Turkey continues the search for its missing children

When he was kidnapped last week in Tatvan from the hospital where he was born, he was just 2 days old and had yet to be named.

He was not the only missing child who was keeping security forces and the media busy, increasing the already high anxiety of families in Turkey.

Almost on the same day a man who allegedly tried to kidnap four girls in the district of Mazıdağ in Mardin province was caught. He introduced himself as a worker for the Ministry of Education and put all the girls in the village into a room and asked them if they had any diseases or if they had undergone any surgery. The girls and their families became suspicious, and he was arrested. In another city, Şanlıurfa, last week two boys aged 13 and 14 were kidnapped for ransom but were later released.

The boys and their families were luckier than 1,657 families whose children are still missing, according to information supplied by the police.

Since the beginning of the new year, stories about missing children have increased in the media more than ever, which has led the police to make a statement on the subject.

Özer Zeyrek, from the police’s public order department, at a press conference on Wednesday said 1,657 children have disappeared during the last 10 years. He claimed that families do not provide much follow-up information even if they find their children and that this is one of the reasons for the high number. He added that most of these children are kids who run away from orphanages.

“If you don’t take the number of runaways from orphanages into consideration, the number is normal,” he claimed.

Organ mafia is main suspect but no evidence

But many families in Turkey do not agree with the police. They have concerns about the security of their children. They share the grief of two families from Kayseri whose three children, aged 6, 8 and 11, disappeared last year on Sept. 21, the second day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, after leaving home to buy candy. Despite intensive searches by security forces and the intervention of President Abdullah Gül, the children still have not been found, just like 9-year-old Leyla from Diyarbakır, who did not return home from a shop in close proximity to her home where she went to buy shampoo for her little sister.

Most of the families strongly believe that the children were kidnapped by organ mafias, but Zeyrek from the police department was not sure about it, although he said they are weighing all kinds of possibilities.

When he was asked if there are international connections regarding missing children, he claimed that they are investigating all cases but that they don’t have any findings as of yet.

He added that 1,462 of the missing children are 13-18 years old and 195 of them are 0-12 years old. According to information that he gave, 562 of those children are boys and 1,062 are girls.

Police claim ‘love affairs,’ report points to ‘early marriage’

Zeyrek underlined that most of the missing children are girls between the ages of 13-18 and that this is due to “love affairs.”

Regarding the missing girls in Turkey, instead of the “love affair” explanation of the police, another explanation is forced early marriages, according to a report by the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights Presidency that was prepared two years ago. The report on missing children cited “early marriage” as the primary reason for disappearances, while the second reason was poverty.

He also warned families to be careful about their children’s use of the Internet.

Families strongly disagree with the “love affair” explanation but believe prostitution gangs are taking the children.

No special measures or methods

Zeyrek claimed that the police’s juvenile units are investigating the cases but that Turkey has no statistics on missing children.

There is no legislation specifically dealing with missing children, either. Despite the Turkish police urging families to be careful about children’s Internet usage, in many other countries technology is used to ascertain the whereabouts of children. For example, in Germany there are special procedures for missing children: Within 20 minutes of the first call to police about a missing child, SMS messages are sent to all mobile phones in the area of the disappearance. Pictures of the child are immediately posted on billboards. In Britain the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP), which is dedicated to eradicating the sexual abuse of children, is planning to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to find missing children and also to raise awareness.

In Turkey there is neither a clear action plan for finding missing children nor any specific legislation, nor, as Professor Betül Ulukol, the chairperson of the child protection unit of Ankara University’s medical faculty, puts it, are there any statistics on missing children. “We don’t have any data or information about these children, how many of them were kidnapped, if they are in the hands of the organ mafia or any other gang, and this is exactly the problem. We don’t have any idea what we face; we cannot even describe the situation,” she told Sunday’s Zaman in a previous interview.

According to Zeyrek at least this part is about to change. The police are about to sign a protocol with the Social Services and Child Protection Agency (SHÇEK) in order to monitor the cases of missing children:

“When this protocol is signed, we will be able to keep and monitor the information on missing children at databanks so we will be able to access more updated information about missing children,” he claimed.

But according to a report by the Prime Ministry, there are many other measures that can be taken to prevent the disappearance of children. At the individual level, psychologists should help develop conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and awareness-increasing studies should be performed, especially in regions with low socioeconomic levels, in order to deter early marriages. According to the Prime Ministry, family support programs should be implemented, and economic, socio-cultural and psychological support programs should be developed and started, especially in areas resided in by migrant families. The report also emphasizes the necessity of ensuring camera surveillance and security measures in places frequented by children, in addition to other security measures.

Source: Today's Zaman.
Link: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-200162-100-turkey-continues-the-search-for-its-missing-children.html.