TV ABUSE OF THE CHILD-ABUSE ISSUE

If you drew up a composite of a typical TV news story in 1984-85, it would be this:

Drug-addicted child runs away after being molested by parents who have Alzheimer’s disease and drive when drunk.

Trauma is big box office. Alleged sexual abuse of kids in particular--led by the bizarre McMartin Pre-School case--has become the media’s hottest ticket. The crush of stories on child molestation--and especially TV news mini-docs during ratings sweeps periods--reminds you of college students trying to stuff themselves into a phone booth.

A subject that was once a TV taboo has become almost TV chic.

“You can’t watch TV or read a magazine without being hit over the head about it,” says a character in “Kids Don’t Tell,” tonight’s CBS movie (at 9 on Channels 2 and 8) about . . . child molestation.

If that is so, if the subject has already had so much exposure, then why produce another TV story about it? Why is “Kids Don’t Tell” needed?

It isn’t.

TV too often transforms us into mental transients, giving us little to chew on.

So it was significant that TV’s first child-molestation movie--last season’s finely made “Something About Amelia” on ABC--again demonstrated the medium’s potential as a consciousness-raiser. Since then, even weekly series have dipped into the well--most recently the ABC sitcom “Webster.”

Although assembled by the usually adept producing team of Bob Christiansen and Rick Rosenberg, “Kids Don’t Tell” seems almost less about about child abuse than an example of movie abuse. Affording nothing new, it shows how a critical subject--even child molestation--can be trivialized through repetition. What’s more, the movie is slow and predictable.

The plot, as directed by Sam O’Steen and written by Peter Silverman and Maurice Hurley:

Documentarians John Ryan (Michael Ontkean) and Eli Davis (John Sanderford) decide to make a film about child molestation. Ryan is initially cool to the plan, wanting instead to make a happy film about sunsets. Yet you know that once exposed to the subject, he will become traumatized and obsessed. So much so, in fact, that he begins imagining molesters everywhere and fears leaving his kids in the presence of any adult.

“The suspect, he’s got all the rights--the victims, nothing,” Police Detective Rastelli (Leo Rossi) tells Ryan and Davis.

That is certainly a commonly held view, but it also is an oversimplification, as followers of the McMartin case will note. This is still a country where suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty and where every suspect is supposed to have the right to face his accuser. So the broader issue concerning child-abuse cases--and one ignored by this story--is how to balance the rights of the accused and the alleged victim without further emotionally scarring children through testimony in open court.

Unfortunately, the focus in “Kids Don’t Tell” is less on the victims than on Ryan and his wife, Claudia (JoBeth Williams), who has to put up with her husband’s irrational antics. Making the documentary turns Ryan into a mess. He plays basketball with the boys and comes apart on the court. He plays pool with the boys and gets drunk. He comes home, and Claudia rejects him. The action peaks the next day when Claudia asks her daughter, “Do you need more cereal?”

It’s that kind of movie.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t help the credibility of the story that Ryan and Davis are two of the dopiest documentarians anywhere. Can you imagine someone giving them money to produce a documentary that they haven’t even researched? Ryan and Davis act as if they’ve just flown down from Mars. They work by the seat of their pants, totally unfocused and with no apparent concept; they just sort of walk in on the cops and ask to see some molesters and victims.

There is one comically corny scene in which Detective Rastelli brings these high-powered documentarians to an area of rampant teen prostitution so that they can film interviews with some of the young hookers. He drops them off with their gear like children--and returns half an hour later. “Great stuff, Rastelli, thanks,” Ryan says.

You might wonder why Davis, who instigates the documentary and hires Ryan, is merely the audio man of the duo, doing little but holding the microphone. And you might also wonder how Ryan, who appears to be a struggling cameraman, can afford a swanky house (it would have to cost at least $500,000) near the ocean.

Oozing sensitivity, Ontkean is like an emotionally fragile, gooey-eyed Robby Benson. Williams has one good scene at the end of the movie. Like just about everything else in “Kids Don’t Tell,” though, it is too little too late.