Thought Provoking Commentary

Our demeaning obsession with Madeleine McCann We've stripped her story of empathy, turning it into a cautionary fairy tale

Tanya Gold

Madeleine McCann is likely dead, say German prosecutors. They think she was killed by a man now in prison for rape, who was living in the Algarve when he took her. His name is Christian Brueckner and his face is as empty as you can imagine.

This may be, at last, an ending — or at least a beginning of an ending — to one of the saddest crimes in recent history. It is sad not just because a child is missing — a missing child is always a tragedy — but because, in its scope and its hysteria, the story of the loss of Madeleine McCann changed from a crime into a fairy tale: a cautionary story to be passed down the ages. It is a warning to unwary parents, stripped of empathy, because archetypes have no humanity. We do not think they need it. It became something for strangers to obsess on, analyse and, eventually, possess. This is not sympathy at all, but theft, and there is something ugly in it.

But, predictably, it rolled out. Yesterday, over 13 years after she was reported missing, her face was back on the front page of seven British national newspapers, pushing pandemic — and faceless tragedies — away. The photographs allow us to imagine an intimacy with Madeleine McCann. There are computer-generated photographs of her at every age, created to assist in her recovery: an eerie physical embodiment of the hope that she is alive. So, there were pictures and timelines and recaps and analyses; photographs of the apartment, the unlucky parents and the alleged abductor’s van.

I know too much about this crime. I know more than I want to. “The latest on Madeleine McCann,” says an email in my inbox, with appalling urgency. I don’t need the final part of this story. I do not feel, after everything that has happened, entitled to it. The only people who deserve an ending are her family. This story is not, I feel compelled to remind you, fictional. It has just been treated that way.

Gerry and Kate McCann paid private investigators to solve the crime after the Portuguese police botched it and gave up on it. (There was something to learn from this story, but it was prosaic, and for the Portuguese police to learn). Then they begged the Home Secretaries Alan Johnson and Theresa May to instruct the British police to solve it. Politicians have acknowledged, with resources, the importance of the story to national life. So have newspaper executives, who supported the involvement of the British police, presumably so they could write about it. Sentimentality and self-interest, here, are twins. Now this, £12 million later, is the result: a prime suspect in custody, who boasted of the crime to a friend. I don’t begrudge the McCanns this investigation. I would have done the same.

But there is something gruesome about the public response to this case; about the media coverage, which segued from hysterical to indecent to insane. Eleven years after the abduction, more than 100 tweets an hour were still attached to the hashtag #McCann. It’s for the parents, some say, even as they were considered suspects due to the incompetence of the Portuguese police, and successfully sued newspapers for naming them responsible for her death. I wonder if infamy was a price they were willing to pay to find their daughter, and if that compounds their tragedy.

The media obsession wasn’t to console the McCanns, who were, for a mistake – leaving Madeleine and her siblings alone in an unlocked apartment – condemned to private and public hell. I think it was to damn them, and soothe the rest, because our children have not been stolen. We imagine we would not be so stupid, or so careless.

How many idle and malicious words have been written on Kate McCann’s mistakes, morals and manners? Of her coldness and her beauty, which render her an unfriendly cliché? The father was considered “too corporate” – I think people wanted grief, they wanted “closure”– but the woman always gets it worse. There are no good mothers of lost children. She was damned for hiring PR consultants; for not crying on camera, on the advice of professionals, who thought an abductor might feast on her pain; for, in the end, I suspect, surviving. She was not the victim we sought; she was not pliant, or vulnerable, or broken enough.

And so, she was punished. Seventeen thousand people signed a petition requesting that Leicester Social Services investigate why the children were left alone; did they want her to lose her remaining children? Did they, in the thrill of mystery, forget that someone else — and not she — had taken the child? No, it was never condolence. It was a public expiation of shared fears, and a judgement of the parents. People read about Madeleine McCann for a jolt of terror, and to feel comforted. Because the children we love are here, and she is not. Our children are not safer because we judge Kate and Gerry McCann. It just feels that way.

There is an entire crime fiction genre dedicated to tales of missing children. I understand why people read them: not being the parent of a missing child will give you a happy day. People are entitled to read fiction, and to process their fears, but I cannot read them. I do not need them because I can imagine them. But they are not entitled to steal real children into fairy tales and parlour games and puzzles. This one — What happened to Madeleine McCann? — should not be played. But it will be when the next tragedy rolls along. Our fears for our children, and our capacity to judge those that expose them, are infinite.

