Brits see themselves in parents' plight
Posted: Friday, May 18, 2007 9:36 AM
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London, England
By Chris Hampson, NBC News London Bureau Chief
What is it about some news stories that capture a nation's attention and have the public clinging to its every twist and turn?
Such a story has captivated the British media and its audience: the disappearance of 4-year-old Madeleine McCann two weeks ago.
Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann – both doctors in their late thirties – left Madeleine with her two-year-old twin siblings in bed in their holiday apartment in Portugal – a popular family-friendly destination for Britons – while they ate with friends just a hundred yards away.
Every half hour Gerry or Kate went back to check on them. They were sound asleep.
Then came the moment of horror that every parent in the world surely dreads: Madeleine was gone. No one knows where. No one knows how.
Did she wake and wander off? Or – as seems more likely – was she taken?
Media mayhem
And so, for two long weeks, TV newscasts, newspaper front pages, and web sites around the world have carried beguiling pictures of this pretty little girl.
Her parents refuse to come home until they find her. Every day Kate McCann goes to church to pray for Madeleine’s safe return and to seek what comfort she can find. You can see from her eyes that she is dying inside. God knows what the future holds for her and her family.
She and her husband talk to the media, every word edged with pain, as they try to keep the hopes for Madeleine safe return alive. It is haunting, disturbing, and desperate.
The public has embraced their cause. Some have traveled to Portugal to help with the search. Others sport yellow ribbons in support. And Madeleine's photo – downloaded as a "missing" poster – has been pinned up wherever volunteers think it may be of help, anywhere Madeleine may have been taken to.
Famous names – J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, and American Idol’s Simon Cowell among them – have contributed to a $5 million reward for her safe return.
And a special web site – www.findmadeleine.com – has reportedly had 40 million hits in just a couple of days, including from concerned folk in the U.S.A.
So what is it about this story?
For sure, Madeleine is not the only child to go missing. She's not the only child who may have fallen victim to predators.
But somehow this story has crossed a line.
Is it simply a phenomenon created by the voracious appetite of Britain’s round-the-clock news media that is reporting every moment of this story, so hungry for detail that at times it seems to suck the very air from around it? I don't think so. There's more to it.
In the U.K. one of the most notorious stories involving children happened long before satellite TV and the internet.
Back in the 1960s a couple of sadistic lovers murdered five children in the North of England and buried their bodies on moorland. Though others may have claimed more victims, the Moors Murderers – as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were known – became two of the most reviled killers in recent history. They still are.
What shocked then – and shocks us now – is how vulnerable children can be, despite the love and care of good parents. And how cruel some human beings are.
Sense of empathy
It has been a matter of impassioned debate that the McCanns – by every account adoring and devoted parents – left their children sleeping soundly while they dined at a tapas bar nearby.
Their grief at not knowing what has happened to their daughter is, I am sure, magnified a million times by remorse and guilt.
But many parents have been tempted to do the same. I would. I did. My kids survived.
And so we are watching and sharing this family's agony unfold in front of our eyes.
Although we don't know them, we find ourselves wishing, in many cases praying, for Madeleine's safe return. Every passing day becomes more desperate.
And each of us who has children of our own knows the one chilling truth that makes us part of this story: there but for fortune go we.
