Abstract
This chapter does not speculate on or make any judgements with regard to what has happened to Madeleine McCann or who is responsible for her disappearance. The focus rather is on elucidating the rationale for the continued hostility towards the McCann’s on social media, over a decade after Madeleine’s disappearance. Whilst there have been several theories presented regarding the reasons for this hostility, this chapter focuses exclusively on explanations relating to the management of risk and the ideology of motherhood. This encompasses an analysis of risk society, whereby individuals are judged as the executers of their own suffering when they make a ‘wrong’ choice; particularly in situations where they are considered to have the benefit of appropriate knowledge to avoid potential dangers. It is argued that an ideology of motherhood not only persists in society but it thrives as motherhood continues to be an ‘institutionalised’ role (Gatrell 2004) and ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays 1996) reigns supreme.
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Notes
- 1.
Refer to Madeleine McCann (2017) by Danny Collins for an insight into some of the practicalities of the investigation. This includes the modification of a statement made to the police by Doctor Oldfield, one of those responsible for checking on the children.
- 2.
Other reasons include challenges to the McCanns account of Madeleine’s disappearance, the media attention that Madeleines disappearance has received in contrast to other missing children, the money that has been spent on the search for Madeleine and questions as to why the McCanns have not been prosecuted for child neglect.
- 3.
Greek playwright Euripides portrays Medusa as a woman scorned, who is willing to murder her sons as vengeance for being deserted by Jason.
- 4.
Jamie Milligan was sentenced for offensive comments he made on Facebook regarding Madeleine McCann and murdered toddler Mikael Kular. Whilst Matthew Woods was charged with making offensive comments against missing children, including Madeleine McCann on Facebook.
- 5.
The reporter Martin Brunt became the target of on-line abuse and a Facebook group was set up calling for him to be sacked.
- 6.
CPS guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communication sent via social media state that ‘for all allegations concerning a public electronic communications network’, ‘the starting point should be section 127’ (2018).
- 7.
The thread is archived and permissions were not sought from contributors. I was able to reconcile this as the thread is taken from a social media discussion site that is open and accessible to the general public. However, it is important to acknowledge the intrinsic value of undertaking a moral approach to any research ‘irrespective of the extent to which the context in which such communication takes place is public or private’ (Coughlan and Perryman 2015: 153). Sagiura encourages researchers to adopt the ‘golden rule’ and to consider how they would feel if the situation was reversed; accordingly ‘researchers can familiarise themselves with the place of study in order to ascertain whether it should be considered public from the perspective of those who occupy it’ (Ibid. 5). I adopted this position and continually reflected on the place of study, concluding that as it is a publicly accessible archived thread on a social media discussion site that has millions of visitors each month, it is ethically defensible. I have chosen to paraphrase the longer quotes made by members of the group so that people cannot do a search on-line for these as I do acknowledge that ‘negative consequences to participants could arise from disclosure that resulted in violation of privacy’ (Sagiura 2016: 7).
- 8.
In 2008 Goncalo Amaral who was initially the lead investigator into Madeleines disappearance in Portugal had a book published The Truth of the Lie (this has not been published in the UK) and took part in a documentary that raises questions about the McCanns involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. The McCanns took out a libel case against Amaral and won a payout. Amaral won on appeal against the payout. The McCanns then took the case to the Portuguese Supreme Court where the judge found against them.
- 9.
Several studies have identified digression from the topic of conversation as a trolling strategy (See for example the study by Synott, Coulias and Ioannou (2017).
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Marshall, J.L. (2021). Can Risk Society and the Ideology of Motherhood Explain the Continued Hostility Towards the McCanns on Social Media?. In: Owen, T., Marshall, J. (eds) Rethinking Cybercrime. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55841-3_8
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