If the suffering of little children interests people, I wish they would also read child poverty statistics. I wish that they would campaign, too, to reverse them, and pray for the return of all lost children. But that is too much to hope for. Reading about Madeleine McCann is easy; caring about children you have not been forced into imagined intimacy with by media cynicism and parental despair is something harder.

https://unherd.com/2020/06/the-madeleine-mccann-hysteria-will-never-cease/

one one side i can see what she means, but there is another side to this story too.

the massive media storm, that still end up from time to time started with the mccanns at the center, and that was way out of anything that could be called as keeping attention on a missing child.

pr guru's, to advise them, for things like interviews, photo shoots, photo making appointment, the we are there at that time.
but also visits to other countries, the european parliament, action during concerts, football matches.

was this truly because the public asked for it. i hate such remarks, because it is in reality never asked as a question of the public.

and the lines have been simple, most media attention starts of at the mccann family, the decided what got attention and in what way. and the public had to read it or not. many still had a paper in 2007, just like we did, we had two, dutch national titles, and you paid for it once a year, and there always been stories we read, read with hunger for more, but many we started to read and stopped and the next, and the next. but the next morning and evening there would simple be new papers with fresh stories.

they never asked what i wanted to read, they decided what was in it, and most was simply because people worked with the media to make these stories. there was a link to amsterdam with the mccanns, but we had not that amount of stories.
i had my holidays from the sunday may 6 in france and nothern half of spain, they had very little in titles as the figarom and le monde, sud ouest a more regional paper had little too. we always had 3 or 4 weeks worth of papers waiting until we got back, and there was attention, but not so much headlines.

but back to when this news broke to the world. we always looked at bbc text, just headlines, i cannot remember if there was already something there, our days started very early, but i remember the story got my attention during my coffee break.
a story of a break in with broken shutters, een broken open window, and a door fully open, and all it was was just one f.cking lie. it never happened, there never have been jemmied shutters, or broken open windows.

but on that first story we all felt bad for the parents, and the rest of the family, but i do not like it when stories are just lies, nothing else than lies. and that brought my curiosity awake.
and that saturday evening on the bbc news we got a bit of video of a a set of parents that told a story, and my trained gut and that of some others had that the same.

a kind of press conference without police or others who usually represent the people, was already strange, so it was a very strange story, i hardly got much news about it, and during the about 10 days in spain it dried mostly up, because we bought papers, a national and a more local or regional one for the weather forecast, and spain seems not to put such in papers like we used to. but el pais was not full of head lines so much.

but these kind of cases do make you curious, and can it be wrong to wanting answers to how it can be a nearly 4 year old girl was missing? such a young age, there can hardly be accepted that this girl had done that by choice, or truly from her own will.
and yes, i think we as the public, as humans need answers. this are things you need to learn from, to see it would not happen again, that is what feeds the most curiosity.

and many people found out this story was not one of the truth. and i have a problem with people who tell me you have to look for my child, but can not burden themselves with telling the true story, and couldn't not so much be bothered with searching by themselves. because all that was what brought out the stories, when was found out the children been left on their own, most will simply have lost their empathy for such parents.
and the media only had bits and pieces. when midsummer of 2008 the pj files been published and more and more got translated
we could see wityh our own eyes, how both these parents had not exactly help the search of their daughter.

people in the public do not like it to keep up empathy, when people only seems to investing in their own, and many times not even could say the name of their own child, that they need a interviewer to remember at the end of their words, that there was still a daughter.

and the story did not stop there, it hunted other people down, bad mouthed them, when they had questions about the lies already told. this story was no longer about one victim, that little girl called madeleine, many times by the way hpow they got attention in the media, but always with help of the mccanns, or their pr guru.
many of the people who have spend their holiday not with having a nice time but actually searching for their child. many locals took time of to search, all kind of people from police, the forestry , the fire brigades spend hours to search.
many people send some money, even if they had to left something out of their own lives, to help this family.

to see it ended up in the pockets of shady detectives and lawyers.

they offended the portuguese law enforcement and by that the portuguese people. the officers that asked how come you said this or that knowing that was not true at all, been burned at the stake and some still are.

the media often with the help of team mccann presented us the public with suspects, we do not mind it much if it are already crooks, but there have been innocent people under too. but most never been tried for this case, not even have ended up in the hands of the police, the police did not have anything, and they need a lot more than the media to suggest guilt.

still the majority of the public has interest in this case because of the only victim in it, a once almost 4 years old girl called madeleine.

and not all see the lies, the pretense, the me, me, me words of the parents. twitter has lost its most posters on hashtag mccann long ago, but the mccann supporters are usually not the best people that write empathy with capitals to anyone else as the mccanns. for years one half feeds the other half with often not that civilised language.

and there are still many who simply want answers to what happened with that little girl called madeleine. and for a lot of the the parents lost the right to empathy long ago, because the public are simply people and people reserve empathy for honest people who met hard times, the mccann family just wrote themselves from that list.

