Madeleine McCann

Drawfull

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On the face of it, she looks similar. And it's possible that someone abducted (as opposed to being killed obviously) at such a young age might literally not know 'who they are'. But if there was any veracity to her claims she's unlikely to be binned off by TPTB and having to resort to Insta.
 

golden_blunder

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On the face of it, she looks similar. And it's possible that someone abducted (as opposed to being killed obviously) at such a young age might literally not know 'who they are'. But if there was any veracity to her claims she's unlikely to be binned off by TPTB and having to resort to Insta.
My wife thought thinks that she looks very similar around the eyes to the father

but yeah very slim chance of this being true but stranger things have happened
 

Bubz27

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I dare say the guilt they’ve lived with has been worse than any prison
Quite possibly, yeah. But I've seen people had their kids taken, deservedly I should add, away for less, and it doesn't feel right.
 

langster

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They won’t be guilty if they’ve had anything to do with it.
Eh?

If they had something to do with it then they would feel guilty, or you would hope they would.

If they didn't have anything to do with it then they would forever feel guilty about it. Continually blaming themselves, questioning their decisions, going over and over in their heads how they could and should have done things differently.

Sorry, but your reply was very naive and very wrong.
 

DJ_21

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Eh?

If they had something to do with it then they would feel guilty, or you would hope they would.

If they didn't have anything to do with it then they would forever feel guilty about it. Continually blaming themselves, questioning their decisions, going over and over in their heads how they could and should have done things differently.

Sorry, but your reply was very naive and very wrong.
Nah what I meant was if they had anything to do with it they’d feel less guilty but either way they should feel very guilty. I mean what parents leave their kids alone while they go out drinking.
 

Samid

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Read a theory a while back that the girl never actually existed and that the UK government made her up to divert attention from their political shortcomings.
 

utdalltheway

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Read a theory a while back that the girl never actually existed and that the UK government made her up to divert attention from their political shortcomings.
Some tin foil hat crackpot thoughts should never be written down, or repeated.
 

George Owen

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True. Everyone raises their kids differently. Mine never left my sight, especially if we were in a public high traffic area.
I remember when I was a kid on holidays in the US. My Mom and my aunt, left my blonde female cousin and me, alone a whole afternoon at the motel swimming pool while they went on a tour to Cabo Cañaveral. This was in the early nineties so we were like 10 years old. After a while, we were proper panicking hahaha. No way to contact them, no way to know if or when they are coming back...

I guess we are really lucky we didn't end up appearing in the Runaway Train videoclip.

 

utdalltheway

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I remember when I was a kid on holidays in the US. My Mom and my aunt, left my blonde female cousin and me, alone a whole afternoon at the motel swimming pool while they went on a tour to Cabo Cañaveral. This was in the early nineties so we were like 10 years old. After a while, we were proper panicking hahaha. No way to contact them, no way to know if or when they are coming back...

I guess we are really lucky we didn't end up appearing in the Runaway Train videoclip.

On the face of it that looks like really negligent behaviour by the adults.
 

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On the face of it that looks like really negligent behaviour by the adults.
It does but times have changed and so have attitudes, when I was a kid I'd be out with my mates, down the park, playing footie in the street, riding my bike everywhere and so on, today parents would be castigated for allowing their kids to do that kind of stuff
 

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It does but times have changed and so have attitudes, when I was a kid I'd be out with my mates, down the park, playing footie in the street, riding my bike everywhere and so on, today parents would be castigated for allowing their kids to do that kind of stuff
Would your parents take you to a different country and say 'crack on'? Parents today are absolutely not castigated for this. Do you have kids?
 

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Would your parents take you to a different country and say 'crack on'? Parents today are absolutely not castigated for this. Do you have kids?
So you disagree, so maybe where you are kids are playing footie in the street, riding their bikes a mile down the road to the park by themselves, they walk to school unsupervised, but I don't think that's the norm in most places
 

Drawfull

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So you disagree, so maybe where you are kids are playing footie in the street, riding their bikes a mile down the road to the park by themselves, they walk to school unsupervised, but I don't think that's the norm in most places
You said parents today would be castigated for letting their kids play outside basically. This obviously isn't the case. You do you.
 

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It does but times have changed and so have attitudes, when I was a kid I'd be out with my mates, down the park, playing footie in the street, riding my bike everywhere and so on, today parents would be castigated for allowing their kids to do that kind of stuff
In the 60s when I was a small child I'd be playing down the road, completely out of sight of my mum. By the time I was 12 or 13 we were off and out all day every day, getting the train to Liverpool sometimes, anything we felt like doing.

I'd make the occasional phone call from a phone box, and I did tell them if I was going to be late back. This was absolutely normal, all the kids I knew did the same.

At 12 and again when I was 13, I went youth hostelling in the Lakes with a school friend the same age, staying away for 5 days and nights. My dad dropped us off near the first hostel and we did all the rest ourselves, walking about 10 miles a day. We never once considered we might be at risk (and we were both very small girls).

It's odd now to remember it. My parents were cautious home-bodies, and yet they weren't worried about me.
 

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You said parents today would be castigated for letting their kids play outside basically. This obviously isn't the case. You do you.
They said parents today would be castigated for letting their young kids run off all day unsupervised.

This was the norm for me growing up in the 80s-early 90s and there were no mobile phones. I'd leave the house and come back hours later. Often my parents wouldn't know where I was or what I was doing and had no way of contacting me. This just isn't done anymore, in Ireland and the UK at any rate.
 

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In the 60s when I was a small child I'd be playing down the road, completely out of sight of my mum. By the time I was 12 or 13 we were off and out all day every day, getting the train to Liverpool sometimes, anything we felt like doing.

