Board leadership election voting is live. Voting closes November 16, 2026.
Board leadership election voting is live. Voting closes November 16, 2026.
Over 250000 children are reported missing in Europe every year. This interactive panel discussion hosted by Missing Children Europe will highlight the link between adverse childhood experiences and missingness, focusing on runaways which make up nearly 70% of all reported cases. Children always run away from something, but the lack of awareness and support for runaways often sees children returned into the same circumstances they tried to escape – leading to a cycle of missing episodes that increase in length and severity.
Four years of research involving several hundred professionals across 40 helplines and agencies resulted in the development of a training (course) that established best practices for detection, intervention, and prevention of runaway cases. In this panel, members from civil society, law enforcement, social services, and young professionals will present these best practices through different lenses and guide the audience through key elements of the curriculum.
Speakers:
This session seeks to raise awareness of the 250000 children that run away and go missing in Europe each year.
The interactive panel discussion will pursue two main goals:
(1) To share the knowledge and lessons learned through the RADAR project - a multi-country project that was conducted with the help of the European Commission - which investigated the procedures and capacities of child protection systems in several European countries (Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Poland) to address and deal with cases of children that run away from home;
(2) To emphasize the nature of missing episodes as an adverse childhood experience that should be addressed through a system-strengthening approach to child protection.
