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The public is to blame for the heartless abuse being heaped on Kate McCann.
The internet has blurred the lines of news and hearsay and the result is trial
by global gossip
Do you find yourself strangely drawn to articles about the McCanns? I do. It’s
not edifying: most of us are uncomfortably aware that the slender line where
personal tragedy becomes popular entertainment was crossed some time ago. But,
like every other person in the country, the story is permanently at the back of
my mind.
I want to stop reading, listening, watching, Googling, amateur sleuthing; I
nauseate myself with my own prurience. My appetite for commentary – which is all
that’s left, in the absence of hard facts – has been sated many times over. But
I can’t stop.
Did they do it? They couldn’t have. And yet . . . And if they did do it, do they
have superhuman powers, such as invisibility and Oscar-worthy acting skills? And
if they didn’t, and are innocent and probably bereaved, what in God’s name have
we done to them?
By that “we”, I don’t for once mean the (British) press, which seems to me,
despite its inevitable mawkish descents into sentimentality, to have acted
pretty responsibly. The press has urged caution, expressed compassion and been
reluctant to judge the McCanns, if not the apparently sham-bolic Portuguese
police.
No, by “we”, I mean the public. Forget that old chestnut “I blame the media”:
now that everyone has an opinion and an embarrassment of outlets in which to
express it, “I blame the public” is going to become the refrain of the coming
decades. There is no shortage of online places where people may freely and
anonymously air their opinions, even if their opinions are vile or demented or
both; and there are millions of these newly voluble people. They have made it
all right to say unspeakable things, to air the most shameful thoughts, always
to think the worst, and never to give anyone a chance.
With the McCann story, this has, for the first time, resulted in a complete
blurring of the boundaries between news and gossip. Sky News lists Madeleine
McCann as a “category” on its interactive content screen: news, business, sport,
Madeleine.
We have been here before with appalling crimes that grip the nation – we may
have discussed, say, the James Bulger case among ourselves, watched the news and
read the headlines, but then the news was on twice a day, the headlines came
only in the morning, and the internet barely existed.
Now we have streaming information, an unstoppable torrent of truth, fiction,
theory and gossip that is accessible 24 hours a day. The result is that,
incredible as it may sound, there is, online (and the real world is catching up
quickly), little difference in the tone of the remarks about Britney Spears’s
failed comeback, and the comments made about Kate McCann, despite the fact that
one is a pop star and the other the mother of a missing girl who may be dead.
But there is no thought for Kate McCann’s suffering in the deluge of abuse
heaped upon her; the McCanns’ local newspaper’s support website in
Leicester-shire had to be closed.
We seem to have lost track of why Kate McCann’s picture-editor-pleasing face –
blonde, thin, wounded, Diana-like – is in the papers in the first place. By
orchestrating the kind of media campaign more usually associated with a
multi-million-pound film or music launch, the McCanns have catapulted themselves
into the gossip fodder league. That means suffocating 24/7 media interest; it
means your choice of earrings is going to be scrutinised and discussed by
millions of strangers – it means you have declared open season on yourself when
it comes to public consumption.
But the public doesn’t just consume: it devours. And once you’ve invited it in,
it doesn’t sit down politely and make small talk: it makes itself at home and
rifles through your underwear drawer. You can’t ask it to leave, to “respect
your privacy”. It’s there for the duration. If the McCanns are innocent, and
even if they aren’t, it may well cause them to lose their sanity.
Despite popular thinking about journalists “making things up”, the traditional
media are regulated. Things have to stand up from every angle. Facts matter. We
have lawyers; we try not to libel or slander; to keep objective. The public,
through the internet, can – and does – say anything, no matter how degrading or
toxic, and keeps on saying it until, by a sort of insane osmosis, it stops being
an outright lie and becomes a half-truth.
The theory that Kate McCann, a doctor, accidentally oversedated her daughter,
causing death, has existed on the internet for months. People write about it
LIKE THIS, in indignant capitals, as if it were so obvious as to be a given, and
as though they were explaining something simple and obvious to somebody mulishly
stupid who refused to see the truth staring them in the face. Behind the
capitals, you can almost feel their quickening breath and their peculiar
excitement as they comprehensively trash the reputation of a grieving woman who
is a stranger to them. Power to the people!
Things are ugly out there – there aren’t many things uglier than gossip about
infanticide, which is what this story has become, and why it feels so
extraordinary. But they have been ugly from the start.
