What’s so special about Madeleine?

Putting aside the enormous elephant-in-the-room questions regarding the McCanns’ failure to take adequate care of their children or ensure that a satisfactory childcare service was employed to look after them, the abduction of young Madeline McCann is obviously a terrible thing and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. But after three weeks of media saturation I’m starting to become a little weary about the whole thing after sanctimoniously being asked over and over again to “pray” for her by politicians and celebrities, especially since the odds of her actually being alive any more are slim and get slimmer by the day. What’s needed here is some perspective.

77,000 children (yes, that’s seventy-seven thousand) go missing in the UK every year (source). That’s 210 children per day and nearly nine per hour. Why has Madeleine McCann been singled out for three weeks of media saturation? What makes her special? I’m not saying that she doesn’t deserve as much attention as possible in order to maximise the chances of finding her, but why am I not seing the faces of the other 4,410 children that have gone missing in the three weeks since Madeline vanished on all front of all the newspapers and on the nightly news? Why do they not deserve the country’s support? Why isn’t David Beckham pleading with us to find them?

I’ll wager that a fair proportion of them are any number of combinations of black, poor, criminal, immigrant, orphaned, from broken homes or working class. Not nice pretty little white girls from families who can afford to go on holiday in expensive resorts in the Algarve. We must look critically at ourselves when so much money, time and effort is spent on one case at the expense of the other 76,999 this year alone.

I hope they find her, I really do. But it’s unlikely and putting her face up on big screens at football matches “to raise awareness” (as if it were even possible not to be aware of it by now) isn’t going to make it any more likely.