An M S University Social Work faculty member and her student have developed a unique mechanism to spread awareness about missing children in the state. Using secondary data from the police and other government agencies dealing with missing children, Leena Mehta, along with Sylvia Mao, an intern from China, found that as many as 136 children had been kidnapped or had gone missing in one year. "The highest number of children was 27 each from Kutch-Bhuj and Bhavnagar, followed by Anand (26) and Ahmedabad (24)," the two reported in their paper presented at the two-day National Seminar University Grants Commission – Department of Special Assistance workshop at the faculty, on Saturday.
Mehta said, by combing the data from the FIRs with a door-to-door approach, they found that the missing cases could be bracketed into two categories.
"The first category consists of children from the affluent families, who are usually kidnapped for a ransom and second are the children from extremely poor families, from where the children are kidnapped for prostitution and for begging," said Mehta, adding that these two categories have different stakeholders and more cooperation is needed among the various state agencies in this regard.
