When the Metropolitan police announced recently that inquiries into the disappearance of the boy known as Adam had uncovered 300 missing black boys - all around the same age, and almost all of them African - the implications were awesome.
'Adam', whose torso was found in the Thames, has been traced back to West Africa, a region mired in armed conflict and misery. Were these other missing boys dead, dismembered and dumped in rivers? Were they hidden in cults? Were they commodities servicing mysterious networks beyond the reach of all investigators? The answers to all these questions is: we don't know.
'We don't really know what missing means,' says Ratna Dutt, director of the Race Equality Unit at the National Institute of Social Work.
Local authorities with large transient populations see the statistic less as an indicator of missing children than of missing data. But whatever missing means, it is telling a story about what we don't know, what we need to know, and about black children consigned to obscurity.
The Met's figures were gathered over three months in 2001. In 2003, following the Climbie case, the Met and the NSPCC jointly organised a three-month operation at Heathrow airport to monitor unaccompanied children coming into Britain. The result was the Paladin Report.
During three months 1,738 children arrived in Britain unaccompanied. Most were legitimate, and follow-up confirmed their documentation. A few were seeking asylum. Some girls identified as being at risk were taken into care; several disappeared soon after. Fewer than 20 of the children could not be traced.
'This highlights the global movements of communities,' comments the NSPCC's Chris Atkinson. 'We are trying to establish the implications.'
That global phenomenon means children are on the move, and some are being trafficked, enslaved and abused. While this may apply to a minority, many others are left with precarious identity, their place in Britain uncertain and unsettled.
Benefit system
What worries Debbie Ariyo, founder of Afruca (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse), is children arriving with adults claiming to be their carers and claiming benefit, but who may be exploiting the children.
Operation Paladin was useful, she says, but it focused on unaccompanied children. 'If you want to capture the problem, you must also do something to check what happens to a child, where it goes, when it comes with an adult who is not its parent.'
She believes registration is vital. 'This checking has to be done, it is a first step. We should use the benefit system to find them.'
A Hackney Council spokesperson explained that at present, if a child moves into the borough, the school is the only source of information, unless the child comes to the attention of social services. 'School is the only way we know they exist,' she says.
But if children leave the borough, or even go to a school out of the borough, they evaporate from its statistics. 'We lose so many at 11,' says one borough spokesperson. That's not because they're dead or missing, it's because people move their children to schools in other boroughs, 'but we have no way of knowing whether they have arrived safely.'
Early years provision, likewise, may not be a point of contact, unless children come to social services' attention. Glenda Jennings, of the African Caribbean Nursery in Haringey, says, 'The children who get lost in the system are the ones living with relatives, and they're at home.'
Private fostering arrangements veil the children currently the subject of greatest concern - those from West Africa. A mist of anxiety, shame and secrecy surrounds the debate. A spokesperson for the Nigerian Embassy refuses to discuss the issue. 'We have no ideas about this,' she says.
'What do you want me to say?' Well, something.
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) has been raising the alarm for years about private fostering, and was disappointed, like other children's organisations, that the Government did not include registration of private fostering in the Children Act, coming into force in the summer. Local authorities will be required to appoint a private fostering officer to raise awareness, but nothing more.
Going underground
Government worries about being accused of nanny statism don't help, and the excuse that registration would drive private fostering underground don't make sense, says Barbara Hutchinson of BAAF. 'It is already underground.
That's the point. There is no record of these children.'
The debate is obscured by other anxieties. A civil libertarian view resists state intrusion, particularly in the lives of black households, and most particularly where misty immigration status makes people feel at risk from, rather than protected by, the state.
Twice a year Hackney launches a publicity campaign inviting residents to tell the council if they are looking after a child. But there is very little response.
Research by Terry Phillpot for BAAF reckons the usual estimate of 10,000 children in private fostering arrangements is an underestimate, because that figure usually refers only to West African children.
Just as this movement was beginning, William Utting, chief inspector of social services, warned that private fostering was a 'honeypot for abusers'. In his later 1997 report, People Like Us, he warned again that private fostering was 'the least controlled and most open to abuse of all the environments in which children lived away from home'.
Migration has since been transformed. There is a view that African children benefit from an ethic that sees all children as the community's responsibility, beyond blood and kin. At its best this gives children access to caring adults and a new life, but in the new world the concept is hardly sustainable. It presupposes a woman sequestered at home, children living entirely private lives, and communities vulnerable to the illegalities promoted by constraints on immigration.
Cultural sensitivity
Ratna Dutt offers a caution: 'culture' and 'tradition' should not exile black children from the protection, safety, respect and resources they are entitled to expect.
'White professionals should not be allowed to absolve themselves of responsibility by hiding behind cultural sensitivity. I'd rather be called racist than allow bad practice,' she says.
Ms Dutt believes that when 'superficial cultural sensitivity' takes precedence over oppressive treatment of children, 'it allows people to argue that good practice is compromised by anti-racism.'
The case of Victoria Climbie confirmed Ms Dutt's worst fears. Victoria entered Britain not from Africa but from France, with adults who had European Union passports. It was not that she was not known, or not seen.
'There was all kinds of information about her, but people didn't take note of it,' she says.
Immigration policies, and the anxieties generated within the community - including among professionals - 'mean that people ignore children's legislation,' she adds.
Her caution is endorsed by a black senior social worker in London whose work is with children, primarily from Africa and Europe, who are in Britain because they are escaping terror or crisis or poverty.
The awareness-raising of the 1980s, staunched by the reaction against anti-oppressive practice, doesn't in any case help deal with the new environment, 'now it is just too complex. People weren't so cagey about information then. Now I'm dealing with people who are all frightened of something. A lot of the families I'm working with are paying off somebody who got them in. Create fences and people have to get under the fence. Get rid of the immigration stuff and people would not be living in such fear.'
Institutional ignorance, and children lying low, has massive implications for children's welfare: traumatised children fleeing war zones, children looked after by relatives or family friends, deprived by the informality of their circumstances. The very things they need are put beyond their reach by the determined privatisation of their care.
The story of the missing children is simultaneously empty of meaning and flooded: spectres of ritual killing hover over the statistics, obscuring something more banal, and yet also dangerous, something that draws our attention out of Africa and back to Britain, to ourselves and what we don't know.
The London social worker adds, 'I know I just scratch the surface, there's a lot of gunge out there, and the victims stuck in it are the children. I meet children who are silent, they can't tell you their story, they are sedated by fear. I feel extremely angry about that.'
