Missing

-Image with thanks to Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay

It was Missing Persons Week in Australia from July 28th to August 3. Other countries and individual states and cities often have their own week or days when they focus on this topic. International Missing Children's Day was celebrated on May 25.

Some 150 people a day go missing in Australia – around 56,000 in 2023. Fortunately most are found fairly quickly, but a few go on to become part of the 2,500 people who have been missing for more than three months.  

Some leave for personal reasons. They may be suffering from mental health issues, depression or substance abuse, or because they are experiencing some other difficulty. Some do so to escape violence or to start a new life, or even more rarely, because they have met with foul play or misadventure. However, in almost all cases they leave behind grieving families or friends who reside in a kind of limbo – neither being able to move forward nor forget the past.

This is known as Ambiguous Loss and psychologists consider it one of the hardest to bear. Many a true -life detective story shows the immense relief which closure brings to victims’ families and friends even in the face of the most terrible crimes, so we ask people to please call home if they can and simply let people know they are safe, even if they don’t wish to have contact.

For more in -depth discussion of this topic click here or here.

While it is important for the whole community to know how to deal with this type of grief, it is especially important for those working on the front lines such as police, social workers and mental health professionals. For them the missed foundation has a special free course available online.

The missed foundation is a unique non -profit organisation in Australia which helps and supports those who have lost loved ones in this way. As well as emotional support, it offers a great deal of practical help on how to report, what to do in the immediate aftermath of people going missing, even how to make posters or a Facebook page, create billboards and contact the media, as well as how to maintain public interest in the longer term.

For this year’s National Missing Persons Week it has teamed up with artists to create a series of street art works and put the images and stories of six long term missing people on take away coffee cups, to keep those faces before the public. It also advocates for the rights and needs of families of the missing.

If you are in Australia and know the whereabouts of a missing person or have any information which would put people’s minds at ease, you can call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 and you can do this anonymously if you prefer. However, those who don’t feel comfortable involving the police can always contact “the missed foundation.”

In contrast to what you may have seen on US or UK television, in Australia, you do NOT  have to wait 24 hours to report someone missing. Rather, police urge you to contact them immediately because during the first 24 hours there is the possibility of obtaining CCTV footage and people’s memories are still fresh, thereby increasing the chance of finding the person who has gone missing. However, Police can only follow up if there is concern for the safety or welfare of the missing person.

In Australia, you can also list a missing person on the Missing Person’s Register, another non -profit group, on Facebook and there are several international organisations which also offer help and advice below. 

If you are worried about the safety of an Australian overseas, you must report the matter to your local Police Station in person and they will contact the Department  of Foreign Affairs and Trade who will pursue the matter through Interpol and official channels. 

If you are worried about someone from another country in Australia, report it to your local police and they will contact the relevant Australian authorities.

On the Australian Police Force website there are profiles of hundreds of people who have been reported missing. There is also a range of support services.

IN THE UK

•         LBT Global: a UK charity supporting families and friends of people who are missing abroad

• Missing People: a UK charity dedicated to helping bring missing people back to their families
  
  
• Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB): a UK charity working to reunite children and their families separated by international borders
  

• Look 4 Them: a website with links to UK organisations that can help you find relatives in the UK and abroad. They also have a list of organisations such as Reunite which can help in cases of abduction and custody disputes\
  
  
• Missing Persons Family Tracing: The Salvation Army Family tracing service
  
  
• British Red Cross: an international tracing and message service to help find missing relatives abroad if they have been separated by war, natural disaster or migration

IN THE USA – CANADA, MEXICO, EUROPE, AUSTRALIA

The Doe Network, based in the USA, is another non – profit, volunteer organisation which helps investigating agencies  in solving cold cases involving missing and unidentified people.

So far we've mainly talked about individuals and what their families can do, but there are other groups of people who go missing too. Next time we'll talk about people who go missing due to natural disasters, war and conflict and crimes such as human trafficking and extortion.