International Briefs – AMBER Advocate

More than 2,000 children were reported missing in South Africa in the past three years in what some authorities say appears to be signaling a disturbing trend. Missing Children South Africa, a nongovernmental organization that assists police in missing persons cases, says the number of missing children is likely even higher, with many incidents, particularly in rural areas, unreported. The majority of the 2,000 children were found, but more than 700 remain missing without a trace, according to law enforcement authorities. Bianca van Aswegen, national coordinator for Missing Children South Africa, said abductions and human trafficking are indicative of the country’s rising crime rate. However, she said cases also involve children who have left home voluntarily or are from homes where the parents aren’t financially able to provide for the child. Additionally, a human rights organization raised concerns about increased kidnappings for ransom done by organized crime rings.

A newly implemented system that links databases is being credited with helping combat international child abductions. In one case, two missing children were safely recovered at the Islamabad, Pakistan, airport in an apparent abduction by a noncustodial parent. Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) emigration database that was linked with Interpol’s global Integrated Border Management System (IBMS) pinpointed the children when they arrived at the airport with their father after traveling from the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. The children were reported missing in 2022, after which time Pakistan authorities had issued global police alerts known as yellow notices. The FIA said the ability to leverage the Interpol system, as well as enhanced cooperation among international agencies, marks a significant advancement in addressing international child abductions and other security issues.

“The collaboration of effort in this case can’t be overstated.” So said U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott of an international search that led to the safe recovery of two missing children located in Iceland, some 3,000 miles away from their Ohio home. A family member who reported the 8- and 9-year-old missing in October 2024 indicated their mother had mental health issues and had stopped taking her medication. The ensuing three-month search included the U.S. Marshals Service, State Department, Interpol, and local police departments. The mother took the children to New York and Vermont before being tracked to Denver, Colorado, London, England, the Island of Jersey in the English Channel, a remote fishing village in Iceland, and finally to the capital city of Reykjavik, where local authorities located them in a hotel. Elliott said recovering children abroad is “extremely difficult,” and credited dedicated law enforcement officers for their work. After the children were placed in the care of social services, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children provided financial support to reunite them with family in the U.S. The mother was recovering in a hospital.

A teenage girl abducted and trafficked from Mexico was safely recovered after sending a series of text messages in Spanish to a 911 telecommunicator in California. About 20 minutes after her pleas for help came in, Ventura County Sheriff’s Office deputies safely recovered the frightened girl, who was believed to be no older than 17. The case highlights the effectiveness of allowing text messages to a call center and using integrated translation technology to bridge language barriers. “Young people text—that’s how they communicate,” a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said. “So her first instinct is to text. Well, she texted 911 and … that works.” The girl, who had no idea where she was when she was able to quietly gain access to a cell phone in the early morning hours, identified landmarks that led deputies to her. A subsequent investigation revealed she had been trafficked from Mexico two months earlier. She provided information that led to the arrest of a 31-year-old man from Veracruz, Mexico, for human trafficking and luring, among other charges.

The European Parliament has lauded a project that revealed a startling number of missing migrant children in Europe. The Lost in Europe project investigated the disappearance of more than 50,000 child migrants and found that, on average, nearly 47 migrant children arriving in Europe have gone missing every day since 2021. The investigation concluded that many of the missing children are victims of human trafficking; based on documentation inconsistencies, the actual number may be even higher. The findings are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Aagje Leven, secretary general of Missing Children Europe. The three-month-long joint investigation by media outlets in seven countries received the E.U. Parliament’s 2024 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism, named in memory of the assassinated journalist and anti-corruption activist.

Legal red tape is preventing two Israeli children from returning home until the end of the year or longer. In July, the Jewish Chronicle reported that a 12-year-old girl was sent to the UK alone by her mother; her 9-year-old brother arrived a year earlier to live with a family friend in Leeds. The girl, who is staying in a hostel in London, has now claimed asylum in the UK. Officials in both countries are working to repatriate the children but have been hampered by international law governing minors. Additionally, asylum cases can take years to resolve, according to the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs. The children’s case remains under police investigation and Chief Inspector Avi Rosh of Tel Aviv District Police said he expects to charge the mother with neglect of a minor and abandoning a minor.

During the Salvadoran Civil War in the early 1980s, babies and young children were regularly seized by the army during anti-guerrilla operations, some taken by soldiers directly from their parents. Others were discovered in hiding places, apparently left behind as their families fled, and later given away for adoption. The nongovernmental organization Pro-Busqueda has helped locate 400 children since its founding in 1994 and is still searching for as many as 500 others reported missing during the 12-year war.

