RESEARCH BLOG.

As part of new research into missing persons in Australia, I have been asking people who return after disappearing what they needed or wanted. Mary, who has gone missing four times in the last few years, responded, I just wanted someone to ask if I was OK when I came back. Voices like Mary’s are not often heard, nor are their problems understood, when we talk about the mystery and intrigue of missing persons cases. Every hour in Australia, 100 police reports are generated abo

In Sweden, the search for high-risk missing persons is a police task based on the Act of Civil Protection — the law which states the responsibilities the municipalities and the Crown have for protection, risk reduction, and rescue from accidents and imminent danger to people, property, and the environment. However, the police’s task does not include the rescue of the found, former missing person, as this is typically a task for the fire department or the ambulance. Every year

Previous research has predominantly examined the risk factors for ‘going missing’ by uncovering various demographic and psychopathological factors that place an individual at high risk for going missing to reduce and prevent these incidents through risk assessments and targeted interventions. Scholarship has attempted to account for some social and environmental impacts, classified as 'push' and 'pull' factors, that may influence a missing event ( Tarling & Burrows, 2004 ).

Missing persons research has relevance in victimological scholarship, and that with such research, we could begin to advance...

The high number of missing person reports that occur globally each year highlights the need for research in this academically neglected field. In this regard, in Spain, some research is being conducted in collaboration with the Spanish National Centre of Missing Persons (CNDES) dependent of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. One of the main goals of these initiatives is to generate an empirical body of knowledge which will establish an evidence-informed approach for preven

“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge” - Lao Tzu Risk is the predominate lens through which academics, police practitioners and policy makers view the phenomenon of missing persons. The logic behind using this lens is both simple and deceptive. One version of it - what I’ll call the ‘academic fallacy’ - runs something like this: a. if we can identify those individual risk factors associated with going missing, b. and we can we