Thursday 17 May 2007

So half of parliament and a whole load of sports stars are sporting "Yellow ribbons for Madeleine"

It's truly awful that four year old Madeleine McCann was snatched from the bedroom of her hotel room on holiday. It's appalling to imagine her fate (which may be worse if she is still alive), yet it is also quite disturbing that, out of the 77,000 kids that go missing in the UK every year, it is only the few that can check all the boxes that make it to the front pages. Cute? Yep. Blonde? Sure. White? Most definitely. Middle class? Naturally: a GP and a Radiologist for parents.

Scary things happen when young, blonde, white girls go missing: tabloids demand the whereabouts of known sex offenders be made aware to the public, vigilante groups start beating up pediatricians and relatives carrying on abusing, safe in the knowledge that it is only ever "Stranger Danger" that we are paranoid about.

Taking race out of the equation, why is it that an abduction of a beautiful, privileged child is more heartbreaking than that of, say, fat, ginger, tendency to nose pick in public, retarded offspring of a dustman and his wife who works at the local chippy?

http://missingkids.co.uk/missingkids/servlet/PublicHomeServlet

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