The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) and Clearview AI conducted an operation in Ecuador this past spring that resulted in locating and positively identifying 110 previously unknown child sexual abuse victims. The operation, held in Ecuador and hosted by ICMEC, used Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology as a main resource. Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and the Dominican Republic were among the countries that worked together on hundreds of cold cases involving previously unknown victims of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

European cocaine gangs are torturing and raping unaccompanied African child migrants to control and force them into the country’s expanding cocaine trade, according to an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian. Some of the most dangerous criminal networks recruit vulnerable children to exploit for trafficking—a tactic that helps the networks evade prosecution and protect their core members. The newspaper’s investigation reported that thousands of migrant children could be involved. An investigation by the journalist collective Lost in Europe found that nearly 47 unaccompanied child migrants vanish each day after arriving in Europe, totaling tens of thousands in the past three years.

The sweet face of 4-year-old Aranza Maria Ochoa Lopez in a “Stay Kind” shirt served as continual motivation for U.S. authorities who worked for nearly five years to find the girl, last seen in 2018 at a Vancouver, Washington, shopping mall. Earlier this year FBI agents got the long-awaited news that Aranza had been located in western Mexico, and shortly thereafter were able to escort the now 8-year-old back home. Though the girl’s mother, who had kidnapped Aranza, was taken into custody in Mexico in 2019, Aranza had remained missing. “For more than four years, the FBI and our partners [in the U.S. and Mexico] did not give up,” said Richard A. Collodi, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle field office. What the girl had experienced while missing is unclear, but “our concern now will be supporting Aranza as she begins her reintegration into the U.S.”

After being kidnapped by his foster parent and her mother, a 5-year-old U.S. boy was found safe in Vietnam and returned to his biologicalmother in Washington State. Foster guardian Amanda Dinges and her mother, Amber Dinges, fled with the boy after it appeared he would soon be transitioning back to living with his birth mother. After Diplomatic Service Security personnel obtained custody of the boy at the U.S. Consulate in Hanoi, the abductors were charged with second-degree kidnapping and first-degree custodial interference. Brittany Tri, the birth mother’s attorney, said the boy is doing well; his mother is unsure how he was able to leave the U.S., since she had never applied for him to have a passport.

After an international manhunt, five missing and endangered children from the United States have been safely recovered in Mexico and their fugitive father and his girlfriend apprehended. Edgar Salvador Casian-Garcia and Araceli Medina—formerly on the U.S. Marshals Service’s 15 Most Wanted List—were charged not only with multiple counts of child sex abuse, but also for the murder of Casian-Garcia’s son, whose remains were found near the boy’s Pacific Northwest home. An official at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which assisted law enforcement in the search, said the fugitives’ capture is testament to the importance of collaboration and community involvement in safeguarding children.

Dozens of migrant children who sought protection after fleeing war-torn countries have vanished in Ireland since 2017. A 2023 report published by University College Dublin’s (UCD) Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP) indicates some of the children were victims of organized sexual exploitation. Of the 62 who are missing, 44 have reached their 18th birthday and, because they are no longer minors, child welfare has ceased searching for them. MECPATHS (Mercy Efforts for Child Protection Against Trafficking with the Hospitality and Services Sectors), a nonprofit group raising awareness of child trafficking and exploitation in Ireland, said the report confirmed what frontline workers have been telling the organization for years. “Sexual exploitation, forced labor, forced begging, criminal exploitation, forced marriage, the removal of organs, and domestic servitude—it is all happening in Ireland,” said Ann Mara, the organization’s education manager. “So, the fact that these children are missing, and there is a kind of a shrug of the shoulders, is just mind-boggling.”

Ukraine officials have identified more than 19,000 children illegally removed from their homes and taken to Russia or Russia-controlled territory since the war began in February 2022. In some cases, Russian authorities took hundreds of children from Ukrainian orphanages and schools, according to Russian documents gathered by Lyudmyla Denisova, a former Ukraine human rights official. Many children were removed on the pretext of rescuing them from the war zone, or lured with the promise of attending camp. Others were taken from hospitals. Russian authorities have placed children with foster families, and President Vladimir Putin opened the way for Russian families to adopt Ukrainian children. The Russian strategy is deliberate, premeditated, and systematic, according to evidence collected by Ukrainian and international human rights and war crimes organizations. In March 2023, The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Putin and another official, a move that has made it easier to return children. Charities such as Save Ukraine and SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine have taken up the cause, and in recent months have tracked down and returned 387 children to their families.

