Missing women: policing absence

Abstract

This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse their management. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported and observed socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim's mobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder and danger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, as collected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence. We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy of continued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationships through regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores the relationships between gender and mobility.

From harassment to disappearance: Young women’s feelings of insecurity in public spaces

“…Forced disappearance especially feeds the imaginary dimension as it is characterized by uncertainty and is usually associated with other types of crimes. Disappearance implies movement, a transition from being a localized presence in a place to a disturbing lack of presence derived from a violent event, especially when this movement is involuntary and does not derive from a sense of agency [ 92 ]. In Mexico, the forced disappearance of women is linked to feminicide, and in public spaces, it is linked to a macho culture that makes women vulnerable to sexual aggressions as well as organized criminal violence.…”

Feminist geography in the UK: the dialectics of women-gender-feminism-intersectionality and praxis

“…Kothari 2013;Kofman and Raghuram 2015;Crawley 2016); political geographies of post-colonialism and postcolonial scholarship (e.g. Sharp 2009; Noxolo 2017a); a rich body of work on emotional geographies (including Liz Bondi's pivotal contributions (Bondi et al 2005), and studies such as Boyer et al (2012) on commoditised childcare and emotional labour; Stevenson, Parr and Woolnough (2017) on the missing); inequalities within service industries (e.g. Batnitzky and McDowell 2011); embodiment and embodied geographies (e.g.…”

‘Going Missing’ as a Maladaptive Coping Behavior for Adults Experiencing Strain

“…For example, Shalev Greene and Pakes (2013) found that, in the United Kingdom (U.K.), the cost of responding to missing person reports for the police alone across ten separate locations per year equates to somewhere between £482,250 and £879,060, which estimates to approximately $830,230 to $1,513,340 in Canada. Despite this, very little is known about a phenomenon that is actually a significant social problem (Tarling and Burrows 2004;Stevenson, Parr, and Woolnough 2016).…”