Shannon,

With two small children I watch the continuing saga of the ongoing treasure hunts for these two girls in horror. In one corner a little girl left alone at night in a foreign hotel room with two baby siblings goes missing and despite a huge worldwide media campaign, she remains lost to her parents who have themselves been suspected of involvement. In the other corner, a slightly older missing girl is found but then a number of relatives – including the mother who reported her missing – are being questioned about their involvement in the case. Child abductions aren’t new, but the way parents and media can get information out to the public and ask for help is far improved on what it used to be. In real life you can’t have give the victim a face lift that makes them unrecognisable, so there is a chance they will be found. Unfortunately cases like these two young girls are more likely to create a certain apathy towards future missing kids simply because of the police involving the parents in such a negative way. Although Madeleine’s parents have been cleared of involvement (although the friends they dined with that evening are still to undergo further questioning), Shannon’s mother has been remanded thus implying that she was in some way responsible for what happened to her daughter. I confess to being somewhat confused to what’s going on in this particular case – Madeleine’s is far more straightforward, although sadder because of her continued disappearance.

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What troubles me however is that if something were to happen to a child of mine, would the media turn its attention from helping me to find my child, or would it use the Shannon case as an opportunity to run our family through the mud? Would the public rise to the challenge of finding our child, or would they shrug and say “Remember that Shannon case; it’s probably the parents behind this one too.”

Too often we get desensitized to things because of excessive media attention, things like changing your gender, breast enlargements and anorexia have become normal. I fear that this will happen in the case of missing children because of the way the McCann’s have flooded the media with Madeleine’s story, and the way that the family seems to be involved with the Shannon story. I don’t blame the McCann’s – if it were my little girl I’d be doing my best to make sure that the world knew what she looked like and constantly doing what I could to keep her in the media’s eye too – but I am a little worried that the public will stop caring and begin to think “Oh another child missing. What a terrible world.” And then forget all about it. If the public don’t care, the media will stop the anxious update reports, and then all the technology in the world won’t help find these children because there’ll be no-one looking.