Never Coming Home

This won’t win me many friends, but truth and sanity are more important in life.

The plight of missing British toddler, Madeleine McCann, is very sad and all but the coldest of hearts would wish for her safe return. However, when newspapers and media organisations make the idiot and selfish parents out as the tragic victims, it is sick, sensationalist and irresponsible.

When you go on holiday, you tend not to leave your wallet or passport in your unlocked hotel room- not just because you suspect the staff of ‘being shifty’, but because you know that some things are important, and worth making sure they are safe. However, if you leave your children alone in the apartment, and they go missing, £2.6 million will be stumped up for her safe return.

On the evening of Thursday, 3 May 2007, four-year-old British toddler Madeleine McCann went missing from the holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Algarve in Portugal, which she was staying in with her parents. I am not heartless, and I am not suggesting that we should feel anything other than upset over a child that has lost their parents. When you are four, you are terrified if you lose your parents in a supermarket for even two minuets. However, the central point is that her parents left her alone in the apartment whilst they had dinner, and that is inexcusable.

We are told that there was a baby-sitting service together with a ‘dining-out crèche service’ in the evenings for children aged four months to nine years - parents eating in the resort’s restaurants drop the children off and pick them up later - but the McCann’s did not use these facilities. Why not? The fact that there was an option to leave children in a crèche whilst you had dinner shouldn’t even come into it though- you shouldn’t leave your children unattended in an apartment ever, certainly not with the patio doors unlocked.

If a chubby ginger-haired boy from Manchester, (mother on benefits, father in prison), had gone missing in Portugal the papers wouldn’t care. David Beckham would not have made an emotional, (if infantile), plea for her return. But Madeleine is blonde, her parents are doctors, and middle class. Welcome to Journalism.

The Facts

• It was a toddler, and toddlers of both genders have an aww factor.
• It was a British child and the UK have journalists with an investigative tradition who know that kids sell papers/attract viewers.
• It happened in another country so the international dimension adds intrigue.

I am not the only one to think this, in The Times, Matthew Parris suggested that MPs wearing yellow ribbons was mawkish and an attempt to tap in to the emotions of the mob. On 19th May, The Guardian described the public reaction as hysteria and drew a parallel with the response to the News of the World’s anti-pedophile campaign.

The Facebook group Find Madeleine has 99,233 members, which includes many friends of mine. How many of them are actively trying to find her? Will whoever has her be swayed by the large number of people touched by this event? One child disappears every six hours in South Africa, according to figures released by the Police Missing Persons Bureau.

There were 798 child abductions in Britain in the last period for which figures are available (2003-4), of which most were intra-family but 68 were by strangers. Of these, a majority were quickly and quietly resolved, by information being available and acted on before the captor realised. Twenty-five of them took longer, in addition to dozens from preceding years. Since the disappearance of Madeleine on May 3, another 450 young people have gone missing in Britain. While many are teenagers, none has received anything like the attention given to the McCanns.
The Guardian

One girl goes missing because her parents desire to have a meal came before the welfare of their children- and you feel upset and sad. So you join Facebook groups, and send emails and feel good about yourself because you have ‘done your bit’. But you know something? Whilst you sit there in the warm glow of having joined a group of other people who also feel sad about the cute little girl, you are wearing clothes that had probably been made by a child the same age as Madeleine.

127.3 million children aged between 5 and 14 are child workers in the Asian and Pacific regions. An estimated 218 million children aged 5-17 are engaged in child labour. These children make your clothes for fractions of pence, and they are the lucky ones. Some 126 million children are believed to work in mines, are working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or working with dangerous machinery.

Millions of girls who work as domestic servants are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked, forced into debt bondage or other forms of slavery (5.7 million), into prostitution and pornography (1.8 million), into participating in armed conflict (0.3 million) or other illicit activities (0.6 million). However, the majority of child labourers 70 per cent or more work in agriculture. Even more cheerful statistics about child abuse can be found at Unicef.

So maybe Madeleine isn’t all that special, and maybe there are more important people to worry about. Maybe you will learn that children are not disposable, if you choose to have a child- you take care of them, because they are more important than a peaceful evening with a bottle of wine in the beautiful Portuguese sun.