The Prague Post Online: News: Missing children programs hit roadblocks

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July 5th, 2008

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Missing children programs hit roadblocks

Bureaucracy slows help for thousands of runaways, abductees

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 6th, 2008 issue

While exact numbers are difficult to determine, it is estimated that more than 8,000 children each year go missing in the Czech Republic. Although the majority of them are found, some can disappear into an increasingly border-free Europe in a matter of hours.

Now a Brussels-based NGO is urging the government to do its part in establishing systems that would help address the problem. Missing Children Europe was in Prague late last month to meet with politicians and activists to discuss the creation of Continent-wide initiatives that would make all children in Europe safer.

The conference “showed that the government is theoretically positive about solving the issue of missing and exploited children,” said Zuzana Baudyšová, director of Naše dítě, a local nonprofit child-advocacy group that hosted the conference and is a member of Missing Children Europe. However, she said “there needs to be a political will” to do the work necessary to solve the problem.

As part of a 2006 national plan to combat the exploitation of children, the Interior Ministry prepared a feasibility study on whether to create a national center for missing and sexually abused children. But concrete results have yet to materialize.

“At present, there are analyses running to find out how the center could work,” said Vladimír Řepka, spokesman for the Interior Ministry. “One of the possibilities is that the center would be a budget organization” that would receive state funding and be controlled by the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, he said. But Kristýna Kotalová, the head of that ministry’s children’s social and legal protection section, said the Interior Ministry is in charge of creating such a center, not the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry.

“It is necessary to work out who is going to be in charge of the center, how it is going to work,” Kotalová said. “It is an issue for more government departments.”

“Unfortunately,” Baudyšová said, “the protection of children is not coordinated from one central office in the Czech Republic.”

A list of unknowns

Meanwhile, while bureaucrats point fingers, thousands of Czech kids go missing each year. Police say 8,117 children were reported missing in the Czech Republic in 2006. That national number is up 292 over the previous year. Most of these kids are runaways who are subsequently located, and often they hail from social-care institutions and are trying to reunite with their families by leaving the orphanage, police said. Children who run away from home are often trying to escape school and family problems. Authorities did not provide a statistic on the number of children who are abducted by parents or strangers, but that category can include many tragic outcomes, such as the recently publicized case of a 5-year-old north Bohemian boy who was kidnapped by his mother after the woman lost custody, and was found dead in a car late last year.

Statistics on abducted children are also hazy for Europe as a whole. “As for the size of the problem, unfortunately, the European Union does not have sufficient statistics,” said Delphine Moralis, acting secretary general for Missing Children Europe.

“The disappearance and sexual exploitation of children is a global phenomenon which touches an increasingly worrying but undefined number of children,” she said. “A European and international approach is essential to tackle the problem effectively.”

So far, only a few European countries have adopted Missing Children Europe’s recommendations to establish child alert systems and assign a special missing-children hot line, number 116 000. Only Belgium, Greece, Portugal and Denmark have so far assigned this number.

Likewise, only a handful of European nations — France, Greece and the United Kingdom — have established child alert systems. These systems are based on the U.S. Amber Alert system and work to notify the public immediately if a child has been abducted or is facing a life-threatening situation.

“With child alert, the public is informed of the emergency through a number of channels including radio, television, road signs, etc.,” Moralis said. “Because of their high impact, child alert systems should be used only in extreme cases.”

Still, such programs cannot be fully effective when only deployed in patchwork fashion across the Continent. “These systems work on a national basis and are therefore not coordinated centrally at a European level,” she said.

No such system exists in the Czech Republic.

“[Interior] Minister [Ivan] Langer was positive about the possibility of a new alarm system,” Baudyšová said. “We really hope the alarm system for missing children’s cases could be launched this year. Many children who are in danger or kidnapped could be saved.”

But lack of coordination at every level — among local ministries and among European governments — still leaves these children vulnerable.

— Hela Balínová and Naďa Černá contributed to this article.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com

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