You keep asking yourself: 'Why did they think it was all right to leave the children?'

29 April 2008
Liverpool Echo
Paddy Shennan

EXCLUSIVE In the concluding part of his series marking the first anniversary of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, chief feature writer Paddy Shennan hears how her grandmother is still struggling to come to terms with the decision taken by nine people on that fateful night.

"I COULD shake all of them, every single one of them," says Susan Healy, the mother of Liverpool-born Kate McCann.

It all comes back to that night.

That fateful, nightmarish night of Thursday May 3, 2007 - and that fateful decision.

The night that Kate and Gerry McCann have relived and regretted time and time and time again. The night their daughter, Madeleine, was abducted while they dined in the tapas bar of their holiday complex in the Algarve with seven friends.

No one needs to tell them they made a mistake. And no one could possibly punish them more than they have punished themselves.

The anguish and sheer frustration surrounding their fateful decision continues to be painfully felt - by both Kate and Gerry and others, including Kate's parents.

Mum Susan says: "I can read articles that say Kate and Gerry should never have left their children and I can accept that. You find yourself over and over again in your head thinking: 'Why did they think it would be all right?' "Why did they think - ALL of them - it was OK to do this?

"I think they were misled into thinking it was OK - but there was no CCTV, no security.

"There is this acceptance among couples with young children, like Kate and Gerry and their friends, that these are good resorts and safe environments.

"I could shake all of them, every single one of them."

She adds: "I understand Kate and Gerry and the others ate in a restaurant without their children. It's something we had to address and Kate and Gerry have had to address it every single day.

"But at the end of the day they thought they had taken adequate provision . . . no one looks after their children better than Kate and Gerry. That's why it's so amazing they can be in this situation."

And yet, fuelled by some bizarre behaviour by the Portuguese police and some wildly unsubstantiated reporting by some Portuguese newspapers, the hate brigade has had a field day.

Lurking on websites and often hiding behind pseudonyms, these pathetic and cowardly cretins have acted like judge and jury, after first putting the boot in on Kate and Gerry McCann - Kate, especially.

Their casual, callous cruelty and almost-gleeful responses to various developments in this heartbreaking and horrifying human tragedy have been outrageous, breathtaking - and utterly depressing. A little girl is missing, but all some want to do is bitch and gloat and goad.

Kate and Gerry McCann don't read the newspapers any more, but their families do and, sometimes, they see what has been posted on the internet by poisoned minds, simple minds and sick minds.

"It gets me upset from time to time, when I'm stupid enough to read it," says Kate's mum, Susan.

Kate's dad, Brian, adds: "We've had a couple of nasty letters here. I can't believe they would actually bother their backsides to buy a stamp and post the letter. They must be warped."

Why do they bother? Susan, sadly, probably hits the nail on the head when she says: "I think they just get a certain pleasure out of it. But it worries me that we have these people in our society - no wonder the world is the way it is."

And how does it feel when you see sneering journalists and internet hate merchants trivialising the case of a missing four-year-old girl by using the term "Tapas 7" to describe Kate and Gerry's friends, or "Tapas 9" to describe thewhole group.

Susan says: "It's awful. This is a group of friends who have all suffered a terrible trauma. They all did the same thing and what happened could have happened to any one of them. It's changed all their lives."

Then there's the derogatory phrase "Team McCann". Susan says: "That's horrible. It makes it sound like an organisation without feelings.

"And Clarence Mitchell (who acts as Kate and Gerry's spokesman), who is vilified very often in the internet forums, is a genuinely nice guy and a family man. Without him, I don't know how they would have got through this year."

From being portrayed as victims to villains and victims again, the McCanns have been given a rollercoaster ride by some newspapers.

At one point, they appeared to be sinking in a sea of defamatory, factfree fantasy reports - but the tide turned when Express Newspapers issued an apology and paid £550,000 into the Find Madeleine Fund.

Regarding damaging headlines, Susan says: "Every time it happens it's like a slap in the face. You have to stop to think 'Do these people not know what they are doing?' - not just to us, but to other people."

Susan stresses that while she doesn't feel she has changed in the past year, she has seen other sides to some other people: "I have seen lots and lots of good in people, but I think I always knew people are basically very kind and supportive.

"But I have seen a side of a certain amount of people - hopefully a small minority - I wouldn't have believed prior to this."

Regarding the overwhelmingly positive side, Susan says: "People have shown us so many little kindnesses.

As one small example, Brian took my shoes to be heeled and the cobbler wouldn't take any money - so we put it in the fund."

Brian adds: "We get an awful lot of support when we walk down Allerton Road, while people I've not seen for years have got in touch."

And Susan has a special request to make of those thousands upon thousands of ECHO readers who have been behind the family from day one: "Please keep praying for us and keep supporting us.

"I'd also ask your readers to remember what this is all about - a little four-year-old child who was loved and cherished and cared for.

"She was the greatest gift anyone in our family ever had. She is somewhere and she may be frightened and unhappy."

"There is this acceptance among couples with young children - like Kate and Gerry and their friends - that these are good resorts and safe environments."