A novel use of technology is helping to locate missing children around the world, including 9-year-old Phillista Waithera, who vanished in Nairobi in 2021. Two years later, she was reunited with her immediate family with the use of Face Age Progression (FAP) technology, which utilizes an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app to create photos of the child to show what they would look like now. In 2021 alone, the Kenyan nonprofit Missing Child Kenya Foundation located 298 children using AI, according to CEO and founder Maryanna Munyendo. And in central China’s Hubei Provence, a group of students at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) developed an AI system to restore and enhance old blurry photos of children who went missing decades earlier. More than 1,000 photos have been restored to improve clarity, helping reunite 11 missing children, like Sun Zhuo, a 4-year-old abducted in 2007 from his daycare in Shenzhen Province and rejoined with his biological parents in 2021 at age 18.

Fourteen European organizations have teamed up on a new campaign to help stop online child sex abuse and exploitation. The “Right in Front of Us” (#ChildSafetyOn) initiative aims to spread awareness of and seek support for legislation that would bring accountability to large tech companies such as Meta, Google, and TikTok. Under a new law the European Union is considering, the tech companies would be required to identify, remove, and report any child sexual abuse material on their platforms. “The proposed legislation is necessary and urgent to prevent and combat child sexual exploitation such as grooming,” said Anna Maria Corazza Bildt, president of Missing Children Europe. In addition to working with teachers and educators to strengthen the message, the campaign includes a website (childsafetyineurope.com) with videos and a petition supporting the proposed legislation.

The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) report that more than 90 percent of AMBER Alerts in Canada’s most populous province have resulted in the safe recovery of the missing child. The OPP has issued 21 Alerts since 2018, an average of about four a year. In noting the effectiveness of the program, the OPP credits the public with being the eyes and ears in the safe recovery of children. They also urge people to be vigilant in checking AMBER Alerts and reporting incidents, even if they may seem insignificant. “Without your help, we might be reporting very different statistics today,” a department official said.

On March 3, 2022, 15-year-old Arina Yatsiuk and her family were trying to evacuate from Ukraine when Russian troops killed her parents and yanked her from their car. Now, the Ukrainian teen is the face of an alarming fallout from Russia’s invasion: She’s among thousands of Ukrainian children who have vanished. Ukrainian officials believe Russia has forcibly deported children and is attempting to “Russify” them. (And Ukraine’s Children’s Rights Commissioner reports more than 16,000 known cases of children who have been forcibly deported.) Some of the children are reportedly held in camps to be politically re-educated; others are put in institutions or orphanages, or quickly adopted and given citizenship, even as relatives search for them. Ukraine’s government, which is seeking help from the international community, has secured the return of about 300 children so far. Arina’s relatives remain hopeful. “We all believe she is alive, and we will soon find her,” her aunt said. “We are considering all options, including that she might have been adopted.”

The group Missing Children Europe was founded in 2001 to protect children from becoming missing. The group coordinates a vast network of missing children hotlines and cross-border family mediators throughout Europe. The group recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary at a celebrity-studded event. But the event’s main goal was to highlight the fact that since the launch of its hotlines in 2007, operators across Europe have answered more than two million calls and supported more than 70,000 cases involving missing children. Those numbers were tempered by this equally stark reality: “The war on Ukraine and the expansion of the internet with both its opportunities and risks of harm for children are just two of the more recent challenges that need tackling,” Missing Children Europe said. The organization plans to continue better protecting and empowering at-risk children through research, advocacy, training, and education.

On November 20, 2022—World Children’s Day—Sakarya University’s Diaspora Research Center in Turkey reported that the number of cases involving missing migrant children in Europe is skyrocketing. According to their 2021 “Lost in Europe” report, more than 18,000 migrant children went missing in Europe between 2018 and 2020—an average of 17 refugee children each day. European authorities are banding together to try and stem this tide. The sad reality behind the high numbers of missing is that criminal organizations target refugee children in Europe and ensnare them in sex trafficking and forced begging.

In the past two years, five volunteer activists in Mexico who have frantically searched for their missing “disappeared” (and presumed murdered) children have themselves been murdered. The news has gotten little attention. With more than 100,000 missing people in Mexico, experts say police often lack the time, expertise, or interest to look for the clandestine grave sites where narco-gangs frequently bury the victims. And so, volunteers—many of them relatives of the missing—do the searching themselves. Unfortunately, Maria Vázquez Ramírez, is the latest victim. She was killed while searching for her son, Osmar. In response, the Movement for our Disappeared in Mexico group, which supports the volunteer searchers, decried the act as “cowardly”—releasing a photo of Maria with her missing son with the words, “I didn’t live long enough to find you.” The group demands Mexico do more to search for all the missing, saying, “Violence against searchers shouldn’t be the norm.”

The Bahamas initiated its first “Marco Alert” for a missing 17-year-old girl in July 2022. Marco is an acronym for Mandatory Action Rescuing Children in Operation. Bahamian officials said some mistakes were made while issuing the alert and a review will be done to improve future efforts to find missing children.

