EACH year, approximately 100 children go missing in Jamaica without a trace.

With no updates on their whereabouts as the years go by, Hear the Children’s Cry Director Nigel Cooper is calling on the Jamaica Constabulary Force to appoint a specialised missing children’s unit dedicated to investigating their disappearance.

According to data from the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), 151 children who went missing between January and December in 2023 were still missing in January 2024. The agency said the figures reflected 14.7 per cent of the total 1,027 children who went missing for the period.

Of the 151 missing children who were still missing at the start of 2024, 133 are girls and 18 are boys.

Multiple attempts by the Jamaica Observer to get an update on these children from the CPFSA resulted in numerous promises for statistics that were not delivered up to press time. Additionally, Cooper stated that the lobby group has also not been given an update on the missing children from two years ago.

However, he noted that data provided to Hear the Children’s Cry by the local authorities showed that approximately 985 children went missing in 2024, with approximately 100 of them still missing in 2025. The majority are girls.

Data from the lobby group further revealed that, since the start of the year, 282 children have been reported missing up to March.

“There are several challenges with missing children, and part of the issue we have is that we have some children that don’t come back. It’s one thing [when] you run away for a couple of days, and that’s traumatic, but what is more traumatic is when the children don’t come back. Every year there’s a particular percentage of children that don’t come back — and even the police can’t say where they are,” said Cooper.

COOPER…we should not have over 100 children in Jamaica yearly who don’t come back

“We speculate; there’s one or two cases of persons being trafficked and all that, but we really don’t know for sure. We don’t have the hard evidence. Let’s say one or two people have been charged for trafficking, but where are these children that don’t come back? Have they been trafficked? We don’t know and so there is a gap,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

The Hear the Children’s Cry director stated that while the majority of the children who go missing are often found or are reunited with their families, it cannot be that the minority are neglected and investigations into their disappearance closed when information about their whereabouts is not forthcoming.

“We’re an island, I mean, we’re three million people. Jamaica isn’t that big like America where I can go to Florida and California and you won’t see me again ever in my life. There is somebody down in Negril who will see somebody. We need to act,” Cooper urged.

Acknowledging that the lobby group is thankful for the support of the security forces, Cooper suggested: “Maybe there needs to be a more focused, dedicated unit to look at these children who don’t come back, and resources to track them to see where they are and what is happening.”

He noted that, over the last few years, Hear the Children’s Cry — under the leadership of the late Betty Ann Blaine — has advocated for stop orders to be placed at borders if a child goes missing, to ensure they cannot leave the parish or country. He has since renewed that call.

“We should not have over 100 children in Jamaica yearly who don’t come back. The authorities should know if it is that they’ve been flown out, and if it is that they have their passports. If not, who would have applied for a passport for them, who would have taken them out of the country and where are they?” he stressed.

Cooper shared that often it is parents who hear some information that can lead to the discovery of their children and relay that information to the lobby group or the local authorities, “but there’s nothing really structured”.

He implored the local authorities to adopt a similar mentality to authorities in the United States.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wouldn’t allow it…they keep the case open. They don’t close those cases because of the geographical location — and we understand the bigger challenge, because it’s a massive country — but in Jamaica…we should have a missing children’s unit that keeps at it, that tracks them to investigate what has happened, and put resources into that,” he emphasised.

Cooper shared that using the data they have gathered over the last 10 years on missing children, the lobby group is fund-raising to conduct a longitudinal study that assesses the trends related to missing children in Jamaica, to get a clearer picture of the issue.