Another case of the Press passing judgement

Missing Shannon Matthews has been found safe and alive this morning and media coverage of the case has attracted a great deal of criticism.But another case of media treatment of victims has gone largely unnoticed

Fiona MacKeown,mother of 15 year old daughter was murdered in Goa has come in for a great amount of criticism in the press.

Madeleine Bunting writing in this morning's Guardian says

Open season has been declared on every part of her family life, her parenting style and even her appearance. She is blamed for abandoning her daughter in a resort while continuing her travels; accused of a recklessly indulgent style of parenting; and criticised for her mode of grieving. Almost every article refers to her hair - it is "lank", a "curtain" and, most unforgivably, grey.

The press has focused on her bohemian lifestyle as the reason why her daughter died such as death.

Here are some examples

The truth about 'Good Life' of murdered teenager Scarlett Keeling in the Mail yesterday

An empty milk bottle, tie-dye sheets pinned over the window instead of curtains, discarded black bin liners and a sleeping bag on the floor, and the contents spewing carelessly from a chest of drawers.
On top of them the remnants of a lost childhood - a plastic duck and young girl's jewellery box.
As these pictures show, this is the squalor in which Scarlett Keeling was being raised.
It is a million miles from the fantasy world of a wholesome family upbringing painted by her mother Fiona MacKeown in the past two weeks.

This morning the same paper reports that

The mother of murdered Scarlett Keeling spent a year in jail for cutting the throat of a man she met at a party, her son has revealed.

The Mirror under the headline Is Scarlett Keeling's mother really the guilty one?
reported

While other kids were at school, her brood would be spending six months in Goa, on India's west coast, where they could run free on sunlit beaches, feel the warm sand between their toes and eat fresh papaya all day long.
This, she explained, would be an education. It's hard to see what lessons are to be learned from Goa's Anjuna beach where hippies trip out on magic mushrooms and Nigerian drug gangs haggle for trade.