Madeline

So the police have stated that the mother of Madeline McCann is now a suspect in her daughter's murder. Despite my feelings as to their treatment by the media, I wonder how many parallels can be made between this situation and the JonBenet Ramsey case back in the 1990's. It seems as though the Portuguese police have never really come up with a valid suspect, so now they go back to the parents and try to build a case there - of course, it is a well known trick to give a suspect enough rope to hang themselves as it were. The english police quite often get the main family suspect to speak at a news conference to guage their body language and reactions. And it has been stated that Mrs McCann did not seem that upset - but then we all deal with things differently.

My beef with this ongoing story, whether it turns out that the parents are involved or not, is that because they are respectable middle class people with good jobs, they have been excused for leaving their kids - all under 4 years old - alone in an unfamiliar place.
If they were council tennants with manual labour jobs and came from a less well-off area, the media would have been calling for their twins to be taken into care as they are unfit parents!
The bottom line is that they did not have to leave the kids on their own - there was a babysitting service. So it does pose the question, why didn't they use that service?

I suppose this is really going back to my problem with the media and is not the McCann's fault, but I am really upset at the fact that the McCann's lack of parental responsiblity has not been questioned in the way that other parents would be. If they had acted responsibly in the first place, they would not now be under suspicion.

Therefore, I find it difficult to sympathise - after all, is it not illegal to leave a minor in a house unsupervised under UK law?