It seems to me that the British media have some small responsibility to bear for the disappearance of beautiful and innocent little Madeleine.

British parents at home are bombarded with stories and information from their media which gives the impression that Britain is the main haven for paedophiles in the world. And we, thanks to their silly media, believe it too

The British press delights in scare stories, in supposedly outing paedophiles (when all they are really doing is driving them underground), in making British parents super paranoid and self-conscious that their kids are not safe, at least not in the UK.

Warm skins and smiles, bikinis and beach holidays means safety to the British whereas rain and a mac, or a hood, denotes perversity and violence. You see British parents in supermarkets hang on to their children while we let ours run around. You see them ever watchful at parks and playgrounds while we watch ours far more lazily. You seem them look wary if you smile at their children (in England, but here in Malta they behave differently), you see them not looking people in the eye, you see them fearing for their children’s life – and this is stoked by the media.

As a direct consequence of all the fear-mongering produced by the British media which portrays England as a country of paedophiles, while in small towns in Germany, Switzerland and France you see the smallest of children walking unaccompanied to school, UK school gates are crammed with overanxious yummy mummies in their ostentatious gas guzzlers or not, and their less pretty sisters all accompanying their children everywhere.

British parents who have an undeserved reputation, thanks to their stupid sensationalist media for not being caring parents are in fact among the most doting I have experienced anywhere. British women are producing more babies than most of their European counterparts, even though many of them work. It is, as a few of us here know very well, extremely hard to do both, even half well, yet British women take it on with that stoicism that is one of their best traits as a nation.

However when they go abroad, British people are lured into thinking sunshine and brown skins, smiles and sea views mean safety. They are not as caring, doting and watchful when they are on holiday. They apply totally different standards, whereas we, as Maltese, are far more careful when we go abroad, quite rightly really because the unfamiliar is just that and you have to adapt to it accordingly. Why don’t the British media make it amply clear that every country has a roughly equal amount of active paedophiles and that it is everywhere that you cannot leave your children unattended?

Paedophilia, thanks in no small measure to the internet, is a worldwide disease that knows no national boundaries. This family was booked on an expensive holiday where safety is a selling point. So safe that parents feel blasé about leaving children in a bedroom, locked and not even where they can see the door or people approaching. This resort just backed on to any old street so it is pretty careless of these holiday organisers to imply it is safe to leave your children like that.

And while initially I was shocked these poor parents had left their children unaccompanied, I soon realised that this is a normal thing to do, certainly among all the British middle class parents I have since spoken to. It is a normal thing to do on holiday in a warm country. They would never leave a three-year-old and her even younger siblings locked up at home, but abroad on holiday it is the only time they get to have a quiet meal together, some time together as a couple. Most British parents do not have the luxury of a nanna or a nannu, a brother or a sister on tap to let couples have the occasional night out. They are abroad. They are made to think it is safe. Even two undoubtedly intelligent, kind and caring doctors like the McCanns were in a sense lured into thinking their children were safe.

And every day watching this story, watching the agony of the parents prolong you can only really hope for a miracle. A real miracle, not the type that sends 5,000 of us swooning to Rome because we have a Maltese saint at last. Actually we have always had plenty of saints whether the Church acknowledges them or not. I see them every day. Mums and Dads who devote their lives to their most terribly disabled children with a fighting spirit that is almost tiring to watch. There are certain people who spend a lifetime doing good and are never acknowledged by a Gieh or a sainthood, but touch so many broken lives for the better; plenty of unsung heroes that we do not get excited about but we should.

Finding Madeleine alive would be a miracle, the kind of miracle that would move me and change me. No religion in the world can to me ever explain the millions of African children just starving to death. No religion can ever explain to me the sexual or other abuse of one child. If there are miracles to be had in this world can the Church please start praying for more modern ones? We are still into the curing of diseases miracles. Can we have some abducted children returned alive please?

One man or a group of them have destroyed a family, have galvanised millions into trying to do something. Madeleine posters are everywhere. I spotted one at the beautiful new Waterfront in Vittoriosa. By a miracle let’s hope this child is alive.

The Pope gave her parents a lot of comfort by meeting them.

Let us now hope we can move from comfort to a modern miracle. Little Madeleine is all our Madeleines.

She deserves a miracle, of that there is no doubt.

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