Rush to vilify in episode that is far from clear-cut

Whenever a child dies in the circumstances that little Rehma Sabir did, there is always this stampede to vilify.

It happened all those years ago in the Louise Woodward case with the Americans deriding the English au pair as an “evil nanny” more concerned with her social life than the child in her care, while the British media sought to demonise the parents of baby Matthew Eappen as status-driven, selfish yuppies more focused on career advancement than the day-to-day care of their infant son.

In the past 48 hours from Boston to Dublin to London, we’ve seen all the CSI fans and armchair psychologists at it again. “Oh it’s definitely McCarthy-Brady, look at her record, she had a drink problem”, or else “Come on. How could decent parents not have noticed all those breakages over the past two months unless they were abusing her?”