Mark Woods: Our worst nightmare is their dream

The ice-cold panic that instantaneously sweeps your entire body is astonishing. An understandably milder, but no less uniquely chilling feeling strikes when you hear the details of other parents who, either temporarily or, God forbid, over a longer period have been separated from their children.This last week has obviously seen the media full of the latter and even as I write this I read that a seven-year-old girl in Dublin has been taken into care under suspicion that she may not be the biological daughter of the couple who claim to be her parents.

This case and the strikingly similar one of a young blonde girl found during a raid on a Roma camp in central Greece, not only shock and disturb, they also act to offer bittersweet hope to the parents of children like Ben Needham and of course Madeline McCann. That these children, suspected of having been abducted, could have remained living with people falsely claiming to be their family for so long, of course bolsters hope for these other desperate parents that their lost little ones could be living in similar circumstances.

Amongst all the judgments, suspicion and often hatred poured on the McCanns in particular, a phenomenon which resurfaced on social media with a vengeance when Crimewatch aired a few days ago, its worth taking a moment to consider what that actually means

No matter what we may or may not feel about the choices they made on the night their daughter went missing, the McCanns and those unfortunate enough to be in a similarly wretched position, are left hoping 
that their children are living a life with someone else, someone who knows that the child they have has been taken.

That thought, the stuff of nightmares for the rest of us, is what they hope, what they dream is happening right now to their child. That’s how horrific, tormenting and hellish a world they must be inhabiting in their every waking and no doubt sleeping moment

Twitter: @mark_r_woods