Identifying Identity

If this child's name was James, and he lived in a council house in Sighthill, there would be public outcry across our nation. But he's not. I don't know his name, but he's from Darfur, and suddenly his image and situation become less important to our society. As quick as we are to talk about the moral worth of every child, we are just as quick to turn that vision inward, onto our own dreams, ambitions and idealised identity.

I have had to become used to sometimes having a minority opinion.

My frustration with the increasing celebrity and values of our western culture often angers me, as it looses sight of values which are so terribly important: not just to my socialist values, but to human kind's very existence.

It was reported today that a mother's child is in the care of social services in England after she left him alone in her flat while she went to the shops. (The full story can be found here). She left the hob on, and the fire brigade were called. After breaking in to the house they found the boy alone.

The mother has been arrested for child neglect, and released on bail.

Allow me to clarify that there is no doubt that the mother made a terrible mistake, and put a 2 year old's life on the line, and that this counts as child neglect.

But what makes me angry, and what I feel is a huge injustice, is that the parents of Madeleine McCann were never seriously blamed or held responsible for leaving their 3 children alone in that apartment in Portugal while they dined else where.

Now it pains me to say it, and I have no personal vendetta against the McCanns, nor do I want to put down or discredit any of the work they have done in highlighting abduction and child exploitation around the world. But it is here where a much more serious point is highlighted.

It is our shared identities, and our expectations of others which led the press and the UK to fall into a black hole of sympathy for the McCanns. Had that family been black, who knows whether that sympathy would have been as great.

But what I do know, is that 100 000 missing children are reported every year in the UK, 9000 of which are from Scotland. Looking through the names and pictures of the 27 children listed on the UK Missing Children site who have gone missing in the last year, there's one striking feature: the vast majority are not white.

The slow and dating website seems to be fitting to the names of these children, none of which I had heard of. Maddy McCann was not featured on the list.

Why did the world fall for Maddy?

Because she managed to perfectly encapture our ideal and perfect vision of what we think being British is. I don't think the other children did.

I don't imagine Bashir Ahmed from Peterborough, or Irene Kattah from London managed to raise millions for their campaign. And I know the press didn't give them as much coverage.

But I do believe that their moral worth is no lesser than that of Maddy McCann.

No one needs to say that Maddy McCann is valued more than these other children's names. No one has to. And it makes me very sad, that our shared identity of 'being British', creates a looking glass through which all of our individualism and moral worth are distorted.