Can’t Get Missing Children Out My Mind

[Whitewinelover19]

Name changed for this thread.Apologies if this has been done many times before. I was flicking through the tv channels recently and saw a programme about missing children. There’s a long list of children and young people who’ve disappeared over the years but I’ve found it really difficult to put it out of my mind.
I then suddenly started thinking about Ben Needham and Katrice Lee. Both of them from a very long time ago but I found these two cases really sad in particular.Obviously Maddie McCann everyone knows about as it’s still quite recent.
I think it’s because they were British children who went missing abroad. And toddlers. Ben wasn’t even two when he disappeared in Kos, at his grandparents place. His gran took her eye off him for a few moments and then he was gone. This was pretty remote from what I gather, like farmland.
Katrice Lee went missing from an Army base in Germany. She was shopping with her mum and aunt, and disappeared in a busy store. It was her second birthday. This was way back in 1981. This came into the news again very recently, following a lead.
What struck me was that although they were different types of surroundings, they were very normal circumstances. How can children just disappear, with no evidence? I just find this very hard to understand. I found reading up on these cases very sad.
It’s almost like I’m grieving for children that I’ve never known. They wouldn’t even be children now, Ben Needham would be 30 this year and Katrice would be 40 this year. But I’m still thinking of them as toddlers.
I just can’t help wonder what happened to them? Are they alive? If they were abducted, they may not even know and live their lives obliviously.
Seeing their pictures almost make me feel emotional .
I think being a parent has made me much more sensitive. I just couldn’t imagine going out in a normal day and coming home without a child. It must be so awful for the families.
Does anyone else think of similar things and struggle to forget them?

I yhink.as a pp.said Robert Black is presumed to have murdered Gennette Rate ? It must be horrendous just to not know what's happened to your child .

Gennette Tate* auto correct keeps changing it.

Find the Beaumont children story so sad. To lose all 3 of your children on the same day. The mum passed the other day not knowing what happened.

There’s a website for missing people/murders etc I frequent

The other day a man was on saying he knew he had been abducted as a child but didn’t know who he was. Very sad for him. He remembered small parts and now as an adult needed to know more

Yes the police think it is likely that Black killed her, due to where he was driving when she was abducted.

Funnily enough this came up on my fb feed the other day .

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-49818638

Arrest was made in Swindon in the case of Katrice Lee.

I often wonder about April Fabb too and concede with PPs that it might have been to do with Robert Black.

Missing people is a subject I've always been fascinated by. The idea that someone can vanish, it's just mind boggling. I know there is a rational explanation for all dissappearences and most are probably dead. But I spend a silly amount of time reading about missing people. The website websleuths is great, but be warned you could lose days on there!

I understand the grief hijacker point but I don’t think there’s anything wrong in being upset about something regarding innocent children being taken from their families.
Ref Maddie- It’s assumed she was abducted, yes her parents did leave her and her siblings unsupervised for long periods of time.
In Ben Needham’s case , I get it’s accepted that he died at the time, although his body hasn’t been found despite the extensive searches that have happened. Also for many years it was suspected that he had been abducted, his family made numerous trips to Kos following sightings.
Katrice Lee was in a busy shop and vanished in a few moments. She wasn’t left unsupervised deliberately.
It’s the not knowing with this case, no one is sure if she was taken or not. Her father was in the BBC recently, still not giving up hope.
It’s devastating that their lives changed forever. I think most parents have lost sight of a young child in a supermarket or shopping centre for a few moments.
Richard Lee has said he can never celebrate Christmas until his daughter is found, he hasn’t been able to celebrate it for 37 years.And her mother said she’s always one Mother’s Day card short every year. Very sad.

Doesn't bear thinking about ,I remember losing ds1 in a large soft play when he was about two ,it was converted mill and it was massive and on a couple of levels , I was searching for about 5 or 10 minutes before I found him on the bottom level playing and completely oblivious .

OP- I made a thread a few days ago ref Katrice Lee, which as mentioned was brought back into the news recently. Robert Black was also driving around Europe at that time, but obviously I’m speculating here and hope he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
Such a mystery.

Lee boxell is another mystery it was on crime watch roadshow last week
He just disappeared and never seen again 30 years ago his parents haven't touched his room so it is how it was when he went missing in 1988 80's posters etc

Sorry, haven't read the full thread but read some replies that made me want to say...it is NOT grief hijacking to feel that certain cases are close to your heart, or particularly shocking, because you've shared a town or a city or a school. It's human nature to feel things like that more keenly because you identify or empathise so much more keenly when you have a shared locale, or the child is the same age as your own or whatever. Of course, I bet there are people who take a sort of sordid glee from it, but for most...it just resonates. I find it heartening. It's the compassion of humans for other humans that make these sorts of awful, unexplained, confusing and horrowing things the tiniest but more bearable.