Nigeria is now using the social media reach of Facebook to curb online child trafficking and the buying and selling of children. The African country is working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to utilize Facebook for protecting children, including posting AMBER Alerts. “Over 40 percent of victims are now recruited online, and this has raised concerns considering the impact of the social media on our children,” said Amarachi Kene-Okafor with the Network Against Child Trafficking, Abuse and Labour.

Families in the United Kingdom have a new resource to help them deal with all the issues they need to face when a family member goes missing. The Missing Persons Information Hub provides information and organizations that can help families with a missing loved one. Missing persons expert Charlie Hedges created the website and has received support from AMBER Alert Europe, the Alzheimer’s Society, several universities, and other missing person organizations. Hedges said he wanted to offer something simple for families in crisis. Though he has been dedicated to missing persons work for more than 25 years, “due to its complexities, I still find it hard to find what I am looking for,” he explained.

Quebec’s provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec, plans to launch a Silver Alert pilot program to help find missing seniors. The police agency estimates that 800 missing seniors would qualify for the alert every year. The Silver Alert would send the public essential information when a senior with neurocognitive challenges, such as Alzheimer’s disease, goes missing. Police were originally opposed to the alert, fearing it would desensitize the public’s response to AMBER Alerts.

AMBER Alert Europe has launched a worldwide campaign to urge people to stop sharing naked images. The campaign addresses the dangers minors face when sharing self-generated naked images, otherwise known as “nudes.” The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found a dramatic 77% rise in self-generated naked teen pictures shared online since 2019, and that one in three teenagers have admitted to seeing non-consensually shared nudes. “These kinds of self-generated images can have far-reaching consequences on (a teen’s) health and wellbeing; and once shared, could also lead to sexual extortion and coercion – even criminal charges,” said AMBER Alert Europe Chairman Frank Hoe. The campaign’s video and posters are being shared in 27 countries.

Several online petitions are seeking an AMBER Alert-like system for missing autistic children after the body of an 11-year-old Lindsay, Ontario, boy was recovered in a river. Draven Graham had a sensory irritation to touch and would not answer to his name. The petitions are asking for a “Draven Alert” for missing autistic and vulnerable/special needs children. Some suggest expanding the alert for autistic adults.

After the AMBER Alert became widespread, pictures of missing children no longer appeared on milk cartons. Now a London-based charity, Missing People, is taking the effort a step forward by using digital billboards with 3D portraits of missing children. The pictures look “live” with blinking eyes and tilting heads. The billboards have a QR code to help spread the image and information on social media. The signs also use the words “help find” instead of “missing” because behavioral scientists say this will give the public a call to action.

United States congressional delegates High Chief Uifa’atali Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen of American Samoa and James Moylan of the District of Guam are co-sponsors of a bill to raise mandatory minimum jail time from 15 to 25 years for convicted child traffickers. The bill, known as the Combating Human-Trafficking of Innocent Lives Daily (C.H.I.L.D.) Act of 2023, also requires uniform sentences for traffickers who exploit victims under the age of 18. The toughened law is expected to send a strong message to those who engage in child sex trafficking. “Human trafficking is one of the greatest crimes imaginable, yet it is a sad reality that we must defeat,” said Congresswoman Radewagen. “Thank you to Congressman Moylan for his leadership on this important issue as we fight for the lives and futures of vulnerable children.” Representatives Don Davis of North Carolina, Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, and Don Bacon of Nebraska also co-sponsored the bill, which was introduced last September.

Digital powerhouse Meta has joined forces with Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security to help locate missing children and adolescents up to age 18. In an agreement signed on the International Day of Missing Persons this past August, two of Meta’s platforms—Facebook and Instagram—have begun issuing emergency alerts for Brazil’s missing children. Emily Vacher, Meta’s Global Director of Responsibility and Safety, says the technology has been used in 30 countries since 1990 and resulted in locating more than 1,200 children. Meta hopes to expand the program to other platforms, including WhatsApp and Threads.

General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror resulted in tens of thousands of Chileans killed, tortured, and imprisoned—and an estimated 20,000 newborns were stolen and put up for adoption abroad. Pinochet was deposed in 1990, but the thousands of families whose babies were illegally taken still feel the pain. To help them and their missing children find answers, the Chilean nonprofit group Nos Buscamos has partnered with online genealogy platform MyHeritage to provide free at-home DNA testing kits for Chilean adoptees and victims of child trafficking. The effort is paying off: One American man has been given his birthright back. In late summer 2023, Nos Buscamos helped Jimmy Lippert Thyden locate his biological mother in Chile after 42 years. Thyden’s DNA test matched him to a first cousin who connected him with his birth mother, Maria Angelica Gonzalez. Thyden soon traveled to Chile with his family to meet her. The NGO has orchestrated over 450 such reunions between adoptees and their birth families in the last decade.