SHE has a face which could have launched a thousand inquiries. Little shiny-eyed Madeleine McCann, her fate still unknown, meets our gazes as she looks out from newspapers and magazines all too regularly.

Her profile is as familiar as the Queen’s on every stamp. But still the search continues.

The tiniest, most insignificant update, true or not, about her will prompt any national tabloid to lead with her face on the front page, particularly the mid-market newspapers who know their readers lap up anything about the mystery of the middle-England three-year-old. In the year after her kidnapping, a picture of her on the front page would sell an extra 30,000 newspapers.

Last week, nine years after her disappearance, celebrities including Sharon Osborne and Katie Price declared they believe the McCanns were wrong to leave their daughter alone in her bedroom, with her younger siblings, while they dined nearby.

At the time in 2007, a health visitor told me that if the abduction had happened in the UK, the McCanns would probably have been investigated for child neglect.

Perhaps the fact they were medics, articulate, and able to garner massive financial support for their plight has helped shield them from the authorities – but it did not protect them from conspiracy theorists and the vitriol of social media.

Whether or not you agree with their decision to leave their children alone in a Portugal hotel room, the McCanns have suffered the agonising guilt and uncertainty as a result of that decision for years.

Kate McCann’s continually pained facial expression shows the daily torment she must put herself through. Whatever you think, she is serving a life sentence of guilt.

And anyone who propels themselves forward into the public eye as the McCanns have done so successfully, with the sole purpose of generating as much publicity as possible for Madeleine, sets themselves up to be wantonly castigated from all corners.

But the criticism coming from Price and Osborne is rich, those who have had the wealth to employ armies of nannies to take care of their children. The McCanns had – hopefully still have - three children under three – not an easy undertaking. The temptation to dine out with friends just a 40 second walk away from the shuttered two-bedroom apartment, must have been great.

Madeleine is just one of about a dozen British children who have vanished without a trace. Two other toddlers, Ben Needham, aged just two when he disappeared from Kos in 1991, and Katrice Lee, also two when she vanished from a supermarket by an army base in Germany, have also never been found.

Their cases, while high profile, have never generated the kind of publicity Madeleine’s has. But the silent torture of not knowing what happened to their children eats away at their parents too.

Katrice’s father Richard, from Hartlepool, dignified yet passionate, wonders about his daughter every hour of every day, 35 years on. He’s not bitter that the McCanns have had so much more publicity, as he wants them to find their daughter too. But it must gripe a little when hers is the only case most people remember.

Punishing Kate and Gerry McCann isn’t the answer. If Madeleine, or Ben, or Katrice, or any of the other missing children are out there, chastisement and judgement won’t bring any of them back.