Recovering Abducted Children in the EU

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction created an international treaty and legal mechanism in order to find children that have been abducted. This is just one treaty or law that has been enacted in order to recover children that have been taken away from their loved ones. However, it is really important to make sure that every state has a means to deal with and track down children that have gone missing.

Children get abducted for a number of reasons:

•Intent to raise the child as their own
•A parent takes the child from the other parent’s care
•For ransom
•Sexual abuse, torture or murder

Despite the seriousness of child abductions it is not publicized enough. This may in part be because the statistics are not very clear. Data collection by different organizations can differ drastically from the definition of “abducted child” to a motivation explanation. Consequently, comparing the numbers is not very helpful or simple. The need for a transnational database is evident in that it will help ascertain the significance of the missing children problem.
Fortunately, in 2007 the European Commission declared the telephone number “116000” to be the single telephone number in the EU to make pressing calls about 3missing children. By securing a single hotline number, hopefully the “116000” number will help this lack of communication that can occur between the EU countries.
Despite this effort to create a line of communication across European borders there is still not a child alert system that would create a network to look for children who may have been taken into a different country.
The United States has a number of different laws that focus on this topic exclusively by engaging in actively preventing crimes against children as well as, similar methods to handle situations in which children go missing. With the ease of crossing borders in Europe it becomes apparent that it can be difficult to work with countries that follow different procedures to help children and this creates a complicated setting to recover and protect children efficiently and safely.
Missing Children Europe is one organization that is tirelessly working to improve and enact legislation that will improve the mechanisms to help children across the European Union while simultaneously working to improve the quality and communication of existing means of handling missing children cases.