It doesn't matter whether 6-year-old Falcon Heene was in the balloon or not. He's become an international joke along with the rest of his family. That's a sad situation for a first-grader whose moment of network TV fame included becoming ill on camera --- twice.

The Heene family's startling launch to celebrity, via televised shots of their free-floating helium balloon, did not foretell the ongoing saga. At some point a judge may decide it was, indeed, a hoax.

Meanwhile, the media's unrelenting gaze is on a small boy who said, quite plainly, "...we did it for the show." That's a perfectly reasonable comment by a 6-year-old well-versed in reality TV.

As a Colorado sheriff said: on the bizarre meter, this one is a 10.

Yes, but Americans still like to peek through television behind closed doors, even if young people are involved.

I wonder if we've forgotten that children are more than just short people. While the world of electronic information and entertainment reaches deeply into their psyches, children are still fragile and innocent beings. They are neither property nor props in the world of adults, but separate individuals full of promise whose fragility and innocence are easily destroyed.

We understand that in a public, legal way. In most American towns you'll get to meet the local constabulary if you sneak into a children's pool or museum unaccompanied by a child. If you take photographs of little ones on a public beach, you'll surely find a lifeguard next to you quite quickly. But taking photographs of children with their parents' permission seems OK.

Some years ago a university communications professor insisted to me that Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of a little girl wearing a dress, but no underwear and posed with her legs spread apart, was "art." I argued (to no avail) it constituted child abuse at least, if not pornography.

Not long ago, the Tate Modern, the London gallery of modern art, withdrew a photograph of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields standing naked in what appears to be a brothel bath, her face heavily made up, her body oiled. Scotland Yard said Richard Prince's 1983 photo, as well as exhibit catalogue reproductions, violated obscenity laws. Prince's photo of a photo (the original was taken in the mid-1970s for Playboy magazine with Shields' mother's consent) is called "Spiritual America." Shields' mother wanted to make her daughter a star.

The Shields photo has been exhibited in New York's Guggenheim Museum and in Minneapolis' Walker Art Center. Is it art? It is a photograph, not a painting, and we know for sure which pre-pubescent girl posed for it. It was at the center of a fruitless lawsuit years ago by its now-adult subject.

Where once it was photography, now it's world-wide video, up close and painfully personal. We really have become a nation of voyeurs. And, TV reality shows include, of course, the children. The patently unappealing program "Wife Swap" is where the Heene family first met their personal idea of fame. Twice. They fed into a disgusting industry at the bottom of a grimy ratings pool filled with left-over slime of other's embarrassing moments.

What drives all this? What drives people to exploit themselves and their children? Are they, and by implication we, so fearful of annihilation that every burp and whistle needs to be preserved? For what?

We are in the midst of an egocentricity pandemic. You'd think at least we'd figure out how to protect the children.

The law alone is not enough. The legal system did not help Brooke Shields. While not on display in London, that photo is still out there. The law will mop up after the Heenes, but Falcon's history is recorded.

I am not sure I know the answer. But I know we have to ask the question.

Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.