Hi there,
Back after a few days away from the blog. I was looking at NHS Blog Doctor and the latest post is on Madeleine McCann. Or rather, some of the blog posts that have been left about Madeleine McCann. Some people are getting bored with the story. Some think her parents should give up and go home. Some think it was the parents' fault anyway for leaving her alone, so why bother us with it? You should just accept just punishment and not bother the rest of us with your grief. Blog Doctor thinks this is attitude stinks and so do I.
We in Coatbridge know only too well the price of complacency with regard to child abduction. 40 years ago, Moira Anderson, a wee 11 year old girl disappeared in a snowstorm. She had gone to buy a Christmas present for a relative at Woolworths and she took a Baxter's bus for this journey. She was never seen again and her body was never found.
At the time it was put about that it was a stranger abduction. Motor cars were becoming popular and it was generally thought that some paedophile toff had whisked her away. Life moved on and the Andersons were left alone in their grief, not knowing what had happened. It looked like Moira would be forgotten, until in 1992, Sandra Brown, a woman who had grown up in Coatbridge at the same time as Moira, went to a family funeral. A chance remark about her father, Alexander Gartshore and that he had been a suspect in the Moira Anderson case, led her to investigate and reopen the whole issue.
The trouble was people didn't want it. When a friend of Gartshore's, Gallogley, died in jail in 2003 and left behind a detailed dossier saying that Gartshore had murdered Moira as part of a paedophile ring operation, the police wouldn't release it. Apparently some of the people named included figures in the police and the Crown office and they wouldn't have it. Gallogley named a burn called the Tarry Burn, as the place where Moira's body had been dumped. The police made a half hearted attempt to drag it over two days, and then gave up on the excuse that it would take a month to drag the burn properly and they might not find anything. Moira had been missing for 36 years at this point, and they couldn't take a month to check out a fresh lead. Now there are calls again for the dossier and the case notes to be made public; it's high time they were.
As it was with Moira, so it is with Madeleine. This is quite obviously an abduction; the window of the room that she was sleeping in was forced open. It has obvious that this was an organised operation; the McCanns were checking on their children every half hour; someone must have been watching and waiting for a while, before they moved. And yet we have people who say that we should all give up, that it happens, what's the point, I'm bored with this story and that wee girl's face. This, despite the evidence that this is an organised ring that struck.
But there is something deeper at the bottom of this laissez faire attitude to child abduction.Child abduction and paedophilia is the crime with no name. Up until the 1960's, it was only hinted at in fairy tales about changelings and wicked stepfathers. As we progressed, we first blamed strangers, then people at one remove such as teachers, clergy and social workers. We still have not admitted that the abuse and murder of children is usually visited upon them by someone they know. And that is why we don't like to talk about it. You can warn a child about stranger danger, but how do you warn them against danger from a relative or friend? How do we cope with this kind of evil within? It is 2007 and we still have not faced up to this; we have not looked this evil squarely in the eye.
Moira Anderson was let down by by our town and I am ashamed of it. The same will happen to Madeleine McCann if we do not keep her in the public eye and insist on answers. I am going to add my own poor effort to the search by posting her picture on this blog, and it will stay there until she is found. I am also adding the Moira Anderson website to my blogroll. Maybe, at the last, justice will be done.
