle was accused of glamorising heroin addiction. It was unfair. The film may have started out on a glamorous note but is soon descended into gritty reality - even taking its audience down a lavatory pan. There were two horrendous deaths. The fate of addicts was writ large. Slumdog Millionaire is a mirror image. It opens with grit and at the end gilds it with glamour.

If only life was like that for the real Jamals.