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.

“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. (Jamaica Observer)