The news of Madeleine’s disappearance broke on a Friday evening. I wrote about
it the following morning, assuming – naively, in retrospect – that people’s
default mode would be compassion or pity. By Sunday evening my e-mail inbox was
full. A handful of the e-mails agonised on the McCanns’ behalf. The greater part
more or less said, “If you leave small children alone to go and eat tapas, you
deserve everything that’s coming to you.”
I know from colleagues on other newspapers that they had the same angry
reaction, which they also found themselves disconcerted by.
I’ll get back to the tapas point, because it’s central to the whole thing, with
opinion dividing into people who see leaving a child as stupid, but not the
world’s greatest crime – such people are broadly sympathetic to the McCanns –
and people who find it inexcusable, criminal and indicative of all sorts of dark
possibilities. This latter group is among the 17,000 who signed an online
petition recommending that Leices-tershire social services take into care the
McCanns’ remaining two children, Sean and Amelie.
The petition was not set up in the past week or so when things became murkier
and question marks started mushrooming, but in May, when all we knew of Kate and
Gerry McCann was that they seemed hollow-eyed with grief. The McCann story may
end up being about the death of empathy.
So here we are, obsessed, in the throes of one of those weird national seizures;
sitting in judgment, wallowing in what the novelist Philip Roth (apropos Bill
Clinton’s infidelity) memorably called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. The woman at
the checkout at Tesco has a view, as does the dinner party guest. The hitherto
unsayable – “Do you think they killed their own child?” – has become
commonplace. You hear it everywhere. We’re gossiping about a four-year-old child
who may be dead, or abducted and raped, or both, and there are no holds barred
any more. What brutal thing does this say about us?
It’s always risky attempting to analyse the nation’s psyche based on one
apparently seismic event: often, when everything settles down, you realise that
underneath all the emoting, there wasn’t anything terribly unexpected happening.
One thinks of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: all that was going on was
that everyone felt sad and shocked, and then got over it.
But the national fixation with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the
incendiary emotions it has provoked, is another thing altogether. It isn’t to do
with empathy, because it seems to be thin on the ground. Prurience, yes;
ghoulish curiosity, certainly – but there are, alas, dozens of hideous crime
stories to pick from: why focus so obsessively on this one? Sentimentality,
because of the involvement of a small, photogenic child? Perhaps at first –
though much of the public commentary on this story is so condemnatory that
sentiment doesn’t seem to come into it.
That says something peculiar about our monstrous appetite for this tragedy –
because, no matter what happened or who did what, a much-loved child has
vanished.
Much of our fixation has to do with fear, and with the public’s desire to “own”
a story. Within 24 hours of her disappearance, Madeleine McCann had become
“Maddie”, as though we all knew her. Aside from what she looked like, we knew
nothing about her whatsoever – not what toys she liked, “Cuddle Cat” aside, or
what her favourite book was, or what she liked eating, or wearing (I am sorry to
use the past tense, and mean nothing by it; the present tense looks even odder).
But in those early days of the investigation, she became a version of all of our
children, a blank to superimpose our own child’s face onto as we peered into the
abyss. This was, of course, terrifying: the idea that an ordinary-seeming family
could go on holiday and have a child vanish into thin air was more than most of
us could cope with.
The natural human instinct, when faced with a terrible fear, is to list the
things that make us different from the victims of the frightening situation, and
in this particular case there were few. Much was made at the time of the
McCanns’ social class (working class gone middle), and of the fact that if a
single mother from a housing estate had gone out on the razz and left her child
alone, sympathy would be in short supply. This is another way of saying that if
a person is recognisably different from us, the bad thing that happened to them
couldn’t possibly happen to us. The problem with the McCanns is that they were
so terrifyingly normal-seeming, so middle-classly resonant, with their neat
Boden-esque clothes and their responsible jobs and their three little children.
How to differentiate ourselves from them, and thereby reassure ourselves that
their misfortune would never be ours? By focusing obsessively on the one
questionable thing they did: leaving their children alone in a strange place.
Phew – instant relief. “I’d never do that,” the thought process went. “I’m safe.
My children will never be harmed.”
This is clutching at straws, frankly – as everyone surely knows by now, children
who come to harm usually come to harm from a person known to them, more often
than not in their own home. But we chose to clutch at this one particular straw,
hence, I think, the disproportionate outpouring of vitriol against Kate McCann,
who, regardless of her guilt or innocence, was, is and will continue to be
punished because she had the temerity to seem so much like us.
