Listen to thisSocial workers can’t know for certain if a missing young person is safe or a victim of child sexual exploitation
Working with teenagers in the care system, you become increasingly good at recognising the signs of child sexual exploitation – one of which is going missing regularly.
Young people go missing for many reasons, but there are also those who are staying with friends and don’t want social services to know where they are. Why? Because they are teenagers; they’re confident about their safety and the last thing they want is the police turning up on their doorsteps to find them. Nor do they want the authorities to have a string of addresses to search every time they disappear – as this leads to their friends and family receiving regular visits from the police.
For the social worker, this causes difficulties: how do you know which young people are genuinely at risk? It’s hard to know what interventions can be put in place when young people tell you: “I am not missing, I am with my friend. I am picking up the phone, and I am safe. I’m just not going to tell you where I am.”
I’ve worked with young people who have said they are safe, but who were not. One young woman was living in semi-independent accommodation and would often go missing. When I called she said she was fine and had just been staying with friends. Regardless of how many times I asked or clues I sought, she wouldn’t give any information as to her whereabouts, but would always pick up the phone.
Months later, she asked if she could be moved from her accommodation. Over time, through building up our relationship, she revealed she had been running drugs for a gang and was frequently abandoned to sleep in gardens or hotel bedrooms. She was far from safe and groomed to give the appropriate answer on the phone.
I’ve worked with other young people who, I believe, were probably just having fun with friends and wanted to be left to their own devices. One young person often stayed with her boyfriend and had extended family members with a history of social services involvement who did not want their addresses given out.
Different local authorities have different policies. Many state that if a young person is missing for more than 24 hours the police should be called. Some young people might fit this criteria every other day, and visiting their accommodation, checking rooms, going to every known address, and carrying out interviews with them uses a huge amount of time for the police and social services. Some argue this situation should not be classified as “missing” but as “absence unauthorised”, leading to a reduced police response until that particular young person does something out of character – staying away longer than normal or not answering the phone.
This would reduce the number of people classified as missing – but this should never be a motivation when considering individual cases.
Recently, I was at a strategy meeting for one of the young people I work with. Police suggested that the young person be moved to a place in the middle of nowhere so they couldn’t go missing. I argued against it. In some cases, the young person does need to be moved to be kept safe. But in others, such as this case, we have to consider if it would benefit them. Is seeing the young person every other day, as we do now, not better than them going on the run permanently because we have moved them far from their family and friends?
As with all elements of social work, building relationships with young people is vital. I’ve worked with young people where, in their own time, they have opened up to discuss their fears and even requested to be moved away and to start somewhere afresh, somewhere safe.
Social work deals with humans, and humans are unpredictable. Equally, dealing with risk carries an inherent degree of uncertainty. We’re never going to be able to know for sure whether this missing person is safe or not, whether we are using vast quantities of professional time unnecessarily, or whether this time and the ensuing interventions will change a young person’s life. In the meantime, we’ll continue to be creative and find new ways of working with young people to reduce the amount of time they are missing from placement, and to do everything we can to keep them safe.
Danielle Adler (a pseudonym)
2 December 2015
