My son has gone missing a number of times, sometimes up to a week at a time. He’s always been such a good boy, he never stayed out late or didn’t come home unless he’d told us he was seeing a friend. It started when he went to secondary school – since he was in year 7, an 11-year-old little boy in his brand new uniform and his hair spick and span, he’d been asked to hold drugs for some of the older boys. And that was the start of it. Since then it’s led to periods of time when we don’t know where he is.
When I first reported these missing periods to police, I didn’t feel believed or listened to. After I explained the circumstances, they said it was his choice and that he couldn’t be treated as missing despite the fact that this was so out of character. My son can be really naïve and easily led, we’ve been trying to get school to help us assess whether he has learning difficulties and to me it was so clear he was being exploited by people older than him. And yet, the police didn’t take these risks seriously, and weren’t communicating with us or prioritising his case. At one point they didn’t even tell me his case was closed and it took me calling 999 to find someone to ask why they weren’t talking to us.
It’s like they just didn’t care. I think I’m just seen as a Black parent kicking off. They don’t care about me. I often wonder if I would be treated this way if I was White and I hate saying those things because it makes me feel like I’m just this negative parent talking about Black and White. But at the end of the day, if I can’t trust the police to find my son, who can I trust?
We feel like we’re just going round and round in circles. One of the most confusing interactions that we’ve had with the social care teams is being told that he needs a positive Black male role model. My husband has been an amazing father, we’re together – we just look at each other in those moments and think, ‘How can they say this?’
