-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
/
who-is-missing.html
96 lines (95 loc) · 12.7 KB
/
who-is-missing.html
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/animated.css">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Special+Elite&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/img/icon/apple-touch-icon.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/img/icon/favicon-32x32.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/img/icon/favicon-16x16.png">
<link rel="manifest" href="site.webmanifest">
<meta property="og:url" content=https://pasitk.github.io/missing-tracks/who-is-missing.html" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Missing Tracks : Who is Missing?" />
<meta property="og:description" content="A huge proportion of the people who go missing in England and Wales are under the age of 18. During 2016 and 2017 a total of 157,852 young people were reported missing. The stories behind these children are infinitely varied, we had a look into the data behind the figures." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://pasitk.github.io/missing-tracks/img/cover-2.png" />
<script src="//d3js.org/d3.v5.min.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script src="//d3js.org/topojson.v1.min.js"></script>
<script defer src="js/layout.js"></script>
<script src="js/jquery-3.4.1.js"></script>
<script src="js/jquery-ui.js"></script>
<title>Missing Tracks : Why are they missing?</title>
</head>
<body class="body-content-page" id="body-page-2">
<header>
</header>
<div class="story bg-img lead">
<div class="lead-inside" id="lead-2">
<h1>Who is missing?</h1>
<p>A huge proportion of the people who go missing in England and Wales are under the age of 18. During 2016 and 2017 a total of 157,852 young people were reported missing. The stories behind these children are infinitely varied, we had a look into the data behind the figures.</p>
</div>
<div class="credit">
Photo: <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/architecture-boys-brick-wall-bricks-551594/" target="_blank">'Kat Jayne' on pexels.com</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story bg-color with-vis who-missing-1 content-box-type-3">
<div class="content-normal content-box-type-1 box-with-radius white-100">
<p>
<iframe title="Reasons Young People Go Missing in England and Wales" aria-label="Bar Chart" id="datawrapper-chart-8QBYT" src="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/8QBYT/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="401"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
</script>
</p>
</div>
<div class="content-normal">
<p>Most missing children were found by the police (22,609) and 17812 returned home of their own free will (17,812). Although most were found within the first few days, 2599 were recorded as coming to harm and up to 36 were found dead, some bodies went unidentified with their ages estimated. In some of the most shocking cases children are trafficked for criminal or sexual exploitation, some even by members of their own family.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story bg-color who-missing-2">
<div class="content-wide-75">
<p>Samantha Clutton is child protection policy officer for the Welsh government and says the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act in 2015 has made huge changes to safeguarding. "Now the ways in which you can traffic a child can be just moving them from one side of the road to the other, so that provided an opportunity for the police in terms of disrupting perpetrators of child sexual exploitation."</p>
<p>Since 2005, Clutton has seen patterns emerge in the ways children are trafficked around Wales. "In North Wales we see children being moved along the A55 and in South Wales along the M4," she explained. "There will be a main perpetrator who will groom and procure a child and then benefit financially in relation to the child's sexual exploitation." Both roads serve as direct links from rural, deprived Welsh towns to Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and London.</p>
<p>Clutton has seen an increase in children going missing from care to be criminally exploited, often by 'county lines' criminals. County lines organisations are typically drug gangs who recruit children and teenagers from the provinces in order to distribute their products. Representatives of the dealers will typically befriend these young people, offering them money, food, alcohol and drugs. Once they have the young person's loyalty it's not uncommon for them to begin making threats or become violent to get the young person to keep working for the organisation.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story bg-color with-vis who-missing-1 content-box-type-3">
<div class="content-normal">
<p>A shockingly large category of missing children are unaccompanied migrants. For children between five and eight years old it's the main profile, whilst every other age group under 18 lists it as the second or third most-common category. </p>
<p>There has been a significant increase in the number of missing persons categorised as 'Asylum Seeker' or 'Unaccompanied Juvenile' with 4,924 reports in 2016-2017 compared with 1,368 in 2015/16, of which 4,870 related to children. According to one child-protection charity, Every Child Protected Against Trafficking, these figures show that this issue still requires urgent attention by the government to tighten up safeguarding procedures. Their <a href="https://www.ecpat.org.uk/still-in-harms-way" target="_blank">2018 report</a>, called for better recording of missing persons and more safeguarding measures for children such as safe accommodation for unaccompanied children, long-term sustainable solutions and an independent legal guardianship service.</p>
<p>The report also states that it is likely the figures recorded by the National Crime Agency are a significant underestimate as they are purely based on police data.</p>
<blockquote>
'There are limitations to the data itself, including differing recording practices across police forces and incomplete data. Some people are not reported missing to the police at all, so will not be included in police statistics. There are also limitations to the police systems for identifying multiple concerns, e.g. when a missing child is also known to be at risk of exploitation or trafficking.'