I'd make the occasional phone call from a phone box, and I did tell them if I was going to be late back. This was absolutely normal, all the kids I knew did the same.

At 12 and again when I was 13, I went youth hostelling in the Lakes with a school friend the same age, staying away for 5 days and nights. My dad dropped us off near the first hostel and we did all the rest ourselves, walking about 10 miles a day. We never once considered we might be at risk (and we were both very small girls).

It's odd now to remember it. My parents were cautious home-bodies, and yet they weren't worried about me.
My story is not dissimilar though my parents wouldnt have allowed the hostelling thing, we didn't have a phone until the late 70's so when we were out that was it.

I used to go and watch the planes at Manchester Airport, 20 miles away, 2 buses, either via Stockport or Manchester when I was 12

Those kind of things were normal then, nowadays not so much
 

Red in STL

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Yeah. If it was legit she’d show a clear pic of the eye
I'm pretty skeptical TBH, but if I'd been kidnapped or what not I'd have likely lost the plot as well!

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Would be crazy if true. Couldn't begin to imagine what would be going on in the minds of the family but I'm sure nothing could be worse than eternally not knowing what happened.
 

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Would be crazy if true. Couldn't begin to imagine what would be going on in the minds of the family but I'm sure nothing could be worse than eternally not knowing what happened.
It would be, I couldn't imagine what it must be like for them, though if you read up on Ben Needham you get an inkling
 

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Read a theory a while back that the girl never actually existed and that the UK government made her up to divert attention from their political shortcomings.
It seems that's a thing now and is being suggested by some idiots about the Nicola Bulley case too.

In a further indicator of the obsessive behaviour generated by the case, data show TikTok videos suggesting Ms Bulley's friends and family could be "crisis actors" staging events have accumulated more than 1.5 million views.

Some videos even allege the Government created the case as a "distraction".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/18/tiktok-sleuths-toxic-interest-nicola-bulley-condemned/
 

Murder on Zidane's Floor

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It does but times have changed and so have attitudes, when I was a kid I'd be out with my mates, down the park, playing footie in the street, riding my bike everywhere and so on, today parents would be castigated for allowing their kids to do that kind of stuff
Me too but my family never went out for dinner, leaving my five year old self at home alone, several hundred metres from the restaurant.
 

DJ_21

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As harsh as it sounds I’ll be very surprised if she’s still alive. I mean the kidnappers couldn’t have abducted her and changed her name because her appearance is unique, people will spot her by her eye. Although I remember seeing a look alike a few years ago at a benfica game that someone posted.
 

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As harsh as it sounds I’ll be very surprised if she’s still alive. I mean the kidnappers couldn’t have abducted her and changed her name because her appearance is unique, people will spot her by her eye. Although I remember seeing a look alike a few years ago at a benfica game that someone posted.
There have been cases of Germans, Austrians and god knows I can't remember who that have been found to have kept children - family members some in basements until they were adults even. It's a Regional Sport in Vorarlberg.
 

sullydnl

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The McCann's understandably get criticised a lot for leaving their kids in the room as they did.

But a piece of context that is often overlooked is that a lot of hotels and resorts at that time actively offered a baby listening service to customers, which consisted either of staff listening into the room via phone/monitor or a staff member stopping outside the door at regular intervals to listen in.

In fact in this case the resort chain was criticised for not operating that latter version of the service in this particular resort as they did in their others. That despite the McCann's making the fairly reasonable point that family members actually going into the apartment to check on the children regularly is probably safer than depending on a stranger to check on them by stopping by regularly and listening in from outside the door.

The point being that while we might all agree that children should never be left alone in a room like that, the reality is that enough parents were doing it for it to be a regular service offered at those resorts. You'd hope attitudes have changed since (and indeed I can't see any mention of that service on their website any more, with group nanny services seeming to be offered instead) but a lot of the parents who frequented those resorts at the time should really have reflected on how easily their own child could have been taken, and what the public's reaction would have been if it had then transpired that they had left them alone in a room under the "care" of a random staff member wandering by every now and again to listen in through a door.
 

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maybe the Portuguese police will make the McCanns take her anyway, like that case in America in the 20s where the cops made that lady take the wrong kid back because the couldn't find the real one
 

Lay

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The McCann's understandably get criticised a lot for leaving their kids in the room as they did.

But a piece of context that is often overlooked is that a lot of hotels and resorts at that time actively offered a baby listening service to customers, which consisted either of staff listening into the room via phone/monitor or a staff member stopping outside the door at regular intervals to listen in.

In fact in this case the resort chain was criticised for not operating that latter version of the service in this particular resort as they did in their others. That despite the McCann's making the fairly reasonable point that family members actually going into the apartment to check on the children regularly is probably safer than depending on a stranger to check on them by stopping by regularly and listening in from outside the door.

The point being that while we might all agree that children should never be left alone in a room like that, the reality is that enough parents were doing it for it to be a regular service offered at those resorts. You'd hope attitudes have changed since (and indeed I can't see any mention of that service on their website any more, with group nanny services seeming to be offered instead) but a lot of the parents who frequented those resorts at the time should really have reflected on how easily their own child could have been taken, and what the public's reaction would have been if it had then transpired that they had left them alone in a room under the "care" of a random staff member wandering by every now and again to listen in through a door.
I can’t fathom leaving any of my kids (aged 9, 4 and 2) alone and regularly checking in on them whilst going for dinner. I just came back from Italy with them, we had a nice restaurant located right next to us and I wouldn’t contemplate going there and leaving them.

It’s not just the fear of abduction, but what if they woke up due to a nightmare or threw up, choked etc.