Missing kids.

I think it happens more often, most of the time I believe it is when parents are divorced and a child takes off to be with the father/mother, or is just generally unhappy at home and goes to stay with some other relative. When my husband was teaching at secondary level kids would go missing but be found due to the reasons above, or because they had got a boyfriend/girlfriend and taken off like love's young dream only to return later when they realised they had no money or felt scared - because they are just kids. Also, and more worryingly, some meet someone online and when that someone turns out to be more like their dad than the boy they thought they were messaging, they turn tail and run back home, or ring a parent to get them, if they are lucky.

I think we know about it more because of social media.
Parents get the word out there straight away,very sensibly imo.
My school wouldn’t have announced it if a child went missing,so we had no way of knowing until the missing child’s mum or dads came to the house to ask

Yes, it seems more publicised, but I’m not sure it’s more prevalent.

My neighbours grandaughter does it regularly, and has since she was about twelve.

It's a very complicated and complex, ongoing issue for her, but she is now early twenties.

It's so dangerous, because she ends up with people she barely knows, in obscure places...1

I agree that we just hear about it more- doesn't make it any less worrying for families though.

If children of any age regularly go missing then there must surely be something very wrong either at school or at home and that is the problem that needs to be identified and solved.

If it is a fashion amongst any age group, then the best way of preventing it is to have a responsible adult fetch the child from school every day and parents will just have to put up with the tantrums that doing so will cause.

I suspect that if a child who went missing once was, when found, told exactly how worried her or his parents had actually been and were wept over and shouted at, as we would have been at their age if we had dared do anything similar, even it was only coming home quarter of an hour late, they would have no desire to repeat the offence because they would know their parents loved them.

In other words this is a form of attention seeking by children who are insecure.

I think, with another girl I know, it was an escalation of her rushing off and looking herself in the toilet, at school.

The schools hands are tied, in terms of what they can do, so they would phone her mum, who then had to come home from work, and stand outside the toilet with an increasing crowd of people.

She then started walking out of school, and it went on from there.

Back in the Summer of 1962 where I was living at 1 years old, 3 children went missing in 6 weeks. One 5 year old was found in a park a distance away and told police a nice man had bought her an ice cream and took her to the park. We never found out of it was worse than that. A 10 year old had just wondered off with friends and couldn't find his way home. The third I never heard whether they were found or not. It wasn't on radio or TV and only the last one was even in the local paper. My late father always said if you plaster it all over the papers it just gives other perverts ideas. Some of the current missing children end up having ran away and hopefully are found safe.

Sorry I was 10 years old not 1

I think it’s often out of control kids in care that go missing from their foster families.
When a missing youngster goes missing, the picture I’d in the paper and you recognise the face as they have done it before. It’s the same few children over and over again usually.

When my youngest was 6 she went missing after I told her off. A neighbour found her down at the local milk bar about a kilometre away. She was quite happy and had no idea how worried we were. These days I would have been even more worried ,there seems to be more crime around now.

Pippa22 - Yes, staff at a local children’s home had certain teens go missing regularly. They notified the police of the ‘mispers’ at midnight. They got home next morning often with no police involvement. If they had been caught up to vandalism they were taken into the station. Sometimes there were not enough staff for one to be available as an ‘appropriate adult’ and collect them so the police kept them until morning.
The staff tried hard to stop them going out at night,even removing their shoes, they went through bedroom windows in someone else’s or in socks. One evening a young girl was about to leave, s staff member tried to reason with her and put a hand out to stop her. Their hand, put out to stop her leaving, caught in her long hair and the staff member ended up in court for assault.