The only choice is to hope

THE news from Ohio, while sending reverberations of disbelief around the world, may offer a shred of hope to one mother and father many thousands of miles away.

For the three young women in Cleveland, missing presumed dead turned out to be just that — a presumption. A reasonable one, after a decade of being gone, but one that was wrong. They were not dead after all. “My name is Amanda Berry and I am here and I am free now,” said one. A neighbour commented to the young woman moments after her escape that she could not be Amanda Berry, because Amanda Berry was dead. And yet there she was, alive, free, breathing. Does this give hope to the family of another missing girl, albeit a younger, and far more defenceless, one? Madeleine McCann will be 10 tomorrow. Or would have been 10 tomorrow. It’s hard to know in which tense to write about her. Missing since May 3, 2007, a week before her fourth birthday, her disappearance made her the most famous missing person in the world, a child who is still featured regularly in newspapers, particularly the tabloids.

Her mother believes she is still alive.

The child’s disappearance caught international attention, because of who she was and how she vanished.

Here’s what Madeleine was not: At risk, in care, on a child protection list, neglected, abused, living in a chaotic family, the child of active addicts, or any of the other stuff we associate with kids who go missing. She did not fit the socio-economic pigeon hole for children who run away from dysfunctional domestic lives, or disappear under appalling circumstances.

Her family were not badly deprived or messed up; it was their very middle class normality which made their child’s disappearance headline news everywhere for so long. People could relate. It could have been our child.

In the years that have passed since the abduction on Praia de la Luz, Kate and Gerry McCann have experienced daily, unendingly, unimaginable loss.

In a recent interview, Kate McCann mentioned how she recently left her twins, now eight, in the back of the family car for the first time when she went in to pay for petrol in a garage. They were in her full view, but it was the first time she had ever dared to do it. Imagine normal parental paranoia, multiplied by infinity.

The McCann parents, in the midst of their anguish, underwent an extraordinary trial by media. The Portuguese police had no idea what had happened, and so blamed the parents. All sorts of smear suggestions appeared in print: That the parents had administered a sedative to make their children sleep so the adults could have dinner in peace, and Madeleine had died as a result of an accidental overdose. This was actually posited as a theory. And then there was the endless criticism that it was their fault in the first place for leaving their children unattended, despite checking on them every 10 minutes. That they were bad parents. In their agony, they were bad parents.

Kate McCann recently ran the London Marathon to raise money for the British charity Missing People, for whom she is an ambassador. In Britain, a quarter of a million people go missing each year. But perhaps none quite so traumatically as Madeleine, because she was so young and has never been found. Her family, unable to attain closure, still put birthday presents in her bedroom every year, a room which they have left unchanged since her abduction.

They have trained themselves to avoid morbid reflection as much as possible so that they don’t get overwhelmed by their feelings of helplessness, rage and terror, but because they don’t know what happened to their child, they cannot stop looking for her. Two years ago Scotland Yard stepped in, so that they don’t have to fund private investigators by themselves any more. But despite sightings as far away as New Zealand, where a recent DNA test showed that a child thought to be Madeleine was not her, the McCanns’ eldest child is still missing.

So are loads of other children, by the way. In Ireland, there are 114 missing children, most of them of African or Asian origin, 106 of whom were in State care when they disappeared. Do we know any of their names? Are there sustained and highly publicised campaigns to find them? Unfortunately not. In the UK, the number of children going missing is estimated at 140,000 per year, or one every three minutes. In the US, 800,000 children are reported missing every year — that’s 2,000 missing kids a day, mostly abducted by people known to them. Murder is rare, although sexually motivated abduction is not.

At the moment, a man is on trial for the abduction and murder of missing Welsh girl April Jones, 5, who was taken in Oct 2012. Her DNA was identified in blood and bone found in his home.

The killer of London schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 13, was convicted of her murder in June 2011, nine years after her disappearance. And the killer of the two 10-year-old girls murdered in Soham, Cambridgeshire in 2002 — Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman — is currently serving life imprisonment.

Their families know what happened to them, who did it, and that their murderers are in prison. Does that make it any better? Is the extinguishing of hope better or worse than the lack of knowing, the “void” as Kate McCann describes it?

Child murders in Ireland are quite rare. In 2010 when 12-year-old Dublin schoolgirl Michaela Davis was killed by a 19-year- old man, her death was widely reported as the first child murder in Ireland since 2005.

This is not quite true. On another day in 2010, four children — two sets of siblings — were murdered by their fathers, but given the ‘domestic’ nature of their deaths, there was less media fuss than about abductions by strangers in the case of children such as Madeleine McCann.

In terms of media attention, the only case which temporarily rivalled that of the McCanns’ was the disappearance of Shannon Matthews in Feb 2008 in Yorkshire. Shannon was 10 at the time of her disappearance.

It transpired that her mother and other family members had kidnapped her and hidden her themselves, in the hope of raising some reward money.

Unlike Madeleine McCann, she was from a chaotically dysfunctional household, her story serving to reinforce class prejudice as her mother was jailed for, among other crimes, perverting the course of justice.

Shannon’s whereabouts are now known only by the authorities, in a belated bid to protect her from the public, the media, and elements of her own family.

Another girl, Tia Sharp, 12, was reported missing by her grandmother in Croydon, South London last August. Her body was found 10 days later in the loft of her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother’s boyfriend, who had formerly been the boyfriend of Tia’s mother, was accused of her murder and goes on trial this month. All of these cases have had the same kind of nightmarish conclusion.

Meanwhile, a comparable case to Madeleine McCann’s is that of toddler Ben Needham, who disappeared on the island of Kos while in his grandparents’ care. He was last seen in what sounded like a safe place — the garden of the family’s farmhouse. Ben was almost two when he disappeared in 1991. He would be 23 now. No trace of him has ever been discovered, and his family continue to look for him, because they can’t do anything else.

Madeleine’s parents cannot stop looking for her either. They have no choice but to keep going.