"Children were subjected to such horrific and degrading violence that much of the detail was unreportable.” These were words written some weeks ago by Andrew Norfolk of The Times. They have been in my mind on and off ever since.

The crimes he was concerned with were those of six Oxford men convicted of multiple sex-offences involving girls aged 11 to 15.

Mr Norfolk is the journalist who broke the story of Pakistani sex abuse gangs in Rotherham, which gained him widespread opprobrium initially but went on to win him the Orwell Prize, the Paul Foot Award and the Journalist of the Year accolade in the 2014 British Journalism Awards.

He has reported on a number of inquiries involving sexual exploitation in the period since, including that in Oxford known to the police (and later the world) as Operation Bullfinch.

It must be presumed that Mr Norfolk knows what constitutes suitable content for newspapers. And yet I still find something unsettling in the quotation above. Why is the violence considered by him “unreportable”?

The newspaper-reading public is expected to tolerate the shock of Mohammed Emwazi’s murderous activities in the chopping off so many human heads in the name of religion. Some stories even appear to encourage access to the websites where these may be viewed. Why must we be denied details of less lethal, if still deeply objectionable, crimes?

It was the judgment of all newspapers, too, that we could bear to be told the full horror of what transpired on the flight deck of the Germanwings Airbus 320 as co-pilot Andreas Lubitz became a proved his claim to be remembered as one of his country’s greatest mass murderers (though here, of course, he faces some competition from figures of the past).

Timothy Leary once called death “the last taboo”. It is so no longer.