Missing Persons

A handbook of research

Karen Shalev Greene, Llian Alys, Karen Shalev Greene, Llian Alys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138494442
• eBook ISBN: 9781317095521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

A missing person is an individual whose whereabouts are unknown and where there is some concern for his or her wellbeing. In the UK, around 250, 000 people are reported missing every year, with the majority being children under the age of 18. Despite the fact that missing persons are a social phenomenon which encompasses vast areas of interest, relatively little is known about those who go missing, what happens to them while they are missing, and what can be done to prevent these incidents from occurring.

This groundbreaking book brings together for the first time ideas and expertise across this vast subject area into one interconnected publication. It explores the subjects of missing children, missing adults, the investigative process of missing person cases, and the families of missing persons.

Those with no prior knowledge or professionals with focused knowledge in some areas will be able to expand their understanding of a variety of topics relevant to this field through detailed chapters which advance our understanding of this complex phenomenon, discuss what is unknown, and suggest the best and most important steps forward to further advance our knowledge.

Part I
Missing Children

1
Children Missing from Care

Carol Hayden

Missing and Care

Children are more likely to be reported missing to the police than adults. In the UK, around two-thirds of all missing person reports to the police are for children and young people (NPIA, 2012). Research outside the UK confirms a similarly high number of children reported as missing. For example, American research shows that the great majority are children who have run away from home or care, rather than abductions and similar events (Patterson, 2008). Biehal and Wade (2000) point out that running away from child-care institutions is not new and that there is evidence across the centuries of children running away from charity schools, workhouses and foster placements.

Children who go missing are a varied group but research has clearly demonstrated that children in care feature disproportionately in reports to the police (Biehal and Wade, 2000; Hayden and Goodship, 2013). However, it is probable that children in care are more likely to be reported missing by carers, than parents reporting children missing from home, because of the professional role of care workers (Hayden and Goodship, 2013). Many of those not in care and reported missing are known to social services departments (Hayden and Goodship, 2013; The Children’s Society, 2012a) and more than one-third are identified as being ‘at risk of significant harm’ (The Children’s Society, 2012b). The risks of children going missing have been well established by a range of studies since the 1970s in the UK (see for example Sinclair, 1971) and by a series of reports and campaigns by The Children’s Society (Safe on the Streets Research Team, 1999; Rees and Lee, 2005; Rees, 2011). A more recent focus in this field includes sexual exploitation (The Children’s Society, 2012a, 2012b) and trafficking (Williams, 2012), issues that are dealt with in more depth in other chapters in this volume. Both of these latter issues interconnect with the circumstances and risks associated with being in care, particularly residential care.

‘Care’ encompasses a variety of environments including local authority, voluntary and independent sector residential care homes and foster care placements, as well as ‘family and friends’ placements, where a child is placed within the wider family or with significant others connected to the family. Existing evidence would suggest that although children are reported missing from all types of placement, children go missing more frequently from residential care (Biehal and Wade, 2000; Hayden and Goodship, 2013). There are just over 65,000 children in care in England at any one time, although around 90,000 a year pass through the care system, some for just a short period. Most of these children live in various types of foster care but around 7 per cent live in one of England’s 1810 children’s homes (Department for Education, 2012). Children’s residential care is now predominantly (76 per cent of all homes) provided by the voluntary and independent sectors; only 24 per cent of homes are run by local authorities (Department for Education, 2012). There is great unevenness in the geographical distribution of children’s homes: half of all homes in England are in three areas (North West, 25 per cent; West Midlands, 16 per cent; South East, 13 per cent) (Department for Education, 2012, p. 35). This latter situation means that 44 per cent of children are placed in homes outside the local authority that is responsible for them (Department for Education, 2012, p. 51). Around 42 per cent of children in care are aged under ten years of age; it follows that 58 per cent are over the age of ten (Department for Education, 2012).¹ Going missing tends to be concentrated in the teenage years (Biehal and Wade, 2000; Hayden and Goodship, 2013).

Prevalence and Frequency

Table 1.1 illustrates various recent estimates of the number of individual children reported missing from care in the UK as well as the number of incidents or reports. Local authorities have to report annually to central government on the children missing from care for more than 24 hours: this official data shows 930 individual children in 2011 (APPG, 2012). Police data shows higher numbers: 5,000 individual children and 17,000 incidents. The UK Missing Persons Bureau estimate is higher still as it includes children missing for short periods.

What Table 1.1 illustrates is how differently the scale of the issue can be configured, in relation to whether incidents or individual children are the focus of the analysis, and whether the child has been missing for over or under 24 hours. According to Rees and Lee (2005) young people living in residential care are approximately three times more likely to run away overnight compared with young people living with their birth families. Biehal and Wade (2000) estimated that overall around 30 per cent of those who go missing and are reported to the police are missing from care environments and most of these are missing from residential care.2 They also found that the rate of going missing from residential care environments ranged from 20–25 per cent in two local authorities to 65 per cent in one large urban authority and 71 per cent in an inner London borough.

