The coverage on Sky News this morning of the rescue of Shannon Matthews was strange. In an apparent attempt to avoid directly referring to sexual molestation they ended up talking some rubbish.
At one point they said that police were trying to establish whether ‘anything inappropriate’ had been done… a nine-year-old girl was taken from her parents for more than three weeks and when she was found she was crammed into a drawer under a bed. I think that is inappropriate for a start!
I’m sure the police are looking into all sorts of possibilities at the moment and would welcome a bit of respite to get on with it, as would the family. Unfortunately the police and parents of missing youngsters have to enlist the help of the mass media in their search and once you involve them its not easy to get them to back off.
The local MEP who started sounding off that the police should have found her much quicker than they did (30% of the West Yorkshire force and about half the countries search dogs….) since she was so close to home doesn’t seem to be helping anyone. The family have been very understanding of the need to question the girl very slowly and carefully and the whole community has had nothing but praise for the police. In an area as deprived as Dewsbury Moor you don’t often hear the police praised.
I hear that the man, the step-father’s uncle, was also hiding in a drawer of the divan so I don’t think she was kept there all the time. The local news is even suggesting that Shannon may not have been aware she was abducted although I can’t quite see how that would work.
It is also the coyness about mentioning the fact that a child may have been sexually abused. On a slightly related note I have just been reading an interview with Terry Pratchett where they ask about his ‘illness’. He insists on naming his alzheimers and recalls hearing of people reported as’passing away after a long illness’ and only afterwards realising that it was a shorthand for cancer. Are we more afraid of naming the thing which we fear than the thing itself – or are we afraid that we call it into existence by naming it. (If nobody had ever said the word Thatcherism would we all be living in a better world…)
The thing that puzzles me in this case is that, if the media reports are correct and both were hidden in the drawers of a bed, who closed the drawers?
I have been trying not to speculate on the whole thing too much, but I have been wondering that too.
I only found out after writing that he was also found in the bed. Although I can work out how, in theory, somebody can shut themselves in a drawer, I can’t work out how a drawer could take their weight.
Every drawer divan I have ever seen has had the same dodgy hardboard base that bows and buckles with the weight of a few sheets.
Jane – is it a case of political correctness gone mad? 🙂
I think you would be better off calling her political incorrectness gone mad….
I don’t like to be too formal – I just call her “mad”