Nearly 30,000 children go missing every year from council care, an investigation by a U.K. daily, The Independent, revealed.
The investigation was carried out following a demand by child protection experts to register youngsters, who in order to escape violence and sexual abuse, run away from care centers. The report found that different systems are used instead of a central database to record missing youngsters.
This demand follows last week's conviction of a seven-member street-grooming gang in Oxford who abused several under-age girls in care for nearly eight years. The girls abused were as young as 11 years old. Of these, three victims were reported missing on 254 occasions and one for 126 times in 15 months from the care home.
According to the statistics provided by the police from the U.K. Missing Persons Bureau (MPB), one in three children in care goes missing. It stated that overall more than 142,000 children go missing at some point each year and of these two-thirds are below 18 years of age.
The Department of Education (DfE) data shows only 1, 510 children recorded as missing for 2012, nearly double the 870 accounted in 2002. However, it is reported that tens of thousands of children disappear every year from care. Such a vast difference between police records and DfE is merely because the police register all cases of missing unlike DfE that records only children who have been missing for more than 24 hours.
According to Natasha Finlayson, chief executive of Who Cares? Trust, there exist 'vast discrepancies' between the police and official records. "Only half of England's police forces use a searchable database that can record details of individual children reported missing." The investigation revealed that one in four children who run away put themselves in dangerous situations.
Most of the youngsters who go missing from care homes are troubled children, said Lily Caprani, director of communication, Children's Society. "Many local councils don't know which children are going missing - they don't know what they are running from and they don't know what dangers they are running to", she said.
The investigation concluded with a statement by a Home Office spokesman that said, "All missing people are recorded on a database held by the national Missing Persons Bureau, but we recognise that improvements can be made in the collection and sharing of information about children who go missing from care. We are working with other government departments and agencies to take this forward."
