Excerpt from the Telegraph

We have become accustomed to treating the disappearance, death or recovery of children as a sort of cathartic public theatre. The long hunt for four-year-old Madeleine McCann has been followed by Shannon's disappearance and the rape and murder of 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling in Goa. Such cases arouse strong public sympathies, certainly, but frequently also the fiercest censure of the families involved at the very moment when they are at their most vulnerable.

In the case of the McCanns, a degree of public anger focused on their decision to leave their three children alone while they went for dinner with friends nearby. In that of Scarlett Keeling, her mother, Fiona MacKeown - who has eight other children and a complicated personal life - has been harshly castigated for permitting her daughter to remain with a 25-year-old male tour guide and his aunt while the rest of the family travelled elsewhere.

A front page in the Daily Mail last week advertised an opinion piece with the tastelessly emphatic headline: "Sorry, but I blame Scarlett Keeling's mother". There was little mention of the culpability of the men who allegedly gave Scarlett drugs, raped her and left her on the beach to die.

In the cases of both Madeleine McCann and Scarlett Keeling, few would question that their parents made a misjudgment for which they have paid a truly terrible price. Yet the nasty fury that has frequently been directed at those unfortunate parents, most often by other parents, suggests something deeper at work. So profound and constant is our fear for our children, that upon hearing of such cases the mind searches furtively for some parental error that rendered them vulnerable: if we don't make the same mistake, the reckoning goes, our own will be all right.

The reality is, of course, that it is impossible both to eliminate all risk from our children's lives and to allow them and us to live sanely and happily. In general, parents are a lot closer to the kind of decisions taken by the McCanns and Ms MacKeown than many would like to admit.

The answer of most parents, I think, to Scarlett's request to stay on in Goa would have been "no". But what of a request from a 16 or 17-year-old girl to go on holiday in Britain with friends from school? Despite the assurances to anxious parents, there may indeed be evenings in clubs and bars, with alcohol and perhaps drugs in the mix. At a certain point, one must have the discussions, deliver the warnings, and then trust enough to let a teenager go.

Both the finely balanced decisions and the fears are so tricky to negotiate that it is tempting to reduce them to simple, knowable dramas: in Shannon's, The Child Lost and Found; in Scarlett's, The Neglectful Mother. A more disturbing truth to face is that the reality of risk, both for them and for us, will always be complicated.