Is it bad to watch Love Island with my daughter?

When it comes to social-care scandals, we are all by now wearily familiar with the one-bad-apple narrative. The blame for failings is invariably firmly placed with the quiet loner, the secret bully, the withdrawn outsider.

Then, the next platitude: once colleagues and line managers were alerted, they immediately stepped in to suspend the individual and take control of the situation.

So what to make of the criminal abuse of care home residents by more than a dozen bosses and staff who used them as slave labour?

In the course of four trials over this past year, a total of 13 people of varying degrees of seniority in Atlas Project team care homes have been convicted.

Courts heard that victims were forced to carry out chores for up to seven hours a day, including cleaning lavatories, laundry and gardening, six days a week.

Those who refused to comply were locked up, sometimes overnight, in unheated punishment rooms, without access to bathroom facilities.

One deaf woman with learning difficulties was locked up 200 times in two years; an autistic 25-year-old with a mental age of seven was locked up 36 times in a month for laughing or asking repetitive questions. Inhumane doesn’t begin to describe it.

My first summer job was as a carer for adults with special needs who attended a day centre in my home town. They would probably be called clients now, but back then we referred to them collectively as “the kids”. Less PC, but arguably more accurate. Although older, taller and broader than me, a great many of my charges were helpless as toddlers.

They also felt emotion every bit as deeply. They laughed until their bodies trembled, wept when thwarted, craved reassurance and were scared of raised voices.

The thought of anyone so childlike, so dependent, being subjected to sadistic treatment at the hands of those supposed to be looking after them is heartbreaking.