True enough, you can go back through history and find people writing how things are getting wilder and wilder. But if you look closer you tend to find it's not a steady development in one direction, it goes in cycles. You get a permissive period that lets things out, and then a repressive period that winds them in again, and so on.

I imagine it won't be long and we'll have relatively repressive period again.

For example, I don't think it is going to be long at all before the fears about child abuse and so forth will give rise to a fairly savage social and cultural crack down on all this sexualisation of childhood stuff.

One thing that is perhaps new to this generation (meaning the last twenty or thirty years, but increasingly so) is the way in which isolated episodes and tragedies, which have probably always happened, get brought to all our attention so vividly and persistently, giving us a false impression of the balance of dangers in the world.