Missing persons
Missing persons cases encompass a wide range of situations where individuals, often children or adolescents, are reported unaccounted for. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported over 97,000 unresolved missing persons cases in 2022, with an estimated 750,000 to 800,000 cases reported annually. The complexity of these cases arises from various factors, including the different motivations behind disappearances. Most missing children tend to be white girls from middle-class backgrounds, often leaving due to dysfunction at home, while missing adults frequently face socioeconomic challenges, including issues with substance abuse.
Responses to missing persons cases vary significantly between children and adults. Police departments have historically imposed waiting periods for adult cases, as many missing persons return on their own; however, immediate action is crucial for missing children. Categories established for missing children include stranger abductions, parental abductions, runaways, thrownaways, and those classified as lost. Each category prompts different police responses based on the perceived risks involved. Furthermore, the landscape of missing persons cases is often shaped by public perception, which tends to focus on sensationalized abductions, overshadowing the more common instances of voluntary disappearances.
Subject Terms
Missing persons
SIGNIFICANCE: Because missing persons cases take so many different forms, law enforcement has no standardized procedures for dealing with missing-person cases. However, determining the types of cases that come to hand is a crucial component in guiding police responses to incidents.
Little is known about the actual number of missing persons in the United States in any given year. In 2022 the Federal Bureau of Investigation had 97,127 unresolved missing persons cases, while data suggested that 750,000–800,000 cases are reported annually. The vast majority of cases involve children and adolescents. Because adults are far more able than children to live independently, the label of "missing" may not be assigned to cases of individuals who are not seen or heard from over short periods of time. By contrast, children and adolescents who do not report home for brief periods are more likely to be regarded as missing. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess the real numbers of adult missing persons when those individuals do not have consistent contact with family, friends, or coworkers. It is thus not surprising that there is a lack of research on adult missing-persons cases.
Research has found trends that separate missing-child cases from missing-adult cases. Missing children are most often white girls from middle-class backgrounds who leave home because of dysfunctional or harmful home environments or for fun. Missing adults tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds; they often have issues with substance abuse or psychological problems and are unemployed.
The overwhelming majority of missing-persons cases involve individuals who voluntarily leave their homes for brief periods. This runs contrary to popularly held traditional images of a stranger kidnapping someone or the extraordinary disappearance cases portrayed in the media. Most missing persons have histories of previous voluntary absences and are found by a police officer or return on their own within a few days. However, those who go missing for extended periods, especially in cases of suspected abduction, get the most media attention and are therefore ingrained in the public consciousness.
Police Response to Missing-persons Cases
Police departments tend to respond differently to adult and juvenile missing-person cases. Historically, police imposed waiting periods before filing missing-person reports. Waiting periods were employed because the vast majority of missing persons returned on their own, making the time invested in creating missing-person files a wasteful burden on police departments. However, since passage of the federal National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990 police may no longer impose waiting periods in cases involving missing children. This is due to the fact that the first twelve to twenty-four hours are considered crucial in any missing persons case for establishing an effective investigation.
Most police departments do not have standard procedures for dealing with missing-persons cases. In the early twenty-first century individual states and jurisdictions began assembling task forces to correct that shortcoming. Reporting cases to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) can also help coordinate response efforts, as it maintains databases of missing persons records that are helpful to investigators nationwide.
Categories of Missing Children
Most attention to missing persons cases is given to those involving children. Five categories of missing children have been defined by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: stranger or nonfamily abductions; parental abductions; runaways; thrownaways; and otherwise lost or missing children. Police responses generally vary with the perceived levels of threats to the children in the different types of cases.
Stranger abductions occur when persons other than family members coerce or take children a distance of at least twenty feet from their original locations, when children are lured away for the purposes of such criminal acts as molestation and murder, and when children are detained for more than one hour. Police typically respond rapidly and aggressively to stranger abductions, in which perceived threats to the children’s safety are high.
Popular stereotypes of child kidnapping associate the crime with demands for ransom. Such kidnappings constitute one major subcategory of stranger abductions. The other subcategory comprises cases in which children are abducted for reasons other than money. This second subcategory includes cases of people who abduct children because they simply want children of their own and abductions undertaken as a means to commit other crimes like rape or murder.
Parental abduction occurs when noncustodial parents take their own children away from legal custodial parents. Resolutions of these cases are sometimes complicated when both parents have apparently valid copies of orders for child custody. Such situations occasionally occur when the abducting parents obtain custody orders in different states or countries. Such circumstances make it difficult for police to determine the most appropriate actions to take.
Runaways are youths who voluntarily leave or stay away from their homes. Typical runaways leave home because of unpleasant situations, such as child abuse. The vast majority of research on missing persons has been done on runaways. Runaway cases are also often difficult for law enforcement to handle because of lack of resources, the recurring nature of the offenses, and the occasional unwillingness of parents to divulge information on their children.
Thrownaways may be considered a subset of runaways. Although no universal definition exists for this type of missing child, such children are generally kicked out of their homes or abandoned by their parents or other caregivers. Lost or otherwise missing children is a miscellaneous category that encompassed all children whose whereabouts are unknown and whose reasons for disappearance are not ascertainable. Homeless children may fit in this category.
Bibliography
Fass, Paula S. Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
Finkelhor, D., G. Hotaling, and A. Sedlak. Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children in America: First Report, Numbers, and Characteristics, National Incidence Studies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Program, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1990. Print.
Forst, M. Missing Children: The Law Enforcement Response. Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1990. Print.
Hutchinson, Anne-Marie, and Henry Setright. International Parental Child Abduction. 2d ed. Bristol : Family Law, 2003. Print.
"2022 NCIC Missing Persons and Unidentified Person Statistics." FBI, www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2022-ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics.pdf/view. Accessed 8 July 2024.
"Unresolved Missing Persons Cases Published in NamUS, Bi-Annual Report January 2024." National Missing & Unidentified Persons System, National Institute of Justice, 2024, namus.nij.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh336/files/media/document/namus-bi-annual-report-january-2024.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2024.