173 Children missing from Kent County Council care

20 children dead in US school massacre. Rightly the story reverberates around the world. Obama said to be considering banning assault rifles but continuing to allow its citizens the ability to shoot kids.

168 children killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, 64 of them in past 3 years under the Obama regime with his enthusiasm for drones.

Both disgusting and abhorrent, I'm sure we all agree, but Kent has its own scandal that continues to evade the news outside the South East.

The appalling number of children who disappear from Kent seems to go almost unnoticed. There was a small report in July this year in the Kent Messenger . A report by ECPAT UK (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) stated that ...173 unaccompanied asylum seeking children (children who face a significant risk of being trafficked) went missing from Kent County Council care... in 2009.

Yes, you read that correctly 173 children at risk of trafficking went missing from council care in 2009. The numbers seem to vary a lot but they are all far too high. I suspect that Kent News may have hit the nail on the head when it come to understanding why 173 missing children are not world headlines.

This is from Kent News last week:
...seven children – at the very least – have just disappeared from our streets in the last few months alone. More than 20 vanished last year. And there are very real fears these figures are extremely conservative; that the real figure will be much, much higher.
But if the real figure is just two, that’s two too many. The problem is that these children going missing aren’t white, British children. They are entering this country seeking refuge or travelling on a promised ticket of transforming the fortunes of their families.
They arrive through the ports into Kent to a society that is turning its back on them; obscured through a fog of politics and knee-jerk reactions.