Supporting and protecting repeat missing children from different residential environments: a scoping review

Repeat missing children pose a significant financial burden onto services, including the police, social services, and health providers. Recognising that 37 to 65 percent of missing child reports each year are repeats, efforts have been made by academics and practitioners to understand this societal problem. Research has identified the risks causing children to go missing and the harms that they experience, but these focus primarily on children missing from residential care only. This PRISMA (2020) scoping review of 76 studies explores strategies implemented to prevent repeat missing episodes, and the role/influence of the home environment (e.g., with parents/guardians, and foster or kinship care). Children go missing for different reasons and some of these are specific to the home environment: including a lack of freedom, and a desire to see family and friends. It remains unclear whether some risks and harms experienced are different considering the child’s residence. Different mechanisms seek to discover this information through direct liaison with the child via the police (safe and well checks) or with social services (Return Home Interviews). Both processes have inherent challenges that prevent them from being effective in reducing repeat episodes, through either failing to obtain the necessary information or sufficiently identifying risks and harms. Other examples of multi-agency interventions focus on only one police force area within England and Wales, and so they are not widely used or examined for their efficacy. This study recognises that children who go missing repeatedly, and do not live in residential care, are significantly overlooked in policy, practice, and research and so their needs and required support to prevent future occurrences are unknown.