Unthinkable by Kris Hollington

Author:Kris Hollington [Hollington, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Finally, if you ask the ultimate experts, the UK’s Missing Persons Bureau, they say that 10,000 individual children went missing from care homes in any given year, with 42,000 incidents in total. This figure relates to all children reported as missing, regardless of whether this was for more or less than twenty-four hours. 59

DI Philip Shakesheff of West Mercia Police made an excellent point when he said: ‘I am baffled to understand why we are only collecting those individuals who have gone missing for longer than twenty-four hours, because all the evidence suggests that children are likely to come to harm in the first couple of hours as opposed to over twenty-four hours.’

The conclusion can only be that children’s homes and local authorities are failing to report all cases of missing children. In fact, they are short by somewhere between 4,000 and 9,000 children. One can only guess why this may be.

Repeatedly running away is often an indicator that something is wrong in a child’s life, or that he or she is being hurt or abused. The University of Bedfordshire has researched runaways from care and found that over 50 per cent of all young people using child sexual exploitation services on one day in 2011 were known to have gone missing (25 per cent over ten times), and 22 per cent were in care. The number of children in the UK in care who have been sexually exploited is about 21 per cent. 60

On top of this, the researchers had ‘been informed about children’s homes being targeted by perpetrators of child sexual exploitation, with multiple children across extended periods of time being groomed and abused by the same perpetrators . These children are particularly vulnerable because they often feel unloved, and frankly they are often unloved, so they are very susceptible to being groomed by men who tell them how much they love them, and give them gifts. It is easy to see how such children can fall into the grip of exploiters . The young person can be left feeling deeply conflicted – wanting to escape and yet being drawn to their exploiter.’ 61

Care homes are supposed to replace a failed family home – a staff member is by definition a care-giver, in essence, a substitute parent, there to provide love, attention, understanding and guidance. It’s a lack of love and attention that has led many children to end up in care.

The home should be a place of safe refuge, where staff are able to supply plenty of empathy, love and patience. It seems, however, that many care homes use different definitions for the concepts of ‘care’ and ‘home’. They often interpret ‘care’ as ‘control’. Workers are trained to restrain young people rather than talk through their problems. Simon Cottingham from the Children’s Society said staff are given training in restraint, but not in listening to young people.

The most common complaint made by young people in care homes is that no one listens to them when they complain. As one teenage girl put it: ‘Basically I used to go missing all the time .

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