I intended, when I started thinking about this blog, to write about parents who harm their children and how some people find it impossible to believe that that could be true while others home in immediately on the father, or more often the mother, as the villain in the piece and refuse to accept their innocence.
Madeleine McCann
In recent times, the disappearance of young British girl Madeleine McCann provides an interesting example: On Thursday 3 May 2007, three (almost four) year-old Madeleine disappeared from her bedroom at a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal. Her parents, middle-class, educated and highly articulate Kate and Gerry McCann, began a high-profile campaign to let the world know about their daughter and plead for help. Celebrities like David Beckham lent their voices and the story was soon global, with ‘sightings’ of Madeleine beginning soon after across the world (and continuing).
The debate soon began, too, about who might have taken Madeleine. The Portuguese police, the British police who got involved soon after Madeleine’s disappearance and then private investigators brought in by the McCanns interviewed and explored, but there were few leads. The McCanns appeared regularly in the press pleading for information and their sang-froid split public opinion as many saw it as “inappropriate” for grieving parents and others saw it as a bold and courageous effort to stay on top of the situation that must soon have felt desperate.
This same split was evident when the Portuguese police named the McCanns as arguidos – suspects, essentially – and this was not lifted until July 2008. In the UK, there was outrage at this and many important people insisted it was simply not possible. For those who work in the field of violence against children, though, there was understanding that in cases of disappearance or death of a young child, police always have to consider the possibility that the parents were somehow involved.
According to the United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children (2006), “The second high-risk group [for homicide] is infants. Data from OECD countries suggest that the risk of death is about three times greater for children under one year old than for those aged 1 to 4, who in turn face double the risk of those aged 5 to 14. The younger the child, the more likely their death will be caused by a close family member… The majority of murders of children under the age of one are perpetrated by one or both of the child’s parents, frequently by the mother”.
While this quote relates to the murder of children, the Study also details the unintentional deaths and severe injury of children by parents and close family members who knowingly inflict violence on them. One of the most horrific statements in the Study is this one: “Children around the world experience hitting, kicking, shaking, beating, bites, burns, strangulation, poisoning and suffocation by members of their family”.
I quote the Study only to explain why the possibility that one or both parents were involved in a child’s death (and by extension disappearance) must always be considered by the police. They have to explore that possibility, although of course they must follow up all leads and continue to investigate fully.
The story of Madeleine McCann is not over. In her 2011 book called simply Madeleine, Kate McCann insists that, “There is no evidence to suggest that Madeleine has been harmed and it is therefore vital to keep looking for her and those who took her”. If I have used the still open wound of Madeleine’s story to illustrate the point I wanted to make about parental involvement, then, it is only to allow me to also reproduce Madeleine’s photo again (above), along with an updated progression image of what she might have looked like in 2012, to urge people to remain vigilant and to continue to report any leads or sightings to: [email protected] or the appeal number 0800 0961011 from within the UK and +44 2071 580 126 from outside the UK.
Madeleine McCann has been gone for almost six years now and we still do not know what happened. Like many people who have studied the case, I have my own theory, coloured by my work in the areas of child abuse and exploitation, child trafficking and violence, and of how Europe struggles with these issues still. But then we all have theories, heavily influenced by the frameworks in which we view the world. What is needed is hard evidence and that is sadly lacking in this case as in others I have been considering in preparing this blog.
JonBenet Ramsay
As I said, my view of child abductions and murders always leads me to ask whether we should also be asking questions about sexual abuse and exploitation. While I was putting thoughts and ideas together for this blog, a case that I have studied over the years suddenly hit the headlines again.
This story began for me in 1996, not in December when JonBenet Ramsay died, but almost a year before. Right at the beginning of 1996, I was appointed Spokesperson and Media/Information Coordinator of the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. The Congress was to take place in Stockholm, Sweden, in late August/early September of that year and the co-organizers – UNICEF, the Swedish Government and a group of not-for-profits (NGOs) working for children – needed a neutral person to bring together available information and talk about it to the world’s press and in other forums without being ‘labelled’ as belonging to a government, UN agency or interest group.
You have to understand that, in 1996, people didn’t talk about the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. It wasn’t on the front page of our daily newspapers, as it is today, and governments preferred to think that it wasn’t a problem in their country. As a result, most of the information we had came from organizations working in the field in various countries and it was, to say the least, unreliable.
For almost 11 months, I collected information, travelled to dozens of countries, spoke to hundreds of people and worked to engage journalists worldwide whose investigative skills could add to the body of what we knew.
Unbelievably, as this effort was nearing (provisional) completion in the run-up to the Congress, a story hit the headlines in Belgium and moved child sexual abuse/exploitation from the features page to the front page of newspapers and bulletins worldwide.
The discovery of the bodies of two young Belgian girls who had gone missing some time before – Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo – led to an unfolding story of child abduction, the sale of children into paedophile rings and a plethora of criminal activity ‘coincidental’ to this, including sexual abuse of the abducted children and child pornography produced as a by-product.
