News and Media - Press Release 25th May 2011:
The following release has been approved for circulation from 00:01 25th May 2011:
A Major Step Forward in Child Protection
International Missing Children’s Day – 25th May
The children‟s charity PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) has been campaigning for nearly a decade to bring about the key changes outlined in today‟s statement by James Brokenshire MP, the Minister for Crime and Security. PACT warmly welcomes the fact that, for the first time, it will be official government policy:
- To integrate child protection services in one body, CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency), in a way which harnesses the expertise and energy of government, the police, NGOs and the private sector.
- To recognise formally that missing children present a different set of challenges to missing adults and therefore call for separate policies.
- To transfer to CEOP responsibility for www.missingkids.co.uk – a unique tool for tracing and retrieving children who go missing for whatever reason.
- To give CEOP responsibility for coordinating with the police the deployment of Child Rescue Alert, a system which provides the public with rapid information about an abducted child.
Catherine Meyer, chief executive of PACT, said:
"This is a good day for vulnerable children in the UK. Today‟s announcement is a major step forward in improving their protection and welfare. It is the culmination of a decade‟s campaigning by PACT and we would like to thank the Home Office and all those who have supported us in our long, and sometimes lonely, campaign.”
“However, we must not forget that some 140,000 children go missing every year in the UK alone – that is one child every five minutes. There is no room for complacency and there is a long way to go. Everyone must pull together if we are going to make the most of the new policies and structures announced today. PACT is already working on new initiatives that will make pictures of missing children more visible and enable members of the public to respond faster and more effectively if they believe a child is in danger. If that can be achieved, that will be another major step forward in child protection.”
Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Executive Director (Corporate and Legal Affairs) at Tesco said:
“We are proud of our partnership with PACT and the work we have done to raise awareness of missing children with our customers across the UK. We are confident that today‟s announcement means we will work together better in the future and help more people with the tragedy of a lost child.”
Quote Web Site: www.pact-online.org
ENDS
For more information please contact:
Alasdair McWhirter on 020 7351 4719 during office hours, or 07803246931
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
NOTES TO EDITORS
1. PACT is an international, non-profit organisation, registered in the UK and the US. It was founded in 1999 by Lady (Catherine) Meyer, wife of the then British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Christopher Meyer.
PACT has spent years seeking to close the gaps and weaknesses in the UK‟s fragmented and ineffectual response to missing children. Since 2005 we have published three major reports and a comprehensive review of the entire „missing‟ landscape. These highlighted the absence of reliable national data. Even today we do not know exactly how many children go missing each year, or why. Best estimates put the number at 140,000 and rising. That is more than one every five minutes and each case is potentially a tragedy.
PACT has consistently campaigned for a) a national centre, which would bring together the expertise and resources of the police, government, NGOs and the private sector; b) separate approaches to missing children and missing adults; and c) comprehensive national data collection based on uniform criteria.
PACT has also pressed hard for the adoption by police forces of two indispensable tools for the safe retrieval of missing children: the Missingkids Website, with downloadable pictures of missing children and age progression technology; and the Child Rescue Alert, which significantly increases the chances of finding children safe and well in the vital first hours after their disappearance.
Working in partnership with Tesco and ICAP, PACT expects to be able to launch a poster campaign, based on images taken from the Missingkids website, in the near future.
2. CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency) protects children and young people off and online. Their work has seen 624 children safeguard, 1131 people arrested and 262 high risk sex offender networks dismantled. The ClickCEOP button is now widely available to report abuse or suspicious behaviour online and their education programme “Think U Know” has reached nearly 8 million children. For more information visit: http://www.ceop.police.uk
3. International Missing Children’s Day, first marked in the USA in 1983, seeks to raise awareness of the phenomenon of missing children by commemorating the many thousands of children who go missing every year; sending a message of hope and solidarity to grieving families; and celebrating those children who have been found and safely returned home.
4. Tesco have been working with PACT since March 2002, by displaying posters of missing children in stores throughout the UK. Since the launch of this campaign over 100 children have been found.
5. The MissingKids website was originally created in the US by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). It enables the police to disseminate rapidly photographs of, and information on, missing children worldwide. The photos can be directly downloaded in poster form. The technology permits the age progression of photographs, which has been successful in the United States in identifying and rescuing children years after their abduction. 17 countries are linked through the website. Though introduced into England, Wales and Northern Ireland in June 2000, and Scotland in June 2004, it is regrettably still not widely used by the police.
Child Rescue Alert. Most children who are found murdered, were killed within the first three hours of their abduction. This is why it is imperative for the police to act quickly and to enrol the public‟s help as soon as possible. The Child Rescue Alert system was modelled on the American Amber Alert Programme which was created in1996, following the kidnapping and brutal murder of nine-year old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas. It is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases. It was introduced to Sussex in 2002 but although it has now been rolled out across the rest of the country, it has not been used properly.
|
