When Harm Remains: an update report on trafficked and unaccompanied children  going missing from care in the UK follows up on ECPAT UK’s and Missing People’s first  study, Heading Back to Harm (which discovered that an alarmingly high number of  children go missing from care with many never being found), and our second study,  Still in Harm’s Way, which confirmed the findings that trafficked and unaccompanied  children are amongst those at greatest risk of going missing in the UK.

Like the previous reports in our missing series, When Harm Remains uses analysis of  data from Freedom of Information requests to local authorities, and finds that one in  three trafficked children went missing from local authority care in 2020, which is a rise  of 25% (24.9%) since 2018. Trafficked children who went missing in 2020 had an  average of eight missing episodes that year, which is a significantly higher rate of going missing than the looked after children population of England who had an average of 6.5 missing episodes in the same year.

CLICK HERE to download the report