Leading article: Wild theories and a warped sense of priorities

We live with the delusion of control. We order our lives, our homes, our jobs. We choose our children's schools and arrange their after-school care. We timetable our visit to the gym, our journey to work, our day in the office, our evening before the television. We stay in touch through mobile phones, text messages and emails. But then it all falls apart. Someone close to us dies in a car crash, or is taken ill, or falls victim to a terrible crime.

Usually such existential agonies we suffer in private. The world turns, unaware and unconcerned. The clocks do not stop. But, occasionally, a case achieves public prominence. Sometimes, as with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it combines celebrity with the shock of an unanticipated death. On other occasions, as with the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann, it resonates as what the populist press loves to call "every parent's nightmare", in which the public is encouraged to indulge a vicarious sense of identification with the unhappy family at the centre of the affair - and enjoy a rather distasteful thrill at the drama of the event and at the fact it has not, thankfully, happened to us.

In response we luxuriate in a pale imitation of the McCann family's distress. We echo their sense of impotence in our need to "do something", whether that is tying yellow ribbons to fences, placing cuddly toys on war memorials, holding up posters at football matches or releasing pink balloons into the sky to symbolise ... what, is not quite clear. Such are the homespun sacraments to which contemporary society resorts, having abandoned the rituals of religion in which Mr and Mrs McCann themselves have sought solace.

The media has offered its own acts of psychological displacement. Not least of these have been the self-righteous indignation that some newspapers have poured on the Portuguese police. There has been an unsavoury jingoism in the way this foreign police force has been caricatured as incompetent, wilfully ignoring the fact that it has two distinct forces, one responsible for searches and another for criminal investigations. And there has been an obscurantist refusal to accept that the Portuguese judicial process insists police cannot reveal anything about a criminal investigation, or potential suspects, for fear of jeopardising any eventual trial.

This is not the only charge against the media. It has displayed a warped ingenuity in a constant flow of articles on a story on which there has been little new to say. Speculation has continued unabated, with wild theories of lone paedophiles, criminal gangs, child smuggling rings, childless couples, jealous mothers and revenge attacks. Not to mention shrill commentators, with tasteless accusations of neglect levelled against the unfortunate couple, in articles of calculated insensitivity.

The truth is that the nation's children are not seriously at risk from marauding paedophiles. Despite all the talk of stranger-danger, most child abuse is perpetrated from within the family. And children are far more at risk from falls from open windows or pushchairs where they are not strapped in - or from matches and lighters, medicines and chemicals, kettles and light flexes, broken glass or kitchen knives, or from choking on small toys, peanuts and marbles - than they are from sexual predators. Nearly all lost children are found. The worst that will happen to most children left unattended in bed is that they will awake, become upset and cry.

The hysteria created by the reporting of this and similar cases does no service to anyone. It will lead only to children being wrapped in cotton wool and prevented from developing the social skills and independence they need to survive. Far from offering a shared catharsis, all it does is spread the virus of fear.

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