We can't blame popular culture for society's ills. Nor can we ignore it

We have seen an outburst of juvenile gun crime, a row about the use of dangerously thin models to sell clothes at London Fashion Week and a damning report on the welfare of British children. Disparate as these issues are, they are linked by one, powerful element: our popular culture.

Those who work with children suggest that gun crime among young boys and eating disorders among young girls are being stoked by the way the media glamorises certain lifestyles and images. Teenage girls want to emulate the women they see in magazines and on advertising billboards. This has made a generation of young girls unhappy with their bodies. Meanwhile, music such as gangsta rap has glorified violence, misogyny and homophobia. Many young boys regard its stars as role models. Some even go as far as embracing the gangster "lifestyle" themselves. There is a host of other malign influences on young people, too. Video games are often disgustingly violent, helping to desensitise children to the pain of others. There is also unease over the levels of casual and sadistic violence in film and television.

It would be quite wrong to suggest there is a direct link here. If such influences were weeded out tomorrow, does anyone seriously believe problems such as youth crime and anorexia would instantly disappear? This is the trap that cultural conservatives have often fallen into in the past, heaping all the blame for society's moral collapse on artistic trends they dislike. Those of a liberal persuasion have instinctively rejected such hysteria, usually rightly. And it remains true that social problems such as gun crime have as much to do with deprivation, social breakdown and the drug industry as music videos and glossy magazines. But liberals have also been guilty of failing to grasp the degree to which the signals from popular culture are reinforcing negative influences on our society, and especially on our children.

Popular culture is much more powerful today than it used to be. Technology has been revolutionised. Children today are influenced by the outside world through the internet and mobile phones, as well as TV. And advertising, which is hugely sophisticated, is often deliberately targeted at children. Young people today are living in a very different sort of media world from the one that existed for those who grew up even a decade ago. Of course, most are perfectly able to deal with it. But there seems to be an increasing number who are not. This is at least one of the reasons for the disconcerting levels of unhappiness among British children identified in the latest Unicef report.

The most difficult question, as always, is what is to be done. State censorship is a blind alley. It is impossible for a free society to impose statutory restrictions on cultural expression. Depictions of sex and violence in films can be essential to the artist's vision. The same is true in music, perhaps even computer games. Unsavoury material is often as much a reflection of what is going in a society as a cause of it. Censorship is also likely to prove counterproductive. Another result of new media technology such as the internet is that proscribed material will always slip through the censors' fingers.

The only serious way forward is through the promotion of what has been termed "corporate social responsibility". Those in positions of influence and power in music, film, advertising, fashion, publishing and retail must acknowledge that they have a duty not to exploit starvation, violence, misogyny and the like for commercial gain. The alternative is to play a role, however slender, in fanning the flames of bigotry, crime and childhood unhappiness.