A blonde little girl with blue eyes is defencelessly looking at us from hundreds of walls: standing at the tube station, at the bus stop or just walking in the street without feeling sorry for her, is impossible. Every corner in town is plastered with posters of the book of Kate McCann, mother of Madeleine, the three years old who disappeared on May 2007 while she was on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal, and hasn’t been found yet. Despite the Portuguese police archiving her search three years ago, her parents has never stopped shouting their pain to the world.
Around 140.000 children go missing every year in the UK, including ‘runaway’, parental abductions and ‘stranger’ abductions – as happened to Madeleine. In 2009, 64% of the 356.000 incidents reported to the Home Office’s Missing People Bureau were under age. Although the majority of the disappearance is solved within the first 48 hours, there are still a lot of lonely children out there and a lot of families are fighting to bring them home.
Continue reading “THE DESPERATE SEARCH FOR MISSING CHILDREN”
