Rihanna’s heavily-broadcast hit S&M makes Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax sound like a nursery rhyme.

The R&B star is far from coy when it comes to letting us know about her desires, and her legion of young fans are hanging on her every word.

Sitting in a suburban park one recent Saturday afternoon, as my nephews played on the swings, I noticed a group of girls who looked no older than 12 eyeing up some awkward-looking boys trying to get on with a game of cricket.

Rihanna’s song crackled into the air from someone’s ringtone and one particularly annoying girl was singing along – “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me” – as she strutted towards the lads.

In her mind, she was probably Rihanna or Cheryl Cole. In reality she was more like Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard.

Even more inappropriately, the S&M song accompanied a game of pass-the-parcel at a five-year-old’s birthday party my friend recently took her daughter to.

Another friend thought her ears were deceiving her when she overheard her 12-year-old daughter singing it. Asked why she was singing about chains and whips, she shrugged and asked “What is S&M anyway?”, prompting a conversation her mother didn’t really want to be having.

Jessie J’s sexually-aggressive Do It Like A Dude is the current playground song of choice for children at the primary school where my sister-in-law works. Gyrating like pole dancers, they sing lyrics rhyming ‘sucker’ with ‘mother******’.

Sexually-explicit pop songs are nothing new, but they used to be more subtle. Children are a lot more exposed to adult material these days, not least on prime-time family shows which have half-dressed female singers writhing around as if they were in an Amsterdam window.

Childhood is short enough – can’t children just be children while it lasts? Must they fall prey to over-sexualised images and lyrics that are either heavy with misogyny or promote young women as self-obsessed sexual predators?

An investigation carried out by Bradford Mothers’ Union found that 80 per cent of parents were concerned that sexual content – from the music industry, TV, the internet and pre-teen magazines – was too easily accessible by children. The charity’s Bye Buy Childhood campaign, calling on the media and retailers not to sell, promote or display goods of a sexualised nature to children under 16, wants the Government to introduce a code of conduct for age-appropriate marketing.

In an age when little girls are having spray tans at spa parties, and an eight-year-old is injected with Botox before a beauty pageant, I’d say a code of conduct is long overdue.