look, i can still find a little bit of empathy as long as i think they once loved that little girl, that the loss of madeleine must hurt, if they had or had not a direct hand in it, i don't think this was planned, so i can understand they will miss her, but i lost empathy very early on. because i have no heart that is big enough, and o mind that is foolish enough to feel empathy for the rest of the role they had in this case. even more because in itself it is even a mountain of things they had no need for, so my empathy i still can have that for that very small part is simply hidden very deep in the shadow of that mountain, one made from lies, me, us, we, and all the actions against others. they build that mountain with their own actions, bit by bit.

people lost jobs as a result of this case, people are made out to be fool, been thrown at with sticky mud. and that is still ongoing. i do not like them for that, i do not hate them, but there is a long road and a nice chunk of empathy is still not in sight.

now they had 17 years to look in their mind and heart to find the words of the truth, to ask others who told lies for them to open up too, but it is very silent, so there still is a once almost 4 years old victim somewhere out there, i do not think she ever reached that fourth birthday, but that needs the truth and if it is possible be done justice too.

and her name madeleine will sadly be always one of many, that have been failed by people who have made wrong and bad choices, and a society that often let is simply happen.

and looking in the case of madeleine, even as a role model for all missing children can be done aside of minding the lives of other children. at least some of them. but this case of madeleine is no longer only about madeleine, it is a long list of people who, just like her need an answer and justice too. both would end up empty handed when we stay simply silent.

Why Madeleine McCann was never just another 'lost child' story

Giles Tremlett - Fri 5 Jun 2020

A new suspect has reignited interest in her case, but the British media was hooked from the day she went missing

It is the story that never goes away. And why should it? The three-year-old girl with the smudge in her right eye would now be a British teenager, looking forward to another family holiday on a Mediterranean or Atlantic beach. Next year she would go to university, perhaps following her high-achieving parents to medical school. Instead, Madeleine McCann is frozen in time – the little girl who disappeared from the family’s Portuguese holiday apartment on 3 May 2007.

Madeleine’s disappearance is an almost unbearable tragedy. Those of us who watched Kate and Gerry McCann step out each morning from their Praia da Luz apartment to drop off the younger twins – Sean and Amelie – so they could continue the campaign to find their daughter, always saw that. Never in British journalism, indeed, have so many hardened hacks so desperately hoped to stumble upon a little girl – perhaps just dropped off alive by her kidnapper on a cobbled Portuguese pavement.

Otherwise, this is a tale uniquely shaped by British media culture. It is so British that the Portuguese media at first paid scant attention to the newest suspect, revealed this week. Motive, means and behaviour all meet in convicted German paedophile Christian Brückner – who, nevertheless, remains innocent until proven guilty. We know opportunity was also present.

When the Brückner news broke, the Portuguese press did not immediately show huge interest. On Thursday Público newspaper spoke of “the latest suspect” (from an already exhaustingly long list). On Friday it reported on how Praia da Luz just “wants the case to close”. People were obviously tired of an old story that still haunts the tourist resort, but which is continually given fresh life by British tabloids that jump on any new clue.

The Portuguese media are not callous. But they had moved on, partly in response to the heavy-footed British press and its mostly condescending attitude to the Portuguese people and police.

The McCann story, indeed, is also a snapshot of Britain and its poisonous media culture. By May 2007, at least 10 million Britons spent their summer holidays in Spain and Portugal. Almost 1 million lived there. Many showed little or no interest in their host countries. They brought, too, a degree of chaos. British tourists kept local police and emergency services busy by needing rescue from drunken late-night swims, overdosing, choking on their own vomit, fighting outside clubs, and jumping, falling or being pushed off balconies. Occasionally they stabbed or shot one another. In the worst tragedies, toddlers drowned in villa swimming pools.

A few years before Madeleine disappeared, a three-month-old British boy was found in a pushchair on a pavement in the Algarve’s main city of Faro. He had been dumped there just before his parents flew home to Gatwick. The Portuguese were shocked. British tourists were good for the economy; but they also did the strangest, most inhuman things.

UK tabloids lapped up these stories. Part of their readership was sitting on the beach, reading summer editions printed on Spanish presses.

The McCanns were not that kind of tourist. Kate and Gerry were both doctors. In fact they were the perfect victims: the blonde white girl with the professional parents. These, after all, were the people the media thought they were speaking to – white, middle-class families. But British children go missing more frequently than we would like. They rarely, if ever, get this much attention.

It is always, too, somehow more fascinating if the disappearance happens abroad. That taps into a very British fear of the foreign – and enables us to blame another culture. This was only too visible in the warfare waged between the British media and their Portuguese counterparts, and by sections of the police in both countries. Within days, Kate and Gerry had built a tight relationship with Sky News – Rupert Murdoch’s 24-hour service.