She has also (more straws) been accused of seeming “unfeeling”, of looking “too
groomed” (“I’d look a mess, therefore we’re not the same, therefore it could
never happen to me”), of seeming strangely “calm” (or tranquillised, surely?),
of, basi-cally, not falling to her knees screaming like an animal in pain – it’s
“Show us you care, Ma’am” all over again.
In some internet chatrooms and message boards, women bitch about Kate McCann for
not reacting exactly like them – not that they’d know how they’d react in her
situation, since they have never been in it. No matter: weird, isn’t it, how she
seems so composed – and let’s not call it composure, let’s call it “arrogance”
(this from the country that invented the stiff upper lip). Must make her a child
killer, and not have anything to do with being told that visible distress might
give pleasure to a hypothetical abductor.
And why are her clothes nice? Who thinks about clothes at a time like this? Why
does she wash her hair? Couldn’t she wear rags, or sackcloth and ashes? Or – any
day now – tar and feathers? And what was that nonsense with the Pope? (Who’d
have thought the devout Catholic/Pope combination would be so perplexing and
aggravating to so many people?)
Our fascination also exists because this story is centrally concerned with what
many people perceive as a failure of parenting, a topic we are obsessed by as a
nation. We are, collectively, eaten up with anxiety about raising our children.
It’s a relatively new thing – people just used to have children and get on with
it – and is reflected by the deluge of television programmes, books and
publications devoted to how to be a parent.
Women, especially, have become almost pathologically insecure on the subject: am
I a bad person if I bottle-feed; have I failed if I have a caesarean; do I harm
my children by going out to work; have they got enough friends; do they sleep
too much or too little; do they eat enough super-foods and fish oils; do they
need to learn Mandarin; do they play outside enough; and so on and on.
With that insecurity comes the strongest desire to judge, as a means of
self-reassurance: you see it every day in the ongoing working mothers versus
stay-at-home ones debate. “Well, she barely sees her children because she’s in
the office all day, so I’m better than her and my children will be happier”
versus “She’s going out of her mind with boredom because she’s stopped working,
so I’m better than her” – nobody can win, and the crazy thing is that nobody
needs to: it’s hardly a competition.
Into this comes Kate McCann, who admits to a failure of parenting, to doing a
stupid thing, and we fall on her like a pack of hyenas, weirdly pleased to leave
behind our own failings and insecurities for a minute and concentrate on hers.
The fact is that while I would never leave small children alone, I know dozens
of people who routinely do, and I do not find them irresponsible, just tired.
There are so many of them that a whole service industry has built up around
them: “family” hotels with a baby-listening service where someone cocks an ear
at the bedroom door every now and then while harassed parents try to grab the
semblance of a date together in the dining room; holidays, like the McCanns’,
with kids’ clubs attached, where children are parked with what amounts to a
stranger while parents try to sunbathe in peace for a couple of hours; skiing
trips where the chalet comes complete with a random nanny; gyms with crèches;
restaurants with some weird bloke in a clown suit “entertaining” the children in
another room; and so on.
A certain section of society routinely leaves their children in the care of
somebody else whom they don’t know terribly well, no matter what the nanny
agency has murmured soothingly about police checks. You can think what you like
about this, but it is a fact of middle-class life, trying to reconcile loving
your children with still having a life of your own, and an omnipresent source of
anxiety for many people – if it weren’t, you couldn’t buy teddies with cameras
hidden in them to check up on your child carer, and many women wouldn’t have the
unpleasant niggling feeling that they don’t entirely trust their nanny to bring
up their child.
The McCanns were foolish and wrong to leave three small children – babies,
really – alone in a strange apartment. But doesn’t the subsequent calamity
override the initial human error? Apparently not: only a fifth of Britons think
they are completely innocent, according to a poll for this paper today. And 76%
think they were wrong to leave them alone. And yet we all take risks: you take a
risk every time you let a child out of your sight, every time they board a bus
or a train, every time they’re a bit evasive about their whereabouts. If your
house is burgled and you stupidly didn’t switch on the burglar alarm, does that
mean you deserved it? Does it make your distress, your sense of violation and
the loss of your goods any less significant?
Meanwhile, with hideous inevitability, the focus has shifted to Kate McCann’s
being “volatile”. She “visi-bly lost control” while being questioned for 11
hours, we are told. It’s such a depressingly familiar scenario: a woman in an
untenable situation is pushed to breaking point, and then when she does lose it
– as lose it she will, because she’s not a robot or a monster – her sane
response to an insane, unbearable set of circumstances becomes evidence with
which to condemn her.
