Date: 28 May

Location: Brussels, Belgium

When Disappearance Is a Warning Sign: Understanding the Intersection of Missing Children, Sexual Violence, and Mental Health

Across Europe, children continue to disappear under circumstances that reveal deeper and more complex protection failures. Behind every missing episode is often a story of vulnerability, trauma, violence, exploitation, or emotional distress that remained unseen for too long.

According to Figures and Trends 2024 by Missing Children Europe, nearly two out of every three children who run away have experienced abuse or violence. Hotline data further shows that 64% of children who run away had known experiences of violence or abuse either before or during their disappearance.

Disappearance is rarely an isolated event. It is often a visible indicator of deeper harm.

At the same time, grooming — both online and offline — has emerged as a significant yet under-recognised factor in missing children cases. While frontline professionals increasingly encounter cases involving manipulation, coercion, and emotional dependency, major gaps remain in data collection and safeguarding systems across Europe. Fourteen out of twenty-two national hotlines responding to Missing Children Europe’s survey currently do not record information related to grooming, limiting early intervention and prevention efforts.

The 2026 Missing Children Europe Annual Conference will bring together policymakers, researchers, child protection practitioners, mental health professionals, hotline operators, social workers, law enforcement representatives, and child rights advocates to examine the urgent intersection between:

• Child disappearance
• Sexual violence and grooming
• Mental health and trauma

Together, participants will explore how these issues interact, reinforce one another, and shape children’s pathways into vulnerability and exploitation.

Conference Theme

Disappearance as a Signal, Not an Isolated Event

Children who go missing are often navigating unsafe environments, trauma, emotional instability, coercive relationships, or exploitation. Grooming can create powerful dynamics of dependency, fear, shame, and isolation that distance children from their support systems and increase their vulnerability to disappearance.

Mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, dissociation, self-harm, trauma-related symptoms, and emotional dysregulation can act both as drivers of vulnerability and as consequences of abuse and exploitation.

The 2026 conference will explore this critical three-way intersection:

1. Disappearance as a warning signal and escalating risk

Understanding missing episodes as indicators of underlying harm and opportunities for early intervention.

2. Sexual violence and grooming as drivers or accompanying harms

Examining how perpetrators exploit emotional and psychological vulnerabilities, particularly in digital environments.

3. Mental health as both a vulnerability factor and a resulting impact

Exploring the psychological consequences of abuse, exploitation, and disappearance, and how mental health systems can strengthen safeguarding responses.

Organisers

Missing Children Europe

Missing Children Europe is the European federation for missing and sexually exploited children, bringing together 34 grassroots organisations across 27 countries.

The federation works to prevent children from going missing and to protect children from violence, abuse, and exploitation linked to disappearance. Through research, advocacy, training, awareness-raising, and cross-border cooperation, Missing Children Europe strengthens the capacity of professionals supporting missing children and their families.

The organisation also coordinates:

• The 116 000 European hotline network for missing children
• The Cross-Border Family Mediators Network

Hope For Children CRC Policy Center

“Hope For Children” CRC Policy Center is an independent humanitarian organisation dedicated to protecting and improving the lives of vulnerable children worldwide.

Through specialised programmes, advocacy, research, and direct support services, the organisation works to ensure children have access to protection, education, healthcare, and safe environments in which they can thrive.

Based in Cyprus, the organisation currently employs more than 110 professionals working collaboratively with national, regional, and international institutions to strengthen child protection and welfare systems for children at risk.