Sky catapulted the McCanns to the top of every news list. Teams of reporters appeared from the Daily Mail and elsewhere, as broadsheets played catch-up. I missed the first days, having written this off as yet another “child lost on beach” story, but eventually spent more than a month in Praia da Luz. That period ended when Gerry McCann drove his family to the airport early one morning, while half a dozen cars swarmed around him, bristling with camera lenses.

In between, as real stories ran dry, tabloid culture took over. A Daily Express reporter wearily explained to me that his editor expected a front page splash every two days. Negative stories grew, targeting the McCanns and the Portuguese police. The following year Express newspapers paid £550,000 in damages to the family. “The general theme of the articles was to suggest that Mr and Mrs McCann were responsible for the death of Madeleine … and that they had then disposed of her body,” the couple’s lawyers stated. The McCanns later became key witnesses to the Leveson inquiry on press misconduct.

The thuggery of mid-2000s tabloids has since emigrated (without journalists) to Facebook and social media. Conspiracy theories abound, fuelled by poisonous commentary and mad theories about “white slavery”.

Yet the tone was set long ago. It turned the Portuguese against this story, and exhausted the patience of people in Praia da Luz. When I called several of them on Thursday evening, they spoke of a tragic moment from a different era – and this new appeal relies on people recalling events, places, vehicles and phone numbers from 2007. So despite this being such a high-profile British story, it will probably be the Portuguese who, eventually, solve the crime.

Giles Tremlett is a correspondent based in Spain.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/madeleine-mccann-lost-child-new-suspect-british-media

When true crime films prove to be guilty themselves

Duncan Campbell

17 March 2019

As Netflix launches a series on the case of Madeleine McCann, how can we balance viewers’ appetites for the fast-growing genre against concern for victims?

Who is interested in true crime? “One imagines a furtive audience of sad saps and sadists, trench-coated lurkers and wan shut-ins.” So wrote Lorna Scott Fox a decade ago in an article for The Nation, which is quoted in Covering Darkness, Neil Root’s just-published exploration of the genre. They were both writing about authors of true crime books but the same could be asked of audiences for a new wave of television and film documentaries dealing with some of our grimmest cases.

The question is prompted by the launch of Netflix’s eight-part series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It was preceded in the public eye by the Oscar-nominated short documentary, Detainment, about the two boys convicted of the murder of James Bulger, and it will shortly be followed by a three-part BBC Four series on the Yorkshire Ripper.

Are they important contributions to our understanding of major crimes or prurient titivations, careless of the feelings of the victims’ relatives? The British fascination – or obsession – with crime has been a subject of curiosity for everyone from Dickens to Orwell but are we now saturated with it at the expense of the victims?

Madeleine McCann’s parents are not involved in the new series about their daughter, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007, and their former spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, told the Guardian this week: “Kate and Gerry didn’t ask for it and don’t see how it will help the search for Maddie on a practical level, so they chose not to engage.”

Why was it even made unless it was going to come up with some new information? Has there not been enough uninformed speculation?

James Bulger’s family had no involvement in – or knowledge of – Detainment, which is not an exploitative film but undeniably provoked anguish for the family. “It certainly wasn’t a career move,” its director, Vincent Lambe, told the Guardian. “I was told by everyone this subject wouldn’t make my career – it would break it.” Did he have regrets? “Only about not speaking to the Bulgers.”

The Bulger film coincided with judicial requests to have the identities of the two, now adult, culprits revealed. Last week the judge, Sir Andrew McFarlane, turned down the request relating to Jon Venables on the grounds that there was “a strong possibility ... that if his identity were known he would be pursued resulting in grave and possibly fatal consequences”. He was right. We now live in a climate in Britain in which lynch mobs would not be short of volunteers happy to appear in a true crime documentary in the role of violent avengers.

The makers of the three-part series on Peter Sutcliffe, on the other hand, are adamant that “the Ripper’s victims are at the heart of the series”. The programmes will be examining whether attitudes towards women at the time, particularly within the police, hindered the investigation, an issue explored by Joan Smith in her 1989 book, Misogynies. By chance, the series arrives on our screens close to the publication of Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Five, which is about the victims of the original Ripper 130 years ago, who were also often forgotten in the obsession with identifying the killer.

It may be impossible to make documentaries or write about horrific crimes without causing someone distress. Should that stay the hand of film-makers? No – but surely a basic rule should be to seek the understanding and cooperation of those affected. There are countless examples of true crime documentaries that are both riveting and thought-provoking, from the 1996 American film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills to the work in Britain of TV series Rough Justice and Trial and Error. There is no shortage of unsolved crimes or miscarriages of justice where the relatives of victims would welcome the expertise and investigation of a film crew, but there must always be some aim beyond vicarious thrills lest we find ourselves in that world of sad saps and lurkers.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/17/true-crime-films-guilty-of-audience-titivation-madeleine-mccann-james-bulger