And also, less of the victim blaming! Children can be snatched in milliseconds. You can tell yourself over and over that it's because they weren't closely watched etc. but the grim reality is we can't watch or be in reach every second of every day. It's just the grim reality that these things could happen to anyone at any time. You can mitigate as much as possible for sure, by taking precautions and not fucking off for a meal leaving your DC alone in a hotel room, but sometimes the most you can do is still not enough.

In most of these cases police have a pretty good idea what happened but can't prove it. Because you need solid evidence to legally prove something. The saddest cases are where they truly have no idea.

I agree, with the victim blaming point, we’ve all probably lost sight of children even for just a few seconds at one time or another. How many times do we see this in parks, shops ? Thankfully, child abductions are rare atleast in this country, which is why the cases mentioned are well known. ( with a few exceptions).
I think that the older children, adults who have disappeared are probably dead, as harsh as that seems, otherwise they would surely have come forward by now.
I think with Maddie, apart from the abduction scenario, itv was mentioned that she may have wondered off and fell down a river or somewhere, very similar to the Katrice Lee theories. I think both of these cases are genuinely hard to solve.

I agree @SirVixofVixHall

There's a very moving moment in Brene Brown's netflix show where she talks about meeting parents who've lost children and people who have gone through other tragedies. She says the overwhelming message from them was that when other people were able to show them that they understood the value of what they themselves had in their own children, it showed the grieving parent that the other person understood the magnitude of what they had lost.

It just doesn’t bear thinking about, having a child go missing. Having to go back home and see an empty bedroom/ place at the dinner table. Eventually, the cameras and newspapers move onto another story, whilst time just carries on. The weeks eventual turn into years.
Those poor parents are still stuck in time that their child went missing.🙁

And also, less of the victim blaming! Children can be snatched in milliseconds. You can tell yourself over and over that it's because they weren't closely watched etc. but the grim reality is we can't watch or be in reach every second of every day.

It’s not victim blaming to say that you can mitigate risk. I’m sure most victims of crime want others to learn from their experiences.

A pp was saying that the thought of missing children makes her too frightened to take her children on holiday overseas. It’s terrible that anybody feels that paralysed by fear.

The best way to learn how to protect yourself from crime, is to know how criminals get their opportunities and take steps to minimise your risk. I can’t understand why you’d want to shut those conversations down.

Agree it takes seconds to snatch a child. April Jones was snatched in a moment from outside her house.
Read the account of how Robert Black was finally caught. A neighbour happened to glimpse the feet of the little girl from the opposite house, as Black lifted her into his van. It is incredibly chilling.

Agreed it takes seconds to snatch a child. James Bulgar was coaxed away by two boys actively looking for a child. His mum was just a few feet away.
If it wasn’t for the cctv cameras maybe those boys wouldn’t have been identified at the time.

Children being snatched by strangers is an incredibly rare crime.

Children being snatched by strangers is rare granted. But in the 80s cctv wasn’t really in existence ( especially early/ mid 80s) children could travel on their parents passports and mobile phones didn’t exist. Just getting news out would take a long time. It’s hard to imagine life now with no social media, yet we did until the last 15 or so years or so.
I also remember Lee Boxall who vanished from his family and another boy similar age two years before, Kevin Hicks. Both similar ages and fairly close together ( Croydon area) After seeing a few years I always wondered if they were connected.
I thought itv was a shame that the BBC canned crimewatch during the evening, it helped solve many crimes. It surely doesn’t get the audience it did when it’s on during the day.

Most children who go missing, the police have an idea of what may have happened. In both those cases they think the boys were groomed prior to being murdered. In Lee Boxalls case they think Lee got accidentally killed intervening to stop another boy being sexually abused. That to me sounds like very specific information they have received, but they can't prove it in court.

Most kids who go missing have a history of being troubled and reappear within a few days. Some disappearances are family abductions. Once you take those children out, the number of children are thankfully tiny.

Kevin Hicks went out late at night to buy eggs from a convenient store. He never returned. It’s strange because of the time of night he went, when he could have gone in the moring. It was for a food tech exam he had the next morning.
Lee Boxall apparently went out to see Crystal Palace play. However, apparently he hadn’t been before.
The child grooming explanation would make sense.
I think it was one of these cases that prompted me to start the thread in the first place.