The girls had been literally swept from the street into the car of a convicted rapist, Marc Dutroux, and had been hidden in a basement cell, given Rohipnol to keep them sedated, and sexually violated by Dutroux while he waited to make profit from passing them on to others. He had been convicted already of selling stolen cars into Eastern Europe and it is widely believed that he planned to do the same with his human contraband.
Dutroux was not a paedophile – the rape conviction related to sexual violence against adult women – but he was undoubtedly an ‘opportunistic’ child sex abuser who violated the two young girls just because he could.
Anyway, while I was dealing with the intricacies of this case in the press day after day and participants at the Congress were hearing heart-wrenching stories from across the globe of how children are used to satisfy the sexual appetites of others or to make money from those who wish to profit from that, another meeting was happening nearby.
So it was that one night during the Congress I sat up late, awaiting a phone call from a journalist whose clock told a very different story to mine, and flicked on Swedish television. I found myself watching a documentary about child beauty pageants, broadcast to coincide with a pageant taking place in Europe.
All day I had listened to psychologists, criminologists, researchers and child rights advocates debating the sexualisation of children and how, by turning them into precocious sexual objects, the world was risking drawing the unwanted attention of paedophiles and sexual perverts to these children who barely understood why their hair was being primped and their lips glossed. And here, in my sterile Swedish hotel room, I was being confronted with shocking images of tiny prepubertal young girls being paraded like Barbie dolls, taught to strike poses, pout their lips and wink at the judges – and anyone else watching.
What horrified me most, though, was the response one of the children’s mothers gave when asked why she entered her daughter into the pageant: “We need a new car,” she said.
In the morning media briefing the next day at the Congress, I talked about child beauty pageants, suggested the journalists might want to follow up the idea and look at possible stories. It seemed to me that, although at that time there was no specific research on links between sexualisation of children and child sex abuse, there was certainly enough evidence to suggest that paedophiles use sexualised images of children both for pleasure and to justify their perversion. (I recently heard about new research emerging from the University of Melbourne, Australia, that suggests that sexualised images of women are directly linked to changed behaviours in both men and women with regard to relationships and perceptions of women).
When the Congress ended in early September, I went on holiday. I was back at work, following up on the issues I had been dealing with, when reports came from the US of the murder of JonBenet Ramsay, known in subsequent reports as “Little Miss Sunshine”, one of the several titles she had won in beauty pageants across the US. JonBenet was six years old when she was found, on 26 December 1966, strangled to death in the basement of her family home.
It would take a book – and several have been written – to recount all the intricacies of this strange murder case. How a ransom note found before the body was discovered is in handwriting that has been considered to be that of JonBenet’s mother, Patsy. How an open window in the basement through which an intruder was supposed to have entered still had undisturbed cobwebs across it when the police photographed it later that day. Why the Ramseys did not look in the basement and discover the body until prompted to do so by the police, and why they were then allowed to move the body. Not surprisingly, the “did they, didn’t they” discussions began in earnest around the Ramseys, and continue to this day, even after Patsy’s death in 2006.
From my point of view, though, the questions that really need to be answered relate to the possibility that JonBenet Ramsay was sexually abused before her death. There was unidentified male DNA found on her clothing that did not match any of the family members or any suspect in the case. There were traces of blood between the child’s legs and indications that her genitalia had been interfered with. The little girl’s hands were tied with a restraint made of the same rope that had been used to strangle her, reminiscent of sexual rituals where the victim is suspended and throttled to orgasm.
In 2006, an active paedophile, John Mark Karr, was arrested in Thailand and told Thai police that he had been present when JonBenet died. He claimed it was an accident and that he had loved her. Now Karr’s declamations are not necessarily reliable: he was a former schoolteacher who had been charged with possession of child pornography, set up an on-line business to lure vulnerable children into his care, and had his teaching licence suspended because he was suspected to sexual offences involving the provision of controlled substances to minors.
But the possibility must surely remain that JonBenet was somehow caught up in the sexual fantasies of one or more paedophiles/child sex abusers, drawn to her by the publicity around her growing success as a child beauty, and killed either intentionally or accidentally when the perpetrator’s sex games went wrong. This would explain so many of the unanswered questions: the male DNA, the genital interference and blood, the ropes and the confession of Karr.
What still needs to be explained – and what started me writing this blog in the first place – is who knew this was happening. And why we have learned only in 2013 that the grand jury investigating the death of JonBenet Ramsey voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey on charges of child abuse resulting in death but then-District Attorney Alex Hunter refused to sign the indictment and prosecute the case, believing he could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
“We didn’t know who did what,” one juror is reported as saying, “but we felt the adults in the house may have done something that they certainly could have prevented, or they could have helped her, and they didn’t”.