My Child Is Missing!
“I first found the note—it was March 31, 1981—in the morning when I went to wake him up to get him ready for school,” recalls Annette. “It said: ‘I am going away because I don’t want to live here anymore. I don’t have to listen to anybody anymore.’” “I’ll never forget that,” she added, “even if it happens to be 25 years from now.”
For Annette, a 27-year-old Massachusetts housewife, the nightmare of a missing child was about to begin. “I knew it was his handwriting,” she said. “I just had this feeling that Taj was hiding out somewhere, someone was helping him. Someone knew the problem he was having and wanted to help him.” But phone calls to relatives and friends in the neighborhood produced no information as to the whereabouts of nine-year-old Taj.
Soon a state of shock enveloped her as police and other agencies took up the search. Cycles of hopelessness, anger, frustration and sadness followed, which persist to this day. “There’s just no end to it,” states Annette. “It’s not like a death that you can accept for what it is and look forward to something better. I can’t put it in the right perspective because I don’t know what I’m dealing with. It’s just very, very frustrating.”
Almost equally as frustrating to Annette is the fact that she cannot tell her missing son that the situation that impelled him to run away—a stepfather who suddenly became abusive and forbade him to talk to his mother, the fear he had of being killed—has completely changed. “Whereas most runaways who run out of desperation would come home and find things the same,” explains Annette, “Taj’s situation is different in that it really has changed. He wouldn’t be coming home to the same place and wouldn’t have to come home with that fear of his stepfather.”
Although it’s been three years since Taj disappeared, Annette still carries on the search for her missing son. “I’m constantly looking at little blond boys,” she says, “constantly. No matter where I am —at the airport, in other cities, my own city—I’m always looking at them and wondering whether, if he turns around, it will be Taj. I’m never going to stop searching.”
Annette is not alone. There are literally tens of thousands of children each year who are reported missing from their homes and are never seen again. Some, like Taj, run away from a threatening or unpleasant home situation. Others are snatched away or simply disappear. What happens to these children? Why are they missing?