Missing Hackathon

Every 40 seconds, a child in the US goes missing or is abducted. Of the thousands of people who go missing in the US each year, especially tragic is the disappearance of the young and vulnerable. According to the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Missing Person File, there are 85,459 active missing person records, of which juveniles under the age of 18 accounted for 29,758 (34.8%) as of December 31, 2018.

Missing Kids UK states that an estimated 306,000 reports of missing people are made to the UK police every year, the majority of which are children and teenagers under the age of 18.

In March 2015, a series of stories appeared dealing with the significant problem of missing people in Asia, as a result of migration in many instances and, in many other instances, as a result of governments circumventing judicial process in the name of public security.

In March 2015, the Eurasia Review reported that as many as 36 million people may be victims of trafficking worldwide, and two-thirds of this number may be from Asia. The article noted that profits from worldwide forced labour and sex trafficking may be as high as $150 billion annually.

A study by the police in western Nepal found that every year “5,000 women disappear as a result of human trafficking related to prostitution and organ harvesting” in the country.

Police efforts to locate and return missing people is but one aspect of the larger set of problems related to the reasons people go missing. This is a collective social responsibility. No matter the system being used to track a missing person, one thing is certain: in today’s connected world, technology can track a missing person faster than people can.