European Commission>Justice & Home Affairs Extract reads:
"The problem of missing children is complex and multifaceted. There are different types of missing children including family abductions, endangered runaways, non-family abductions, and lost, injured, or otherwise missing children (including disappeared unaccompanied minors seeking asylum). It is today not possible to obtain comprehensive statistics across the European Union regarding missing and sexually exploited children. According to the Commission's Childoscope study on the contribution of civil society in finding missing and sexually exploited children (published in 2004) , statistics regarding sexual exploitation of children and missing children are generally unavailable in the EU. Data gathering is seldom organised at a national level and the available data are largely difficult to access and little or no details can be obtained.
To give an indication on the extent of the problem in some European countries, the following statistics can be obtained from national sources:
- In Italy, police records show that 1.850 minors went missing in 2005;
- In Belgium, the number of dossiers reported by the police was 1.022 in 2005;
- In the UK, police recorded 846 cases of child abductions in 2002/03 , while the total cases of missing children (runaways for any reason) is estimated at 70.000 annually."
USA:
"The statistics are well-publicized: 2,000 children are reported missing every day in this country; nearly 800,000 children disappear for at least a time every year; one in four girls and one in eight boys will be sexually exploited or abused before reaching adulthood.
About 200 to 300 children are kidnapped in the classic sense each year, according to the National Incidence Study of Missing, Exploited, Runaway and Throwaway Children (NISMART). Another 3,200 to 4,600 are taken for shorter periods, have something done to them, often a sexual assault of some type, and are then released. This number could be two to five times higher than the NISMART estimate, some believe, because of underreporting to law enforcement."
