Or do you think the baby sitting services at these holiday hotels and complexes provide someone who will actually sit with the children?

Curiously, the guy who did my haircut last Monday said he took his family to exactly that place for the last couple of years. And one of the major reasons was that they *do* have a creche with full-time attendants, and they *do* have a top-class babysitting service where the babysitter will stay with the kids while the adults go off for a meal, at a very reasonable cost.

There is still a question of what's appropriate care, though. You don't sit with a baby 24 hours a day, do you? So I don't think the problem is failure to have someone in the same room as the kid. But it is usually considered essential to have someone within earshot of children, not to protect against kidnappers but for all the other problems that kids can get themselves into, like getting their head stuck through the bars of the cot or stuff like that. So leaving the kid without a babysitter is usually considered negligent. 99 times out of 100 they'd get away with it, so they were incredibly unlucky for it to come to this, but it was still negligent.

Of course, that doesn't make it their fault - the fault is clearly with the evil person (or people) who abducted the kid. But their negligence made it possible, and I'm sure they're living with the guilt of that "if-only".

Graham.