Impound her diary, call in all lap-tops: she must have done it if she shows any
feelings. And she must have done it if she doesn’t. QED: she’s had it either
way.
We are now told, by Portuguese newspapers who claim to have published extracts,
that her diary, which the police want to see, shows she “struggled to control
Madeleine”, that her children were “hyperac-tive”, and that looking after them
exhausted her.
She also allegedly wrote that her husband left her to look after them too much
on her own. Show me a woman with three children under four who doesn’t express
the same frustrations, and I’ll show you an improbability. But even this utterly
normal maternal response to child-care – it’s knackering, I wish he’d help out
more – is being used as an indication of Mrs McCann’s “instability”.
And the people who’ve been there and ought to be able to sympa-thise – other
women – are the ones sharpening their knives. As Madeleine Albright, the former
US secretary of state, once said: “There is a special place in hell for women
who don’t help other women.” If that is so, hell must have got pretty crowded
over the past four months.
The McCanns did themselves no favours when they embarked, deliberately, on a
gigantic, modern publicity campaign. And that has contributed in no small part
to making this case seem so compelling now. It is hard to criticise their
original motive for hyping up the publicity, but in the process the McCanns
unwittingly turned themselves into a soap opera: available to view on a screen
near you 24 hours a day.
As I write, there are reports that they’re looking for a new, bigger “campaign
manager” to try to stem the tide of negative comment. (In what world did Gerry
McCann think it was a good idea to put in an “appearance” at the Edinburgh
television festival?) But it’s too late. The tide won’t be stemmed and the
appointment of a Max Clifford figure will make things worse, not better. Every
soap needs a baddie and since we seem to have forgotten that we’re not, in fact,
watching a brilliantly scripted and plotted episode of Portuguese Holiday, it
was only a matter of time before the goodie turned bad.
What a twist! How compelling! More, more. Give me the inside story. One of these
mornings, we’re going to wake up and see just how ghastly a part our own
voyeurism has played in all of this. At least, I hope we are.
Vitriolic rants of the online rabble
IF you haven’t read what is on the internet about the McCanns you wouldn’t
believe it. Here are a few examples of the kind of vitriol out there. Trawling
through the sites to find these quotes is like a trip through the darkest
recesses of people’s most ungenerous minds.
- ‘I never believed in your pain – the Find Madeleine McCann website
- Kate McCann is an ineffectual, weak and total washout of a mother and probably
mentally unbalanced. Pathetic woman should never have had kids if she couldn’t
cope – Mulderx, Mirror forum
- Gerry McCann does come across as a thug to me. I have no idea if wifey is
involved but either way she is still as guilty as sin for leaving her children
alone – Halibutswift, Mirror forum
- The McGrubs are terrible examples of parenting and should be prosecuted. At
the very least, they should have to attend parenting classes. The day you put
tapas and alcohol before the health and wellbeing of your offspring is a very
bad day!!!! – Dr Kildare, HaloScan
- The people who must shoulder the burden of responsibility for the Maddie
disappearance are Gerry and Kate McCann. If they did it, they are sick and evil
and deserve to rot for ever. If they didn’t, they let her down by being selfish
and indulging in their own pleasures leaving her alone and vulnerable – Val,
Skynews
- The parents are a disgrace. They were on the razz every night after leaving
their children in the crèche all day every day. Much wanted children? More like
little fashion statements that they couldn’t be bothered to look after properly.
The children unfortunately got in the way of their “me time” – Proud Parent UK,
Alpha Mummy
- These people are doctors and in their professional lives would not hesitate to
point the “abuse” finger at any other parent who left their children alone like
they did. They should hang by their own noose – Arthur, Alpha Mummy
- I do think the McCanns have acted somewhat oddly throughout this investigation
– particularly the mother. I can’t quite see it as natural for a mother in her
position to make one of her immediate priorities in the days immediately
following the disappearance of her daughter a visit to the Pope – without her
remaining children – Krazykoolkazza, Mumsnet
- Even female doctors are subject to domestic abuse whether it be mental,
physical or psychological bullying. Kate looks to me to be very submissive to
Gerry. Her eyes dart towards him when the couple are questioned by the media.
It’s as though she can’t speak up for herself. The running is another strange
one. I’m a keep fit nut but the last thing on my mind would be to run if one of
my kids were abducted. I would be spewing venom and ranting. – Ragna, Mirror
forum’
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