Research by the author (Hayden and Goodship, 2013) found a very similar proportion (to that of Biehal and Wade, 2000): 28.7 per cent of individual children were missing from care environments in a large police force that serves four local authorities. This police force had nearly 10,000 missing person reports in a one-year period, of which around three-quarters were reports on children. The perception was often that children in care accounted for a substantial

Table 1.1 Estimates of the scale of children missing from care and reported to the police in the UK

Source	Estimate
APPG (2012) police figures, > 24 hours	5,000 children
	17,000 incidents
APPG (2012) local authority figures, > 24 hours	930 children
UK Missing Persons Bureau (2012)	10,000 children
	42,000 incidents

proportion of their work, partly because of repeat incidents and partly because of the number of reports from a single address. Children in care accounted for 44.9 per cent of all incidents relating to children and 28.7 per cent of individual children. At least half the addresses that had the highest number of missing person reports each month (over a one-year period) were children’s residential care homes. The number of reports from individual addresses ranged from 14 to 40 reports in a month from a single care home address. As most of these homes housed a maximum of six children and young people and not all went missing every month, the number of reports illustrates how multiple reports on a child are common, even in a short period like a month. Analysis of missing person reports across seven homes over a six-month period illustrated that although all homes had children reported missing in this period, the number of reports varied greatly (again endorsing the findings of Biehal and Wade, 2000). Shalev Greene and Hayden (2014) confirm these earlier studies and have also shown that 88 per cent of reports on children in care are repeat reports. The range in the prevalence across different local authorities suggests that the specific context of residential care (such as proportion of out-of-area and specialist placements) in these local authorities and in individual care homes (age of children, whether the home caters for short-term or long-term placements) are important issues to understand in order to reduce the number of children who go missing from care.

There is very little published research that focuses on children who go missing from foster care. Biehal and Wade (2000) found that there was no central recording in their four local authorities and overall recording by social workers was ‘hit and miss’ (2000, p. 214). They estimated that at least 5 per cent of children in foster placements went missing over a one-year period. The author found a much bigger proportion of carers (in a small-scale survey of 29 placements) had experienced a child going missing during 2010 (58 per cent) and that 78 per cent of foster carers had this experience at some point in their time as a carer. This local authority still had no central recording system for children missing from foster care; records were held by individual social workers.

More broadly, it is important to recognize that many children in care started to go missing before they entered the care system. The Social Exclusion Unit (2002, p. 14) found that ‘while almost half of all young people in care are likely to have run away, many started running before they entered the care system’.

Why Do Children Go Missing from Care?

Children go missing from care for a variety of reasons, the most frequent of which relates to a desire to be somewhere else (often with friends and family) and for more freedom than they are allowed by their placement. Some aspects of the problem are created by the nature of residential care – for example, children in residential care cannot have a key to the home and there may not be enough staff to pick them up from a night out with friends (Hayden and Gough, 2010). Children and young people may be used to more freedom to come and go as they please than they find in both residential and foster care so react by not returning to their home when expected. Sometimes they are running away from bullying or arguments with other residents. Other reasons for going missing may relate to seeking adventure or excitement and trying to escape an accumulation of stress and anxiety. The importance of peer influence has been noted, particularly in relation to young girls. Children in care (particularly residential care) are also groomed by inappropriate adults who want to abuse them. Table 1.2 outlines the very different types of missing from care.

Adult involvement and sexual exploitation are possible in any of the situations depicted in Table 1.2, but the likelihood may well increase from situations 1 to 6. Trafficking is more likely to be an issue in disappearances from care. In July 2011, CEOP took the national lead for

Table 1.2 Different types of ‘missing’ and ‘absent’ from care

Type of incident		Example or explanation
1	Reported missing during the day	Do not go to school/leave the school site/do not come back from school but do not stay out overnight. Carers may or may not know where the child is.
2	Absent	Go to see family or friends, go to a party and do not return, often overnight or longer. Carers think they know where the young person is but either did not give their permission or expected them to have returned.
3	Missing from care overnight	Go out and do not return. Whereabouts unknown by carers.
4	Missing from care repeatedly	May relate to grooming and sexual exploitation or other dangerous activities (drugs, criminality).
5	Missing from care for longer periods	May relate to grooming and sexual exploitation or other dangerous activities (drugs, criminality).
6	Disappearance from care	May be related to trafficking.

missing children, acknowledging the link between going missing and child sexual exploitation. Going missing is increasingly recognized to be connected to the risk of sexual exploitation; and, in turn children who are sexually exploited are more likely to go missing (Sharp, 2012). For example, a study by Barnardo’s (2011) estimated that around 50 per cent of the children and young people they worked with in relation to sexual exploitation went missing on a regular basis. CEOP (2011) in its national scoping study of grooming concluded that going missing frequently was in evidence in many cases and where it was not it is possible that parents had not reported their child missing. Similarly, the Children’s Commissioner (2012) inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups found evidence of children repeatedly reported missing in all 14 sites in the inquiry.

Morgan (2006, p. 19), as Children’s Rights Director for England at the time, concluded from his consultations with children who had run away from home or care that:

there are three very different sorts of running away – running away simply to enjoy yourself for a while before coming back; running to somewhere or someone you want to go to (like your family or a friend’s); and, most worryingly, running away from where you have been placed because you can’t cope with things or didn’t feel protected there.

In 2013 it would be pertinent to add to these three groups – those who go missing because they are groomed for sexual exploitation or through trafficking or fall into these situations through going missing. Morgan’s (2012) second report has more mentions of these latter possibilities, although the overall message is very similar.

Earlier research has generally concluded that going missing is a sign that something is wrong in young people’s lives (Payne, 1995; Rees and Lee, 2005). This might include problems within a placement or at school, drug and alcohol use or offending behaviour.

Research conducted on reports to the Missing People charity in 2003 showed that 70 per cent of children who had been reported missing had run away by choice – this included those who stayed away from home without permission and without intending to leave for good. Biehal et al. (2003, p. 22), in a sample of 40 former young runaways, found that ‘running away is more often a spontaneous reaction to hurt and frustration than a premeditated decision’. These researchers also found that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Missing Children
• PART II Missing Adults
• PART III Investigation of a Missing Person Case
• PART IV Families of Missing Persons
• Index