Blonde, Blue-eyed girl still missing

Undesired Walrus

Penultimate Amazing
Undesired Walrus
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Apr 10, 2007
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Is anyone else getting thoroughly disgusted by the whole media circus surrounding the dissapearance of Madeleine McCann? Although I do of course see the irony in me creating a thread about it.

77,000 children go missing in this country alone every year. Why is it the media as a whole decide to choose upon just one of them each year? Any why is it that they always choose a pretty, white, blonde, blue eyed girl? Why is it the parents have to be wheeled out in front of the cameras every 24 hours making sure they look as upset as possible and are seen to be doing as much as they can so that the press and other ***** don't label them as 'bad' and possibly even insinuating their involvment?

Today apparently is the girl's fourth birthday, so one of her relatives is handing out missing posters ... at a football game in Scotland. How exactly is this supposed to help anything? The fact that these posters have been produced by the scottish Sun newspaper with their logo larger than the child's head obviously shows this part of the campaign is a horrendous and deeply cynical ploy by a major newspaper to get free advertising through a rather horrible series of events which is ****ing disgusting - much like the media's whole involvement in this case - nice how they label the portugese police 'incompetent' because they have a rather sensible policy of not telling the press details of ongoing investigations - so the press just badger any tidbits of news out of the suffering family.

And now, a £2.5 MILLION reward for information leading to her safe return? All of it of course donated very publicly by The Sun's sister paper The News Of The World and PR-hungry media mogul Richard Branson - clearly entirely in the interests of self promotion. Quite how this money will be distributed if the child is found safe will remain to be seen. I very much doubt it will just get donated to the local police force if they can find some suitable camera-friendly 'hero' to publicly hand over the novelty-sized cheque to.

The saddest part of this whole thing is that as in every case like this that gets such media attention and goes on this long, is that the abducter will have panicked long ago, and the child is almost certainly already dead. But I doubt the press give a **** about that as lond as they can keep us all drawn out and buying their crap.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
77,000 children go missing in this country alone every year.
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Where's 'this country'? 77,000 seems a very high figure for the UK.

I think you're probably right about the girl being dead, but I hope we're proved wrong on that point.

And on a lighter note, happy birthday.
 
I agree with you broadly about the futility of distributing leaflets in Scotland to help find a girl abducted in Portugal, but I think it's a push to suggest that, this isn't an unusual case. Young children don't "go missing" 77,000 times a year - that number includes, I would imagine, anyone under 16, or maybe even 18, who runs away of their own volition.

The abduction of a small child is particularly unusual, hence the media attention. The same thing happened with James Bulger, with the Soham murders, and would be just the same were the child not white, I'd guess.
 
That the press coverage, the support at the football, and the UK posters is excessive is not in doubt. But then neither is the tragedy of the missing child. Is this case more media-friendly than (say) a missing child from Easterhouse or Westerhailes? Yes. But also recall the level of media coverage when Caroline Hogg went missing. And Vicky Hamilton.
 
You really think 77000 little kids get snatched out of a locked building and vanish every year? I don't think so. Cases like this are extremely rare, which is why ot's newsworthy. I doubt the media interest has much to do with her being white either. Are you going to acuse her of the henious crime of being "middle class" next?

Having said all that, the media circus is over the top. I want to know that it happened and be updated with progress. However I don't need to see a BBC reporter covering the area in a helicoptor or the views of random Portugese policemen saying "we hope we find her". That isn't news.
 
Missing White Girl Drives Missing Black Girl From Headlines
http://www.theonion.com/content/nod...utm_medium=Embedded+HTML&utm_campaign=Widgets

CORVALLIS, OR— Becky Van Gelder, an 11-year-old white girl from Corvallis, was abducted from her home Monday, bumping 10-year-old Chicago black girl Tyesha Washington from the nation's newspaper headlines. "When a child is harmed, we all lose a small piece of our collective innocence," said USA Today managing editor Donna McCutcheon, who moved the Washington abduction to page 23A to make room for Van Gelder on the cover. "Especially when it's a young blonde girl like Becky."

 
HarryKeogh said:
Missing White Girl Drives Missing Black Girl From Headlines


CORVALLIS, OR— Becky Van Gelder, an 11-year-old white girl from Corvallis, was abducted from her home Monday, bumping 10-year-old Chicago black girl Tyesha Washington from the nation's newspaper headlines. "When a child is harmed, we all lose a small piece of our collective innocence," said USA Today managing editor Donna McCutcheon, who moved the Washington abduction to page 23A to make room for Van Gelder on the cover. "Especially when it's a young blonde girl like Becky."
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Yes, but - and correct me if I'm wrong here - Oregon is in America. So whilst it may be that the American press might be rightly accused if inappropriate emphasis in that case, it doesn't really help us with the UK.

I note, in passing, the wide coverage given to the Stepehen Lawrence inquiry.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
White guys killed him..
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..Because of the colour of his skin. The reason that murder got so much attention (compared to most murders) is the racist nature of the crime, and accusations that institutionalised racism within the police force hampered the investigation.
 
Happens everywhere.

