A few weeks ago I wrote about the disappearance and subsequent discovery of 9 Year old Shannon Matthews. The little girl had vanished after a swimming lesson, but 3 weeks later was discovered in the home of her step father’s uncle. Since then, Shannon has remained in the care of a foster family and has had little direct contact with her mother, while most days a further piece of the jigsaw of the complicated life of this family has been revealed. There is little hard information other than a number of the family have been arrested and some of those people including Shannon’s mother and step father are now being held in prison having been charged with various offenses.

When I wrote about this topic on my blog, it was with sadness that family life for some people was so complicated, and that those people appeared to live very different lives from what I would call normal. I wondered if poverty and lack of opportunity had anything to do with the way in which some families live their lives. The main thing that struck me last week when Shannon’s mother’s partner was arrested on child pornography charges was that here was a young man of just 22 who had moved in with a woman of 25 when he was only 16. I wondered about the kind of world he had come from. Today Karen Matthews appeared in court charged with child neglect and attempting to pervert the cause of justice. Perhaps Karen knew where Shannon was, perhaps she organised the whole thing, I don’t know. There are rumours that the family tried to obtain money from the Madeleine McCann campaign and others that they based the whole thing on a recent episode of a TV programme in order to try to extort money.

We live in a world of celebrity a world where people think that they can get money for doing little. Only too often people are looking for an easy way, when for most people it takes hard work to earn the money to live comfortably. There is no doubt that some of us have advantages over others in terms of who our parents are, where we go to school, how long we stay in education and the kind of work we do. However, there are plenty of people out there who have lots of disadvantages in life, yet still manage to succeed.

What is most sad is that there is a little girl living with foster carers, what is more, she has brothers and sisters who must also be in care now. What family life there ever was has now disappeared, perhaps for ever. What is even more sad, is that perhaps those children have a better chance now they are apart from their mother and as one myself that is the worst bit.