The link between going missing and child sexual and criminal exploitation is not a new phenomenon. Research in the UK and US has long recognised young people going missing as having increased vulnerability to exploitation due to their personal traumatic circumstances – history of abuse, emotional and physical neglect, breakdown in family or home relationships, domestic and family violence, etc.

Research also highlights that children in out-of-home care tend to be overrepresented in data due to additional vulnerabilities present in their situations – attachment deficit, lack of consistent care, etc - and the fact that authorities tend to react inadequately due to inconsistencies in how an absence or missing episode might be classified. Additional vulnerability factors for children in residential care means this demographic is often targeted and groomed by perpetrators operating alone or in organised gangs because they are seen as an easy target.

Too often, frontline workers, including those in statutory agencies, miss the signs. By the time services are involved, grooming has already occurred, and power and control dynamics well established.

In 2024 Project Paradigm in collaboration with Peak Care and QFCC, developed an innovative toolkit for frontline workers to improve outcomes for young people who go missing from out-of-home care. Toolkit content, developed in consultation with a multi-disciplinary range of frontline professionals and young adults aged 18 – 24 with lived experience in out-of-home care, provides important, tangible information on approaches to both preventing and disrupting exploitation through guidance on what to do before, during and after episodes of missing occur.

The initiative’s aim is to directly and positively impact on the 12,000+ young people in out-of-home care, by reducing episodes of ‘going missing’, and consequently decreasing vulnerability to exploitation through enhanced support responses for young people at risk, as well as disrupting perpetrator activities and recidivism by improving the confidence, skills and knowledge of 3000+ out-of-home care workers across Queensland.