Member News
By Ann Coffey MP - 21st June 2011
Ann Coffey MP raises awareness of the under-reporting of missing children in the UK, at a time where there is increasing evidence of the link between missing episodes and sexual grooming.
My debate today on young runaways and sexual exploitation is timely given the growing number of awful cases of sexual exploitation and grooming of children which have recently hit the headlines. Sadly the latest case involves young girls in the Stockport area, many of whom were repeat runaways.
I have initiated the debate to highlight the links between runaway children and sexual exploitation and I will release figures which expose a huge under-reporting in Department of Education statistics of missing incidents of children in care.
The strong link between sexual exploitation and children missing from home was revealed in the recent research by the Children's Charity Barnardo’s in their report on grooming entitled 'Puppet on a String'.
As the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults, I was taken aback by the massive discrepancy between figures for missing children reported to the Department for Education by local authorities and the information I have collected separately from police forces.
Figures provided by 152 local authorities to the Department for Education showed that a total of 920 children were missing from their agreed placement for more than 24 hours in England and Wales in 2010.
However figures I obtained from police forces in Greater Manchester, Kent and West Mercia reveal that in those three areas alone more children from care went missing for longer than 24 hours in 2010 than the total of 920 recorded by the Department for the whole of England and Wales.
A Department of Education parliamentary answer to me revealed that there had been only 45 young people in Stockport missing from care for longer than 24 hours in the three years from 2008 to 2010. I found these figures "staggering" as Stockport police have told me that there were 2,014 missing incidents between July 2009 and June 2010 alone of which 41 per cent were generated from care homes.
And figures from the first five months of this year alone show it is a growing problem as there were 1070 missing from home reports generated by 284 children under 18 running away in Stockport. In addition to the under-reporting of missing episodes of children in care I am concerned that according to the Children's Society, two-thirds of children who go missing from their own homes are not reported by their parents.
It is very concerning that there is under-reporting of children going missing in Stockport and throughout the country especially when there is increasing evidence of the link between repeated missing episodes and sexual grooming.
It is crucial that proper data is kept in order to safeguard children in the future from the horrific experiences some have experienced in the past.
The harm that is done to a child abused for sex is incalculable. Children live with it for the rest of their lives haunted by the memories of their experiences. Some never recover and the pain of their families can go on for a lifetime. We must do all we can to safeguard our children.
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