I remember the day after the Soham bodies were found. I was driving to Germany on holiday, and had stopped at a motorway cafe in Belgium for lunch. I had my (Scottish) Sunday paper with me and opened it to read. A couple of German ladies at the next table noticed the front page picture but coudn't quite make out the headline, so they asked me what was the news. They were aware of the case, but the news of the finding of the bodies hadn't made it that far until my newspaper apparently.

Some shocked and sorrowful half-German half-English conversation ensued, but I was quite appalled when their main expression of shock was consistently "hubsche madchen!" They were quite clearly especially shocked that such a thing had happened to two white, middle-class "nice girls". I didn't actually say, what, would it have been OK if it was two little guttersnipes who'd been murdered, but I felt like it.

Rolfe.
 
The media circus surrounding this story is OTT but what's really annoying me about it is that every damn story has religion in it. Either the parents are asking the public to pray, they are attending yet another futile church service, or they are thanking the public for the 'spirituality' that has been sent their way (presumably via the prayers they earlier requested).

Really, that the media find it acceptable to promote religion when any sensible Catholic should be asking "what the hell kind of god allows this kind of thing to happen in the first place?" smacks of hypocrisy. Enough with the damn religous angle, please.

The criticism of the Portugese police is also annoying me. If you don't like the way a country's authorities may or may not handle a crisis, go on holiday in England.

Sorry to be snappy. You can probably tell that I have some anger towards the parents for leaving a three-year old and two two-year olds alone in a locked apartment. There are laws against that for a reason, and the list of accidents that could have happened to one or all of the children (fire, electrocution, drowning, injury, wandering off, suffocation, strangulation, death by falling, and so on) before you even get to "malicious action by a stranger" is massive. All my sympathy is for the child in this case, not the parents. I know that sounds really harsh but I've seen the burnt dead bodies of children who were left alone for "just half an hour" and frankly there is no excuse for negligence. To accuse the Portugese police of incompetence is more than a bit rich, IMO.
 
tkingdoll said:
Sorry to be snappy. You can probably tell that I have some anger towards the parents for leaving a three-year old and two two-year olds alone in a locked apartment. There are laws against that for a reason, and the list of accidents that could have happened to one or all of the children (fire, electrocution, drowning, injury, wandering off, suffocation, strangulation, death by falling, and so on) before you even get to "malicious action by a stranger" is massive. All my sympathy is for the child in this case, not the parents. I know that sounds really harsh but I've seen the burnt dead bodies of children who were left alone for "just half an hour" and frankly there is no excuse for negligence. To accuse the Portugese police of incompetence is more than a bit rich, IMO.
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I wouldn't do it, but I know of many people who have left kids asleep in hotel rooms with child monitoring on and the like. So I am loathe to criticise them in this respect.
 
Architect said:
I wouldn't do it, but I know of many people who have left kids asleep in hotel rooms with child monitoring on and the like. So I am loathe to criticise them in this respect.
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Why wouldn't you do it?

The McCanns had no child monitoring other than a half-hourly visit.

They were about 120 metres from their locked apartment. What would have happened had the fire alarm gone off and the complex evacuated?
 
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Because I'd worry. Anyway I also enjoy having the kids with me when I'm on holiday. But I reckon its a personal call.
 
tkingdoll said:
You can probably tell that I have some anger towards the parents for leaving a three-year old and two two-year olds alone in a locked apartment. There are laws against that for a reason
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Are there laws against that? I honestly don't know. I certainly have not seen a mention of these parents being criminally liable (but I may have missed it)

I would be surprised if there was not some law against leaving young children alone but I don't know where the lines are drawn. TIA
 
tkingdoll said:
The law disagrees with you.
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It's borderline. In the various UK legal regimes, there is a requirement on you to take appropriate care of your children - but is there a specific injunction against leaving them unattended for short periods of time? It can be argued that checking on kids every 15 or 30 minutes is reasonable care.

When our oldest was about a year old, it wasn't unknown for us (of a Saturday night) to pop through the wall to the neighbours' house for a glass of wine. We'd set the child monitor up and could here everything. We were, at the most, only 5 or 6 metres further away than our own living room. The alarm would be on. Does that qualify as reasonable?
 
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Architect said:
It's borderline. In the various UK legal regimes, there is a requirement on you to take appropriate care of your children - but is there a specific injunction against leaving them unattended for short periods of times? It can be argued that checking on kids every 15 or 30 minutes is reasonable care.
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Presumably this will be Portuguese law?
 
In the UK there is no legal minimum age at which a child can be left alone, but the 'common sense' approach is that the child should be old enough to understand instructions like where to phone you in an emergency, and that the child is happy to be left. The NSPCC issue guidelines for this, and they are often the basis for court decisions about negligence.

Essentially, they left their two-year old twins in the care of their three-year old.

ETA: Here's the NSPCC guidelines. Notice the first line is "NEVER leave babies or young children home alone, whether sleeping or awake, even for a few minutes"

http://www.nspcc.org.uk/helpandadvice/publications/leaflets/homealone_pdf_wdf36243.pdf
 
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