Contrary to the common belief that efforts to search for missing children — especially those who have been missing for years — are “hopeless,” the Child Welfare League Foundation’s (CWLF) own statistics prove just the opposite.
Posters are common at public places with pictures of missing children and their name, age, the place where they were last seen listed, asking the public to help find them and many people may have doubt if such efforts really work.
“We’ve often heard questions like ‘Can you really find these kids whose pictures are from so many years ago?’ — and my answer is ‘yes,’” CWLF executive director Alicia Wang (王育敏) told a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
PHOTO: CNA
The CWLF launched a campaign to search for missing children 16 years ago, and is working with the Ministry of the Interior’s Children’s Bureau to maintain a nationwide missing children database.
“In fact, I handled a case where a child’s parents found their daughter who had been missing for 13 years,” she said.
The case happened a couple of years ago when someone randomly saw a picture of a three-year-old child on one of the missing children posters on the street and recognized the child to be a 16-year-old junior high school student that he knew and contacted the foundation.
“After a long confirming and checking process, we finally brought the ‘missing child’ and the parents together,” Wang said. “It was an exciting moment.”
In fact, according to the CWLF’s own statistics, the success rate at finding missing children is as high as 75.4 percent and the foundation has helped 1,056 children to find their way home since the campaign was launched in 1992.
However, not everyone is so lucky.
Liu Mei-chu (柳美珠) has been looking for her missing daughter for the past 14 years.
Liu’s daughter, Wang Hsiu-li (王秀俐) was last seen by neighbors sitting near a bus stop waiting for her mother to return home from work, but Liu did not meet her daughter that evening and never saw her daughter again.
“Little Li, I have not moved, I am still and will always be here to wait for you to come home,” Liu said at the press conference, in tears, hoping that her daughter would hear her call through media reports.
“Having a child go missing has very severe impacts on a family. Some parents begin blaming each other for ‘losing’ the child, some parents would quit their jobs to look for their child and sometimes the entire family just collapses,” Alicia Wang said, urging everyone to help search for missing children and report cases of missing children as soon as possible.
For more information, call the toll-free missing children hotline 0800-049-880 or visit www.missingkids.org.tw.
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