Can anything positive come from the disappearance of Madeleine McCann? Given
that it is now a year since she disappeared, and that the high profile of
her case is unprecedented, it's a question worth asking. Might her tragedy
be the spur that leads to the creation of co-ordinated and effective systems
for recovering missing children?
Certainly her parents are determined that the loss of their child will make a
difference. A few weeks ago Gerry and Kate McCann again met Ernie Allen, the
man who leads the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)
in America, recognised globally as the gold-standard service for recovering
missing children. Then they took their quest for a Europe-wide alert system
to Brussels; they even cooperated with a TV documentary about their
campaigning, which no one could fail to see as anything other than an
admirable and dogged expression of their grief.
Yet the question remains. Of the issues highlighted by Madeleine's
disappearance, key was the unformulated response of the local police in
Portugal - and who can be certain that police reaction in a small seaside
resort in Britain would have been more forensic? The truth is that in much
of Europe the morbid curiosity that has surrounded the case has yet to
translate into improved procedures to recover missing children. Britain is
no exception.
Catherine Meyer has been at the forefront of the debate around missing
children for eight years and, other than the McCanns, is alone in having
both a detailed knowledge of the practical improvements needed, and an
emotional understanding of the pain involved. Her sons were 7 and 9 when
their father, Meyer's ex-husband, prevented her from seeing them, and only
now that they are adults is she in contact with them. As a result of her
experiences Meyer founded PACT - Parents and Abducted Children Together -
and she still bristles with energy, outraged that the commonsense
developments she is certain would help missing children are so slow to
materialise.
“The problem is that there has never been a centralised system for the police
to hold information, and there are some 15 different computer systems which
don't talk to each other,” she says. “What's difficult about working with
the police [she sits on the Strategic Oversight Group, chaired by the
Association of Chief Police Officers and overseen by the Home Office] is
that it's difficult to change the mentality. There is this belief that the
way we do things in Britain is the right way and we're not going to be told.
Sometimes I hear people say, we don't have a problem here, we have only 50
cases a year, or five cases a year. You feel like saying, ‘Excuse me, if it
was your child, how would you feel?'”
This notion that few children go missing in Britain is predicated on a lack of
facts. If we don't know how many children disappear - and the Children's
Society estimate is 100,000 a year - there is no foundation for formulating
policies to recover them. Meyer has long campaigned for a national database,
and is heartened by the recent arrival of the Police National Missing
Persons Bureau, which will analyse data at the National Policing Improvement
Agency (NPIA). But she still wants to see a national centre dedicated to the
recovery of missing children, and believes that the existing Child Rescue
alert system, launched in 2006 and used three times, could be better
understood and more widely used. She would like to see further promotion of
the www.missingkids.co.uk website, which she believes could be expanded
across Europe.
“In Britain we have five government departments involved in missing children,
so you don't have anyone who is responsible. It's uncoordinated, fragmented,
because you also have social services in there and a huge number of NGOs
[non-governmental organisations]. I would like to see people coming together
but none of these groups wants to lose its identity. We're moving very
slowly, people are closing their eyes to what I think is a huge problem -
but children don't vote.”
Meyer is supported by the MP Helen Southworth, chair of the allparty
parliamentary Group for Runaway and Missing Children. In January, when she
presented her Ten Minute Rule Bill, Safeguarding Runaway and Missing
Children, she called for the collection and reporting of information on such
children, and co-ordination between police and local authorities.
“Although a small number of police forces are leading initiatives to identify
and protect runaway and missing children, a number are still using
paper-based systems,” she noted. “There is better information available
nationally on stolen cars than there is on missing children ... ACPO [the
Association of Chief Police Officers] has calculated the social cost of
policing runaway and missing children at £222 million every year, yet the
government investment to tackle the issue last year was only £1.1 million.”
Talking to the police about this issue isn't easy. Repeated requests for phone
conversations about missing children with ACPO and the NPIA led, after nine
working days, only to a defensive e-mail from ACPO. Transplanting the tried
and tested US child alert system would add “little to the already high level
of police interconnectivity” and the UK system “works well”, ACPO said. I
cannot help but observe that this complacent response appeared to be given
only because ACPO had received similar media requests for information as the
anniversary of Madeleine McCann's disappearance approached.
The failure of the NPIA to talk to The Times over a two-week period is equally
eloquent, but then, as I discovered from talking to others in the missing
children field, few are well informed, and those who are may work for an
organisation with limited and uncertain funding.
How can Meyer be so confident that the systems she calls for would work?
Largely because of evidence that the American system does work, and there
can be no doubt that its 25 years of expertise is relevant worldwide. Of the
800,000 children who go missing in the US each year, more than 99 per cent
are recovered. Of the most serious cases dealt with by the NCMEC, the
recovery rate has climbed from 62 per cent in 1990 to 97 per cent today.
Ernie Allen, of NCMEC, says there are three elements of missing children
investigations that are not in place in most of the world (including
Portugal, where my request to police for information about their procedures
for recovering missing children was also ignored). First, police should be
required by law to take immediate reports of missing children. “In much of
the world that still doesn't happen,” Allen says. “Speed of response is key
- we know that in abduction homicides, where children are abducted by
strangers, in 76 per cent of cases the child is dead within the first three
hours. You can't wait until tomorrow, you have to move now.”
Secondly, says Allen, missing children should be registered on a central
database because it is easy for abductors to move them across borders. And
thirdly, he advocates “a system for rapidly providing key descriptive
information and mobilising the eyes and ears of the public to help in the
search”. In the US this is known as the Amber alert, and is issued to media
and transport networks when a missing child is thought to have been abducted
and is believed to be at risk, and when there is enough descriptive material
to tell the public what to look for. In Britain, resistance to such a system
centres on the idea that alerts lose their potency if used too often, yet in
the US the decreasing number of alerts - from 275 in 2005 to 227 in 2007 -
shows that with improved training, the deterrent effect and better public
awareness, the need for them drops. As a result of this system, 393 children
have been returned to their families - and in a third of the cases last
year, the abductor released the child safely after hearing the alert.
Meyer notes that a similar system was introduced in France in 2006, and as a
result six children have been safely recovered. Why was an alert not issued
when Shannon Matthews was reported missing? A spokesman for West Yorkshire
Police explained: “A child rescue alert can only be used where there is a
partial car registration and it's an abduction rather than a missing person
inquiry.” Information about Shannon was given to the media the next morning,
he added - but she had been reported missing at 7pm the previous night,
meaning that potentially vital hours had been lost.
America has responded to harrowing cases of missing children by improving its
systems to find them. Ernie Allen believes that Madeleine McCann is a
similar catalyst. We can only hope he is right.
www.pact-online.org