Continue Reading... Labels: Madeleine McCann, propaganda

Nobody loves to torture a 'bad mother' like the British

14 April 2008
The Times
Melanie Reid

* The persecution of Kate McCann is the cruellest thing I have seen

How many centuries of accumulated spite and misogyny, I wonder, went into the latest twist in the Madeleine McCann saga. Did the British television presenters feel the remotest twinge of conscience as they sensationally reported - second-hand via a Spanish television station - the leaks from the Portuguese police portraying Kate McCann in the worst possible light, as a mother who had left her children to cry?

And did Britain's tabloid editors, themselves presumably sons of mothers and husbands to the mothers of their own children, flinch even a jot as they ordered the devastating headlines "Mummy, why didn't you come when we cried?" to be unfurled on their front pages alongside the face of the missing little girl?

I have seen, lived with and been party to many different kinds of sadism in a long media career, but I honestly think that this latest outbreak of malice towards Kate McCann is just about the cruellest thing I have witnessed.

Many serious writers have deliberately avoided discussing the case of Madeleine. Not because it is not serious, but because there was no enlightenment we could bring; nothing remotely we could add to the frenzy of distress, loss and bewilderment.

I have avoided reading or watching most of the coverage. It was too harrowing; the couple's grief too visceral to bear; and I could not stand the treatment they received from the macho, out-of-their-depth Portuguese police. For many of us, it was enough, briefly, to contemplate the horror of losing our own child. Anything more was prurience and soap opera.

But somehow we have passed a watershed. With this latest betrayal, picking deep at Kate McCann's emotional scars, we have regressed to the level of the medieval peasants reaching for the ducking stool. Although women suspected of being witches, I sometimes grimly think, received a fairer fate in their slow drowning than do modern women accused of being bad mothers, who are tortured to the point of mental disintegration.

And so it is time to speak out in defence of Kate McCann, a woman whom I have never met, but someone who is being sacrificed to society's tyrannical views about a mother's role.

Even in the enormity of her suffering it seems Kate McCann must be punished for failing to live up to idealised, romanticised - and wholly unrealistic - maternal standards. Her child cried the night before she disappeared. It is of no relevance to Madeleine's apparent abduction, but what a glorious stick with which to beat her already guilt-ridden mother.

Why do we do perpetuate this immense cruelty upon women? There is no justice in it. Kate McCann is just the latest in a long line of high-profile victims of the prevailing fatwa - that all mothers must be perfect, self-sacrificing angels. From Kate McCann to Louise Campbell (the mother of Molly/ Misbah, the Scots girl who fled to be with her father in Pakistan), to Britney Spears to Anne Robinson to Frances Shand Kydd, nobody loves to torture a perceived bad mother or a bolter like the British do.

Any sign of weakness, any suggestion of being "unfit", any hint that a mother is compromising her child by seeking small freedoms or equality, and the judgment of society is absolute.

Behind the famous names lurk an estimated 100,000 ordinary women who are separated from their children for various reasons - everything from abduction to the mundanity of being the main earner in divorce. They must simply hide their pain, die a kind of psychological death for their loss and exist in the shadows. Some, like Paula Clennell, one of the five women murdered in Ipswich, simply give up all hope when they lose custody of their children. Their problems are too huge; the hole in their hearts too big to heal.

The taboo surrounding bad motherhood has always struck me as tantamount to pulling wings off butterflies. Vulnerable women, already heartbroken by their loss, must then face devastating social stigma. If women are honest, they admit the maternal paragon does not exist outside Catholic mythology. We all fail, and frequently. But women, terrified of being stigmatised, are often not honest.

You will find out why the media torture Kate McCann if you read the online blogs: it is because there is an audience desperate, as far as I can see, to join in any kind of attack on a bad mother. Everywhere I looked I found a harshness and a pitilessness - from both sexes - towards Kate McCann.

Women sanctimoniously pressed their own claims to maternal sainthood: "My sons are teenagers and I still don't leave them alone." They were also horribly vindictive: "Sorry Kate, but you have only yourself to blame." They even, outrageously, cited God: "You can never replace the time lost with your children which God has blessed you with."

On the Daily Mail site, women criticised Kate McCann for being photographed smiling. "If I lost my child I don't think I would ever smile again," they declared pompously.

The Daily Mirror website spoke for itself: "Sadly, due to persistent and serious abuses, we will no longer be hosting discussions regarding Madeleine McCann. We do not take this action lightly... but the level of debate on the Maddy forums has gone way beyond what we consider acceptable, with several recent incidents of extremely abusive postings, both against fellow users and the McCanns."

A society, then, riddled with prejudice, which knows precisely how to attack women where they are most vulnerable, and thereby control them. I would like to reassure Kate McCann that she is not alone, but rather a member of a growing army of mothers who share her pain and her pariah status.

In a dark, lonely corner of purgatory, behind the sign "Maternal Failures Only", there are a surprising number of her fellows who offer her only understanding, love and support. And this is a purgatory, she will come to learn, that traps only mild sinners, the undeserving and the desperately unlucky.

Continue Reading... Labels: Madeleine McCann, propaganda