daily numbers of missing children
there's an awful lot of people who 'suddenly' go 'missing' and are never found.
What missing children? The vast, vast majority of children who are reported missing are found within 24 hours. The remainder are nearly all either runaway teens, or children taken by a parent or occasionally a grandparent as part of a custody dispute. Child abduction by a stranger is extremely rare, and is practically always committed by lone wolf predators, not for the purposes of trafficking.
Traffickers pretty much exclusively target people who are very vulnerable who either won’t be missed (ie runaways, homeless, in care), or who are groomed into “consenting” (in parenthesis as it’s coerced consent), not physically kidnapped. Often the parents are groomed too.
A typical trafficking case might involve the trafficker going to an impoverished family in Bangladesh or Albania, offering a girl a high paying job in London so she can send money back to her family, telling her parents it’s an amazing opportunity for her. The girl voluntarily gets on a plane with her parents’ blessing. When she arrives in London she’s told she owes £x thousand pounds, and that she needs to work for free for a few months (maybe in a nail salon, maybe in domestic service, maybe in a brothel) to pay off the debt and after that she’ll be free. She’s told if she refuses she’ll be handed over to the authorities who will either deport her or put her in a detainment centre, that her parents will have to pay her debt. So she agrees, but it’s coerced consent. But the debt only gets bigger so she’s trapped. She isn’t locked up in a dungeon, she’s free to go out, but she’s controlled by fear and lack of options. She’s never reported “missing“ because her parents think she’s working a great new job in London.
That is trafficking/sex trafficking: grooming and exploitation of vulnerable people. No one is being snatched off the streets, and no one is being chained up in basements. The girl sitting next to you on a bus might be a trafficking victim.
Virginia Giuffre is a classic case of child sex trafficking/grooming, and the amount of victim blaming she’s had to face from people going, “well she wasn’t chained up, she was being taken to parties, why didn’t she just leave?!” is a perfect example of how ignorance hurts trafficking victims.
The only genuine “missing” children who may have been trafficked are unaccompanied refugee and migrant children, and that includes the many migrant children forcibly separated from their parents due to Trump’s inhumane treatment and incarceration of illegal immigrants. Those children are incredibly vulnerable to predators because there’s no system monitoring them properly.
If people really care about helping child trafficking victims they should focus on campaigns to end global poverty, or programmes that support young people in impoverished countries to access education and training. Or programmes in this country aimed at helping vulnerable youth eg. teenage girls in care. And support measures aimed at combatting modern slavery, such as recognising the signs that someone may have been trafficked (like the girls in your nail salon) and reporting it.
The posts on p2 by Gancanny and p4 by canigooutyet are also excellent.