There are very few parents in the world who truly know the kind of exhilaration that Shannon Matthews’s parents are feeling today. The number is so low because in the rare cases when young children remain missing for more than two days they are hardly ever found alive.

After emerging from that flat in Dewsbury, clinging to a plainclothes police officer, Shannon has confounded the odds. And although the circumstances of her disappearance and discovery are yet to be fully explained, other parents seeking a missing child will seize upon the Shannon Matthews case as proof that children can survive, even when all hope seems lost.

While her fractured family count their many, incredible blessings today, Shannon has now to begin the process of recovery. Whatever happened to her in the 24 days she was missing must be unravelled in micro-detail and probably on tape. There will be interviews with child support officers. In the weeks and months to come she will undergo therapy and be encouraged to discuss her ordeal.

At some point she will return to school, where her classmates will know exactly what happened to her. In her local community, the nine-year-old will find that she has become a mini-celebrity and, after the euphoria and celebrations have died down, she may discover the uncomfortable truth that her disappearance exposed a hostile schism within her own family.

In this case the innocent child will not return to a “Hollywood movie-style” happy ending. Shannon’s mother, Karen, has been repeatedly described as the 32-year-old who has “seven children by five different fathers”. Her maternal grandparents have publicly accused her stepfather, Craig Meehan, 22, of being violent with the children, though Shannon’s biological father has defended him. It emerged last night that the person in whose house Shannon was found, secreted in the base of a divan bed, is a relative of Shannon’s stepfather. Amid this tangled and dysfunctional backdrop the little girl must try to come to terms with what has happened to her.

But though all of it will be painful for a girl so young, history shows that an abducted child, if this is what Shannon turns out to be, can bounce back from such trauma.

Last month I interviewed two girls who were 10 years old when they were abducted in Hastings, Sussex, by a paedophile and held for four days in his Eastbourne flat. Lisa Hoodless and Charlene Lunnon, now 19, were bundled into the back of a car and raped repeatedly by Alan Hopkinson, who removed all the door handles from his flat and tied the children up with tights.

He frightened them into submission by telling them that there was a lunatic next door who had a big dog that would kill them. He said, untruthfully, that their parents had refused to pay a ransom to get the children back. When they watched the TV coverage of the massive police hunt for them in 1999, Charlene said that she could tell from the defeated look on her father’s face that he thought she was dead.

But it is worth remembering that their resilience in coping with that trauma has been remarkable. Although they suffered repeated nightmares and the indignity of being pointed out at school, both have defied the odds and gone on to have relationships. Although they were horribly damaged by such foul abuse, both young women regard themselves as largely recovered.

Contrary to what the “mis lit” culture might have us believe, they have refused to let themselves be perpetual victims and insist that in some ways their ordeal has made them stronger. As Lisa said: “You can either go one way and [think] everything’s ruined, or you can go the other and put it behind you. That’s what we did.” Indeed, they agree that the “counselling” they underwent was almost as bad as the abduction. What they needed, they say, was to return to school and have a normal life with their friends, not relive their experience repeatedly.

We do not know yet what Shannon endured in that house, or whether she will manage to respond in the same way.

But she is a living example of what Charlene and Lisa fervently believe: “You should never, ever give up looking for children, because sometimes they can come back.”

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