http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/10/what-made-kate-gerry-mccann-object-of-so-much-angerWhat made Kate and Gerry McCann the object of so much anger?
The thing all parents dread, the McCanns experienced. Perhaps it is their defiance in the face of such dismal fortune that provokes their abusers
The Guardian, Friday 10 October 2014 15.30 BST
Many people think they should have given up long ago, but the McCanns continue to fight. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPAIt’s been more than seven years since Kate and Gerry McCann informed the British media that their four-year-old, Madeleine, had gone missing from her bed in a holiday resort in Portugal. Their hope was that publicity would help them to find their daughter. It didn’t. It hasn’t. But still the headlines come.
The latest of many disturbing postscripts to this disturbing story is the death of 63-year-old Brenda Leyland. Her body was found in a hotel room in Leicester a few days after a reporter from Sky News doorstepped her. Film was broadcast of Leyland reacting to Martin Brunt’s suggestion that she was one of a number of people whose abusive messages about the McCanns had been handed to the police. Leyland’s high-profile exposure has, inevitably, been directly linked to her suicide.
One is not supposed to think of “Twitter trolls” as fragile. But this one was, apparently. Her anonymous tweets talked tough. They proclaimed her hatred of the McCanns. She took particular umbrage to what she saw as the couple’s publicity-seeking behaviour. There’s sad irony in the fact that, when publicity found Leyland, it seems to have quickly destroyed her.
Maybe Leyland knew that, were she to be subjected to a fraction of the notoriety that has been piled on the McCanns, she would indeed be destroyed. Maybe that’s why she saw the couple as so different to her that she could not summon any sympathy, only hostility.
Why Madeleine’s disappearance attracted so much interest has never been much of a puzzle. Any parent who has lost their child, even for a few minutes, is familiar with their own panic-stricken voice of fear, asking that Grimm’s fairy tale question: “What if she’s gone? What if you never see her again?” The thing all parents dread, the McCanns experienced. Why this, the most dismal of ill fortune, made the McCanns, for so many people, the object of suspicion, contempt and anger, rather than empathy – that’s a more difficult question to answer.
It’s often said that the McCanns attracted criticism because they were middle-class – with a sense of entitlement that made them not just careless about their own daughter’s welfare but also expectant that the world would help them get her back. Essentially though, that criticism really amounts to this: “We don’t like the McCanns because they clearly didn’t live their lives for ever in fear that the worst could easily happen to them.” What’s more, when the worst did come, the couple remained hopeful, purposeful, even defiant.
What really irked people about the McCanns, from the beginning, was essentially their massive reserves of emotional resilience. Kate McCann was criticised for not looking broken – for brushing her hair and putting on makeup. Gerry McCann raised eyebrows because he remained articulate. They exercised, which absolutely scandalised people. Sure, that was a sensible thing to do. But what kind of monster is sensible under such pressure? Even that decision in those first hours – not to wait passively for news, but actively to go out and create it – this pair chose fight, not flight, from the start.
The McCanns continue to fight. Many people think they should have given up long ago. Some perverse people even argue that Leyland’s death is on the conscience of the McCanns, because they won’t shrug their shoulders and accept that some people think very, very badly of them. The McCanns say their twin sons [sic] are old enough now to see all the awful things that are said about their parents. They cannot accept that this is something they have to put up with. No enemy is large enough to intimidate the couple, not even the vastness of the internet.
By contrast, there’s no flight more complete than suicide. Is that why Leyland and others have developed such great animus against the McCanns? Do people simply find the sheer stubborn courage of these people so unbelievable that they mistrust it, even despise it? Can the root of all this McCann hatred be people seeing two parents roaring for justice, attacking those who would deny them it, and thinking: “I couldn’t do that, no way. But I can’t accept they’re better than me because they can. I prefer to believe they’re worse.”
Many people, when discussing trolling on the internet, see it as a manifestation of misogyny. Others, who don’t like this idea, insist that women can be trolls – vicious trolls – as well. Leyland, her choice of hate figures and her awful demise appear to prove their point far more graphically than anyone would wish.
Yet if you start thinking of trolls as people who resent strong people because they make them feel inadequate, then you see that trolling would indeed be an activity particularly attractive to misogynists, who prefer to think of women as weak precisely so they can think of themselves as strong by comparison.
The McCanns were strong enough to make sure that their own voices – not the stereotyped voice of the universal grieving parent – were heard. Trolls gain strength from making their voices heard too, but they’re not strong enough to speak in their own name. Expose a troll’s name, and you expose their fears and vulnerability. Such people, it appears, may sometimes be far more fearful and vulnerable than the people who anger them so greatly.
