Repeat missing child reports: Prevalence, timing, and risk factors

The power few missing persons: A ten-year follow-up study of over 2000 youth missing persons

“…Quite apart from looking to redress some of the economic arguments made by police around the burden associated with responding to missing person reports (Hayden and Shalev-Greene, 2018), these findings also point to how police need support from, and to work alongside, other services, in a 'joined-up' way (van Dijk et al, 2019), with proactive, sustained partnerships that extend outside of their current professional silos (Crofts and Thomas, 2017). The call for this kind of cooperation and partnership between health, justice and social welfare agencies is not a novel or new recommendation (e.g., Newiss, 1999), and it is not by any means straightforward (Bezeczky and Wilkins, 2022). However, these study findings reinforce the continued need to target/support young people prior to them becoming habitual/chronic missing individuals to reduce the chances of further occurrences and change the trajectory of their health and justice involvement.…”

“…For these reasons, scholars have emphasized that additional research is required that disaggregates and compares across single and repeat cases to extract discriminating insights on potentially habitual/chronic missing persons to assist in informing police risk assessment and targeted strategies towards exigent cases and people/groups in highest need of intervention (Ferguson and Picknell, 2021). Some informative recent UK-based research, for example, has highlighted distinct groups of particular concern; that being young people (defined in their research as under 18 years old) in out of home care and those of white ethnicity (Bezeczky and Wilkins, 2022;Sidebottom et al, 2020). Another UK-based study reported that young people who went missing repeatedly were more likely to have a history of abuse and neglect, substance use issues, and be at risk of exploitation (Hutchings et al, 2019).…”

“…Firstly, by virtue of relying on a police contacts-based database with data that were not collected for express purposes of research, we were somewhat limited with the scope of the data available. For example, some extant literature notes the relevance of considering the role of out-of-home care and differences according to ethnicity (Bezeczky and Wilkins, 2022). The police database did not routinely capture this information, so we were not able to consider these as partial or alternative explanations in our analyses.…”

“…or disclose personal details to the police (Bezeczky and Wilkins, 2022;Thomas, 2014). Indeed, Birch and Sicard (2021, p.394) describe the relationship between young people and the police as, at best, turbulent.…”

Critical Child Protection Studies

“…Future research might also focus on children who go missing repeatedly versus children who go missing once and whether this information is picked up and disseminated by newspapers. As Bezeczky and Wilkins (Bezeczky and Wilkins 2022) pointed out, their results showed that around 40 percent of children in their sample were reported missing more than once during the study period. Children reported missing repeatedly were more likely to be White and live in residential care.…”