<p>
Still in Harm's Way (2018) <cite>- ECPAT.</cite>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The report strongly recommends that the data collection on missing children is vastly improved to ensure that trafficked and unaccompanied children are monitored locally, regionally and nationally.</p>
</div>
<div class="content-normal content-box-type-1 box-with-radius white-100">
<p>
<iframe title="Missing Children by Age Group" aria-label="Bar Chart" id="datawrapper-chart-Gd1lt" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Gd1lt/3/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="277"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}}))}();
</script>
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story bg-color with-vis black-100 content-box-type-3">
<div class="content-normal">
<p>Missing Persons' Coordinator for the North Wales police force, Sam Roberts, says that many policies on police action in the interest of missing persons are statutory in England but not in Wales. This means that many of the things that are required by law in England are not in Wales, leaving the missing persons safety net open to interpretation and potentially differing standards. In fact, every local authority in North Wales has a different 'missing' definition. "In Wales, there seems to be a lot of work going on from all-party parliamentary working groups on missing people, certainly on missing children in particular however they tend to work with the department of education and OFSTED, which doesn't include Wales," she explained.</p>
<p>Roberts remembers a young girl who had run away from home out of fear of honour-based violence from family members.</p>
<p>
<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/784527346&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true"></iframe>
</p>
</div>
<div class="content-normal">
<p>"She was 17, an extremely good student, and her family will tell you she was an A-class student, there's no way she'd just run away. She's a good girl. The more we did the investigation it was extremely out of character and that's something that always stands out to me if it's out of character and it was very much out of character. We do look at the family, the more we did the investigation, she'd become pregnant by a family friend and she wanted to keep the baby so to protect herself and to protect her unborn child she fled and we actually located her in Manchester. So that was kind of one that isn't your stereotypical normal missing child for me, that was one that stood out to me. She's fine and we ensured that she had the right safeguarding in her new place where she'd run off to make sure that she had the right support in place for her and her baby. So that was quite a nice one."</p>
<p>Roberts has seen a shift in the attitudes of police officers to young missing people since she started her job three years ago: "Whereas before we definitely saw the younger males as the pain in the arse who were going out and committing a crime, similar to the girls I suppose. Now we very much see that 'Well, actually there's a very good possibility they could be a victim.'"</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="story bg-color who-missing-2">
<div class="content-wide-75">
<p>When young people return home after being missing for a period the police do what is known as a 'return home interview', where they try to establish the reasons for the absence, to try to stop them going missing again. They are then supposed to have these questions followed up by an independent agency.</p>
<p>Clutton says that a holistic approach is needed in order to safeguard young people, "Some of the work we're doing is about getting information to practitioners [organisations in charge of care, such as children's homes] so that they can focus on children's wellbeing and what makes children happy instead of focusing on controlling risks."</p>
<p>It's a complex picture surrounding young people who go missing in the United Kingdom. Some want to go missing, for others it's the worst ordeal of their lives. As is common with the sort of data-collection surrounding crime and misfortune, higher numbers do not necessarily mean the situation is getting worse, possibly just that incidents are being recorded in higher numbers.</p>
<p>In her role as a safeguarding expert, Samantha points out that the more policy, practice guidance and training that is introduced so that people recognise when something is wrong, they report it and somebody investigates it, the more children will be identified.</p>
<p class="remark">If you've been affected by anything in this article, go to <a href="https://www.missingpeople.org.uk/" target="_blank">https://www.missingpeople.org.uk/</a> or call their helpline on 116 000.</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>