25 Facts About Missing Persons

Here at Investigation Hotline, locating missing persons is one of our core competencies. We have over thirty years of experience finding missing people, whether it is a spouse, child or loved one. Below, we’ve compiled twenty startling facts about missing persons.

• In the United States, a child goes missing every 40 seconds.
• 45,609 children went missing in Canada in 2017.
• Due to panic and shock, it can take up to two hours to get information about a missing child from a parent.
• More than 800,000 children go missing in the U.S. every year.
• After being listed missing for seven years, a person can be declared as “legally dead” or absentia. In rare cases, such as for natural disasters and terrorist attacks, this time can be shortened.
• In 1980, less than 150,000 people were reported missing per year. That number has climbed to 900,000.
• The Missing Children Society of Canada receives almost 800 calls per year regarding missing children.
• In the majority of jurisdictions around the world, missing persons are a low priority for police. Homicides, rapes, robberies, assaults, traffic issues and crime prevention take priority.
• Coroner’s offices in America hold more than 40,000 sets of unidentified remains.
• In 2010, the National Crime Information Center reported that 355,243 women and 337,660 men went missing.
• 58% of adult missing persons reports involve males in Canada.
• 12. Worldwide, estimates indicate that eight million children go missing every year.
• The U.S. AMBER alert system has been replicated in 18 countries across the world.
• The majority of adult missing persons cases involve individuals with drug and alcohol addiction, psychiatric problems, and elderly suffering from dementia.
• 83,000 Americans have been to deemed to have gone missing from World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War.
• Of the sixteen million soldiers who served for the U.S. in WWII, 73,000 are still unaccounted for.
• 75% of Canadian missing children’s cases were due to runaways.
• Police in the United States are working approximately 100,000 missing persons cases at any given time.
• Police advise that parents of missing children be on alert for psychics claiming to have knowledge of a loved one’s fate.
• Family abductions are the most common type of child abductions, with fathers being responsible 53% of the time.
• The AMBER alert was named after 9 year old Amber Hagerman who was abducted and murdered in 1996.
• Of all missing children reports in Canada, 58% involve females.
• Enough children are abducted in the United States every two hours that they could fill a school bus.
• Children from minority families account for 65% of all non family abductions, with African Americans making up 42%.
• Across Europe, the phone number 116 000 can be called to report a missing child.