Kate McCann has given her support to the new Child Rescue Alert System which was launched yesterday.
Her support for the system comes almost seven years after the disappearance of her daughter, Madeleine McCann in Praia de Luz in the Algarve on 3 May 2007.
Kate is urging the public to sign up in order to receive texts, emails and social media alerts when a child goes missing. The mum said: "When a child is abducted, families are devastated and entire communities are torn apart. The agony of not knowing where your child is is almost impossible to imagine. The helplessness is at times overwhelming."
The Child Rescue Alert System is due to go live on May 25 this year which is also International Missing Children's Day. Alerts about missing children will be made by the British police under three conditions: The child who is feared missing must be under 18 years of age; there must be viable belief that the child is in immediate danger and finally, there must be enough information for the public to be able to aid the police in their search and investigation.
Kate spoke about the pain of not knowing what has happened to Madeleine seven years on: "I'm not underestimating the blow of hearing bad news that your child has been killed, because obviously we're not going to go 'OK, at least we know.' But I've spent hours thinking about that and, each time, I still come up thinking we need to know. Regardless, we need to know."
