One year ago, Madeleine McCann was with her parents on holiday in Praia da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, perhaps one of the calmest and safest places in Europe, if not the planet. Nothing would have led the three-year-old’s parents to believe that there was any danger at all of abduction...and so the mistake was made to have dinner with friends and leave three children in a bedroom.
The eldest of these three childen was three-year-old Madeleine McCann, whose disappearance was the spark which set off an entire year of media interest and public involvement in a tragedy which happens more frequently than many think. Millions of children around the world go missing every year.
Why the tremendous interest in Maddie? She is (and let us suppose she is still alive and will be found, until irrefutable evidence to the contrary) a pretty little girl, white and blonde, from an affluent family with good-looking parents who look good on TV. If she were the daughter of a Cape Verdian immigrant lady with an unknown father, nobody except the mother would probably care less.
It was precisely this interest in the case which brought the question of justice and the media into the fray, exacerbating the supposed culture shock between the Portuguese detective force (Polícia Judiciária) and the British media, from the erudite former broadsheets down to the “Ten-breasted alien”-story tabloids. The word “supposed” is justified because it is not universally true that the Portuguese detective service works behind a cloak of secrecy – the Casa Pia case (paedophilia involving public figures and pupils from the Casa Pia Institution) is now in its sixth year, famous personalities have had their reputations ruined, smeared in the public image amid rumours galore – and the case has not yet been judged.
The same happened in the Madeleine McCann case – questions by the Press, many based upon sheer supposition, and half-facts leaked out by the police giving rise to escalating importance being attributed to gossip, where “someone said they heard someone say” becoming “credible” sources.
The result was that different newspapers printed what they managed to find in their desperate quest for information and the result of this was not pretty – cloudy “facts” about blood samples in the boot of a car, hair samples, allegations of sedatives being administered to the children, none of which has been backed up with hard and clear evidence.
In the absence of this, and with a glut of gossip, the sympathy for the McCanns turned to suspicion and culminated in the Portuguese police insinuating to Kate McCann that she had killed her own daughter. Unless this insinuation was based upon firm evidence, in which case it would have been the basis for a trial, why was it made?
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