AMBER Advocate Magazine

In the aftermath of his son Adam’s kidnapping and murder in 1981, John Walsh became a victim’s rights activist, political lobbyist, and creator of the TV program, “America’s Most Wanted,” which he hosted until 2013. The popular show was credited with helping solve missing child cases, including the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, featured on one of its episodes. In January, Walsh returned to “America’s Most Wanted,” this time with son Callahan Walsh as co-host and co-producer. To help find more missing kids, “America’s Most Wanted” is also working directly with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). “Partnering with NCMEC is so vital to the return of ‘America’s Most Wanted,’” said Callahan, who is also the executive director of NCMEC’s Florida office. “By featuring these cases on the show, we’re putting these missing children in front of a national audience...It’s going to be such a powerful tool to help bring kids home.”

When Chinese exchange student Kai Zhuang was reported missing in December from his host high school in Riverdale, Utah, authorities traced his location by analyzing call data and bank records. Police found the 17-year-old alone in a tent in rural Utah, amid freezing temperatures and with limited food and water, the apparent victim of a cyber-kidnapping scam. Zhuang was unharmed, but the damage was done—his parents in China had already paid “kidnappers” an $80,000 ransom. Zhuang’s case represents a growing type of fraud where cybercriminals target exchange students, particularly Chinese students, tricking them into believing their families are being threatened. They force terrified victims to take photos of themselves bound and gagged, which are then used to coerce the family into paying ransom. The cyber kidnappers continue to extort the family by using photos and voice recordings of the victim that give the impression the kidnappers are with the victim and causing them harm, Riverdale police said. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), experts believe the crimes will continue.

It was nearing dusk one Sunday evening last November when Hillsborough County deputies in Tampa, Florida, were notified about a missing 9-year-old child with autism. With weather conditions worsening, deputies could not use an air unit to help search for the child, but a SafetyNet bracelet he was wearing allowed them to pinpoint his location. SafetyNet works by allowing law enforcement agencies access to GPS information from bracelets worn by those with cognitive conditions when they go missing. The child, who was hiding behind an air conditioning unit, was found about 20 minutes after the signal was detected.

Despite being separated during childhood, two Sioux City, Iowa, sisters and members of the Winnebago Tribe reunited as adults and set out to learn more about their Native American heritage. While digging into their family history, Trisha Rivers and Jessica Lopez-Walker learned of an aunt, Paulette “Paulie” Walker, who left Iowa for California in 1984, and shortly afterward was murdered. The sisters struggled to understand why no one reported the young woman missing, and now aim to have her remains returned to Iowa for burial near family. Their aunt, whose case remains unsolved, is one of the countless Indigenous women who suffer disproportionately higher rates of violence, sexual assault, and murder compared to the rest of the U.S. population. The sisters’ work with the nonprofit organization Great Plains Action Society involves helping find missing or murdered Indigenous people (MMIP) and providing support for other issues Iowa’s Indigenous population faces. Native Americans made up 1.5 percent of missing persons cases in Iowa, despite the state’s Native American population accounting for less than one half of 1 percent, according to an Iowa Public Radio report. “Native women and girls, our relatives, are not expendable,” Rivers said, adding that they’re seeking better treatment for Native communities.

Leah Gazan, a member of Canada’s Parliament, is leading discussions on a proposed “Red Dress Alert” system for missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit (gender-diverse) people, who face a murder rate six times that of other females. Similar to AMBER Alerts for children, Red Dress notifications would be sent to the public on their phones. Ottawa, which recognized the crisis as a national emergency, included funding for an alert system in the federal budget in March 2023. Calling it a matter of life or death, Gazan is urging the federal government to implement the Red Dress program before the next election.

Advances in rapid DNA sequencing are helping to solve missing persons cases long gone cold, such as that of 20-year-old Ashley Loring Heavyrunner, who disappeared from Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation in 2017. New testing kits can extract thousands of genetic markers from unidentified human remains, making it easier to link them to missing persons. Because few genetic data are available for Native Americans, Hopi Tribe member Haley Omeasoo, a classmate and distant relative of Heavyrunner, decided to pursue forensic anthropology to help locate missing Indigenous people. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Montana, Omeasoo and her graduate advisor, anthropologist Meradeth Snow, are working with the Blackfeet Tribe to create a DNA database of tribal members that can be compared with unidentified human remains. More than 4,000 sets of human remains are found in the U.S. each year; about a quarter remain unidentified, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 5,500 reports of missing Indigenous women and girls were filed in 2022 alone. Omeasoo is hopeful Ashley Heavyrunner will be found alive, but she knows that her DNA work could ultimately identify her friend’s remains. If that happens, she hopes it will at least give the family closure.

Dozens of migrant children who sought protection after fleeing war-torn countries have vanished in Ireland since 2017. A 2023 report published by University College Dublin’s (UCD) Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP) indicates some of the children were victims of organized sexual exploitation. Of the 62 who are missing, 44 have reached their 18th birthday and, because they are no longer minors, child welfare has ceased searching for them. MECPATHS (Mercy Efforts for Child Protection Against Trafficking with the Hospitality and Services Sectors), a nonprofit group raising awareness of child trafficking and exploitation in Ireland, said the report confirmed what frontline workers have been telling the organization for years. “Sexual exploitation, forced labor, forced begging, criminal exploitation, forced marriage, the removal of organs, and domestic servitude—it is all happening in Ireland,” said Ann Mara, the organization’s education manager. “So, the fact that these children are missing, and there is a kind of a shrug of the shoulders, is just mind-boggling.”

Ukraine officials have identified more than 19,000 children illegally removed from their homes and taken to Russia or Russia-controlled territory since the war began in February 2022. In some cases, Russian authorities took hundreds of children from Ukrainian orphanages and schools, according to Russian documents gathered by Lyudmyla Denisova, a former Ukraine human rights official. Many children were removed on the pretext of rescuing them from the war zone, or lured with the promise of attending camp. Others were taken from hospitals. Russian authorities have placed children with foster families, and President Vladimir Putin opened the way for Russian families to adopt Ukrainian children. The Russian strategy is deliberate, premeditated, and systematic, according to evidence collected by Ukrainian and international human rights and war crimes organizations. In March 2023, The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Putin and another official, a move that has made it easier to return children. Charities such as Save Ukraine and SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine have taken up the cause, and in recent months have tracked down and returned 387 children to their families.

A novel use of technology is helping to locate missing children around the world, including 9-year-old Phillista Waithera, who vanished in Nairobi in 2021. Two years later, she was reunited with her immediate family with the use of Face Age Progression (FAP) technology, which utilizes an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app to create photos of the child to show what they would look like now. In 2021 alone, the Kenyan nonprofit Missing Child Kenya Foundation located 298 children using AI, according to CEO and founder Maryanna Munyendo. And in central China’s Hubei Provence, a group of students at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) developed an AI system to restore and enhance old blurry photos of children who went missing decades earlier. More than 1,000 photos have been restored to improve clarity, helping reunite 11 missing children, like Sun Zhuo, a 4-year-old abducted in 2007 from his daycare in Shenzhen Province and rejoined with his biological parents in 2021 at age 18.