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Kate and Gerry McCann to help raise plight of missing children
Ellen Widdup18 May 2009
The parents of Madeleine McCann will join families of other vanished youngsters today to mark International Missing Children's Day.
Kate and Gerry McCann will attend an event on London's South Bank to publicise the plight of the mothers and fathers left wondering what happened to their children many years after their disappearance.
The couple, from Rothley, Leicestershire, recently marked the second anniversary of their daughter Madeleine going missing from their holiday flat in Praia da Luz, southern Portugal, on May 3 2007, just days before her fourth birthday.
Also taking part in the event will be the mother and sister of Katrice Lee, who was two when she disappeared from a Naafi shopping complex in Paderborn, Germany, on November 28, 1981.
Natasha Lee, Katrice's sister, will make a speech and read a short poem.
There will also be speeches from ChildLine founder Esther Rantzen, Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, and Andy McCullough, from runaway children's charity Railway Children.
Other attendees will include police officers from Hampshire and Lancashire Police involved in the searches for Damien Nettles and Paige Chivers.
Damien was 16 when he went missing after a night out with friends in Cowes on the Isle of Wight on November 2 1996, and Paige was 15 when she vanished from Blackpool on August 22 2007.
Balloons featuring the faces of these and other missing children will be displayed at the event, which is hosted by the National Policing Improvement Agency.
The event will also highlight today's launch of a “forget-me-not” campaign to help bring missing children home.
Every five minutes a child goes missing in the UK, according to child welfare charity Parents & Abducted Children Together.
Pact's attempts to tackle the statistic have been given a boost by Tesco, which is selling forget-me-not ribbons, badges and wrist bands to raise funds and awareness.
The supermarket will also continue to display posters of missing children and link its website to www.missingkids.co.uk.
Pact's founder Lady Meyer said: “It is vitally important to increase public awareness of the problem of missing children if effective action is to be taken.
“Our ability to tackle the dreadful statistics - some 100,000 children missing every year - is hampered by lack of information.
“From why children go missing in the first place, to what happens to them next - our information is incomplete and co-ordination between the police, NGOs and private sector could be much, much better.”
Tesco executive director Lucy Neville-Rolfe said: “Tesco have been supporting this important cause since 2002 by putting up posters in our stores. This raises visibility of missing children with millions of customers every week.
“This year we are also helping the campaign by selling forget-me-not badges, wristbands and ribbons in our larger stores, hoping that together we can find more missing children, faster.”
Pact has campaigned for full police support for the Missingkids website with age progression technology and the Child Rescue Alert, which increases the possibility of finding a child in the vital first hours after their disappearance.
Lady Meyer, whose husband Sir Christopher Meyer is the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission and a former British ambassador to the United States, founded the charity in 2000.
She fought a long-running legal battle after her two sons were abducted by her ex-husband - German physician Hans-Peter Volkmann - in 1994.
