Comment Madeleine, ‘missing white girl syndrome’ – and the heirachy of ‘ideal victims’
demonstrates. We even make judgments about the characters of missing children, implicating some in their own victimisation while continuing to highlight the innocence of others.
Shortly after 13-year-old Milly Dowler went missing in 2002, a body was found at an abandoned cement works near to Tilbury docks.
It soon emerged that the body was that of 14-year-old Hannah Williams.
But Hannah didn’t generate any more than a few column inches in the inside pages of our newspapers. She was presented as culpable – she had ‘run away before’.
This, combined with the fact that she had been raised by a single mother on a low income highlighted the runaway narrative in which she’d made a decision to leave and quashed any notion of her having been taken away or taken advantage of. Her background denied her the status of an ‘ideal victim’ worthy of our sympathy. Her name soon faded into the ether.
Writing about Hannah’s case in 2002, Martin Bright argued: “There are certain rules in the missing person’s game. Don’t be a boy, don’t be working class, don’t be black. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drugs problems, forget it”.
Sadly, 15 years on, these comments are still all too accurate.
Madeleine disappeared at the dawn of the social media era. Her image has become iconic. The case provides fertile ground for online gossip and all too often defamation. Madeleine’s case is hungrily consumed like a long running crime drama. But do we really want to know what happened? I would argue that in our contemporary ‘wound culture’, no – some people don’t. Speculating about what happened and whodunit has become macabre entrainment.
‘Wound culture’, Mark Seltzer argues, describes a pathological public, one drawn to the trauma and suffering of other people.
Culture implies something learned, shared and transmitted – something that we do collectively, something that brings people together. Essentially we gather around other people’s misery.
Ask someone at the bus stop or in the pub about their views on Madeleine’s disappearance and many will gladly chat away for ages.
Madeleine has gone from missing girl to leisure activity in the depressive hedonia of the 21st century – a distraction from the mundane realities of our everyday lives.
In our collective obsession with Madeleine’s disappearance and the noise generated around the case, we have stopped seeing her for what she is – a little girl who disappeared.
In so doing we have sunk further into our state of interpretive denial about other missing children.
We know other children go missing but we construe their disappearances in ways that justify not caring about them. They ran away. They chose to disappear. They were trouble. They came from ‘challenging’ circumstances.
But let’s face facts – a missing child is a missing child.
All missing children matter, all missing children are vulnerable.
So what can you do? There are many ways to help. Support charities like the NSPCC, Barnado’s and the Children’s Society, find a case of a missing child and raise awareness on social media.
Just as Madeleine didn’t vanish off the face of the earth neither did these children. They are not just missing but missing from the public consciousness. That’s the shameful reality here. Let’s start to change it. Dr Elizabeth Yardley, is Director
of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City
University