Given that there has been little actual news to report, the ongoing, increasingly desperate search for Madeleine McCann has remained in the media spotlight for longer than anyone could have imagined. The fact that it has become a fixture on the news agenda is a testament to the hard work that Madeleine’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, have put in. While the tragic episode has captured the hearts of the British public in an unprecedented fashion, the blanket media coverage has so far not helped to find the youngster and some argue it may even have hindered it.

The scale of the interest shows that people do care and that they want to help, but all the attention focused on this one incident has glossed over a much more widespread problem. Of course every effort should be made to find Madeleine, but the massive amount of help and money that the search has had will no doubt seem unfair to a certain section of society – the families and friends of other missing people. An estimated 210,000 people are reported missing in the UK each year and about two-thirds of those are under the age of 18. This means that there are thousands of parents who have gone through or are going through the same ordeal as the McCann’s without being afforded the same hope that the mass media attention brings.
Paul Tuohy, chief executive of Missing People, the charity formerly called the National Missing Persons Helpline, said: “Madeleine’s disappearance has been a wake-up call that ‘missing’ is a social issue. Our charity offers support to around 2,000 families each year and directly as a result of our work we find 10 missing people every week.”

People go missing for a variety of reasons. Some people go missing for just 24 hours, while others are away for years. Some of them are found, while others are never seen again. When someone goes missing, the effect it has on their family or loved ones can be devastating, according to Missing People. They can be left feeling angry, depressed, bewildered and often with a sense of bereavement.

The grief that the McCanns are living through very publicly in Portugal is replicated behind closed doors all over the country. While the publicity surrounding Madeleine’s disappearance has not yet resulted in finding her, perhaps some good will come out of it, as it has raised awareness of the widespread issue of missing people and missing children in particular. The problem of missing children is complex and multifaceted. There are different types of missing children, including family abductions, endangered runaways, non-family abductions, and lost, injured, or otherwise missing children (including disappeared unaccompanied minors seeking asylum). The media is very good at bringing attention to certain types of missing children cases, such as Madeleine’s, but others go by almost unreported.

To combat the inequality, Missing People is hoping as many people as possible will acknowledge International Missing Children’s Day (May 25), which aims to encourage the population to think about all the children still missing in Europe and around the world and to spread a message of hope and solidarity at international level to parents who have no news about their children and do not know where they are or what has become of them. The charity, which starts using its Missing People name instead the National Missing Persons Helpline as of May 25, has re-launched its official yellow charity ribbon as well as rolled out its first ever UK direct mailing to help find missing children.

It is clearly doing all it can and despite boasting an extremely good track record, the Missing People charity can’t do it all on its own. The public and media have a very important part to play. Not every child that goes missing does so in such dramatic circumstances as Madeleine McCann, but the strain on the families and friends is just as much. Madeleine is obviously a very young missing person and that could explain the level of interest, but what the public and media must learn to do is share their attention, sympathy and efforts to help across the board. They need to spread their level of interest across all missing persons’ cases, not just focus on the high profile ones.