Annoyed/upset by Netflix series

[KimberleyClark]

The Snow Girl (contains spoilers)

This is a Spanish series about a little girl who goes missing on a busy Christmas festival night in Malaga. The police never find her. Got to the fifth episode which goes back to the night of the disappearance and it turns out she was kidnapped by an infertile woman who had just been told her latest IVF didn’t work. Saw her in the square where she had got separated from her father who had gone to buy her a balloon. Took her away.

This is such an untrue stereotype about childless women. IRL we do not kidnap other people’s children. And the woman was portrayed with such a lack of empathy for the child’s actual mother. It was awful.

I've seen similar storylines a few times on various (usually American) crime/police based shows. It's obviously nonsense - I spent a lot of time wanting and desperately trying for a baby and even at my most hormonal and lowest points, stealing someone else's was never in my mind.

Try and ignore - it makes more interesting Tv than the true stories of infertile women I suppose.

My own bugbear is when they use infertility as a plot line but it never lasts more than a year and the woman is never without a child in the end - she get miraculously pregnant or her IVF works after 2 attempts.

I mean, it's certainly not common but it does unfortunately happen op.

When I had ds last year, on our first day home from the hospital I was warned by the community midwife to always ask for Id and not let anyone in without a prebooked appointment even if they looked legit. It was because there was a woman in my area who was pretending to be a community midwife, had got a uniform etc and was following new mums home to see where they lived and then visiting later pretending to be a midwife in order to gain access to babies. She'd had her own struggles and was clearly mentally unwell. It was terrifying as a new mother but it was a reality in my area. Shows like that will always lean towards the dramatic, it doesn't make it a portrayal of all childless women. It makes it a portrayal of a woman who's unwell and struggling.

It is often a plot in dramas

As

A) it does happen in real life

B) it's actually a nicer story than the little girl having been murdered or held by a man with ill intent. You could go for a tragic accident on the day but that's not really a happy ending either.

So happiest ending is child alive and has been well treated by their capturer.

I actually enjoyed that drama.

I'm sorry it upset you but it's just a drama.

You can't let such things affect you personally or you'd live your life in a permanent state of upset.

It wouldn’t upset me.

Shlocky clichés are the lifeblood of run of the mill TV dramas:

Widowers are always handsome and charming
Women orgasm in 30 seconds without any foreplay
Cops who are about to retire get killed on their last day
Baddies always explain in great detail why they did what they did, rather than just shooting the person
Tough guys get beaten to a pulp and just walk it off like it’s no biggie.

I mean it has happened in real life that women blinded by infertility grief have done such things. Obviously it's a rare situation but I wouldn't be insulted by it.

There are also plenty of bad plots around grieving mothers stealing children, which I think it’s safe to say is not something that happens very often. You can’t take it to heart.

Vastly overused plot device. I read a lot of thrillers and if it's a missing child one and a childless woman appears amongst the characters, I stop reading and just flick through to the end as it's obvious 'whodunnit'

Your not over reacting op and this cliche plot is way over used.
No matter how crap and low budget the series is its still upsetting.

I was a decade in the ivf game and never contemplated kidnapping a child.
I wanted my own and to experience pregnancy

Sadly for the parents of missing children the idea that a childless couple took their child rather than something else does provide weird comfort I think.
So possibly why this urban myth stays alive..

surely its also nicer for us as viewers to have a "happy ending" occasionally.

or would people prefer the child to be either dead or having been abused for many years until rescued.

It's a TV show. TV shows would be very boring if it focused on the norm and not the exceptions to the rule.

It wasn't that much of a happy ending.Spoilers The kidnapper totally isolated the girl from the outside world for six years, during which she killed an innocent man from the bank who had come by to see why mortgage payments were being missed, then when the net started to close deliberately tried to kill herself and the girl by driving her car into a ravine so they wouldn't be separated. She died, the girl survived and was eventually reunited with her birth parents who she hardly recognised. Bog standard behaviour from an unhinged infertile woman of course.

well it was a happy ending for the child/parent/the viewer, compared to OTHER options for that sort of story - ie child recovered, she wasn't physically abused as such, "bad guy" died.

Now one could argue that children shouldn't be used in these sort of tales (and of course if women are used instead, then rape is often on the table over just being held for ransom/politcal purposes which men may be).

I loathe this sort of plotline. Infertile women don't want your baby, they want their baby.

The extraordinarily rare woman who steals a baby does so because she's mentally ill, not because she's infertile.

I'm another one who immediately goes to the end of a book where there's a missing child and a childless woman, rolling my eyes at the inevitable shocking(!) twist.

It’s not a stereotype. A stereotype is something that it very common.

when I think of woken who are infertile/can’t carry their own child etc I don’t automatically jump to “bet she’s going to kidnap a child now”

I’ve read awful stories before about women killing other women for their babies etc so yes it happens. It doesn’t make it a stereotype though.

What? Since when is it a straight choice between 'kidnapped by childless woman' and 'dead/abused'. A modicum of imagination could produce many other scenarios where the child emerged alive and without having been physically abused.

• Revenge (based on some long-held grudge) kidnapping by someone who was also a parent
• Family member taken child for family-politics reason
• Kidnapping was a sham in the style of Shannon Matthews
• Child had run away and hidden out somewhere
• Ransom-based kidnapping for financial gain

I absolutely hate this kind of plot.

I get that it's meant to be a "better ending" than the child ending up murdered (and it, of course, is a much a nicer ending compared to that) but it's just a lazy, overused stereotype and it's a mistake to think that there aren't those stereotypes floating around about women who can't have kids.

It's the typical "Oh, look, this woman has been driven demented by her sheer desperation to have a child that she can't bear herself that she is compelled to steal someone else's child."

It's always a woman put in that plot, too. No one ever writes a plot like that about a man-driven to insanity by his infertility and desperation to be a parent that he kidnaps a child for his own.

It's just lazy and I know it's just a show-but it does portray a really negative stereotype around childless women, in particular, that they can't find happiness and acceptance without a child when that so often isn't the case.

You realise they have to make dramas dramatic so that people want to watch them right?

it sad that you feel offended but your feelings are misplaced. The programme is not about you.

There are plenty of shows about parents neglecting or abusing their children, no one assumes all parents are like that. Same as no one hears of a childless couple and starts worrying their child is going to be kidnapped.

We all have to Avalon things we find triggering, it doesn’t mean those things shouldn’t exist.