Children go missing by the tens of thousands each year in the united States. We know that quite a bit of these occur while they are in the foster and Child Protective Services of the state. However, there is one city in which 43 children have gone missing and the city is East Cleveland, Ohio.
The Daily Mail has more:
Eric Vance’s family has been in turmoil since the 16-year-old went missing in Ohio last month.
His grandmother Roseann Vidovic said she ‘can’t sleep, can’t eat’ as she wonders why Vance disappeared.
He was last seen on Janette Avenue in eastern Cleveland, wearing white socks and black jogging pants.
His family has handed out flyers across the neighborhood and Vidovic told News 5 Cleveland the despair was ‘pure hell’ as she tried not ‘to think the worst’ about the fate of a teen with mental health problems.
Still, Vance’s tragic disappearance is far from an aberration. Since late 2014, at least 43 children — 24 girls and 19 boys — have vanished from East Cleveland, a once-prosperous community left battered by decades of urban decay.
With a population of 13,792, that means 3.1 kids per 1,000 residents have gone missing in just 10 years — a worse rate than in Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and other cities in the Buckeye State.
An investigation by The Columbus Dispatch attributed these shocking numbers to the area’s rampant crime, poverty, and a local police force that’s too crooked and understaffed to focus on stray youths.
Among the missing are kids of all ages, such as a nine-year-old girl who vanished five years ago wearing a denim shirt and purple leggings; and a 17-year-old boy last seen in a red and black hoodie in 2014.
In most cases, it’s hard to establish whether the youngsters reported missing ended up dead, or victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation rings — or indeed went back home and officials never learned about it.
Eric Vance went missing from eastern Cleveland in October, leaving his family in agony
Tracy Jones Jr (top left), 17, disappeared from Dayton, Ohio, on November 20: one of many missing kids in the Buckeye State
Roughly 30 percent of the 365,000 US children reported missing each year are the victims of sex trafficking, according to Saved In America, a California nonprofit that focuses on the plight of missing kids.
East Cleveland is a classic American story of Rust Belt decay. It is today marked by abandoned neighborhoods with crumbling properties, boarded windows, broken glass and graffiti scrawled on brickwork.
Art McKoy, a local barbershop owner and racial justice campaigner, says it’s no surprise so many youths disappear from a mostly-black neighborhood of pothole-covered roads that reeks of despair.
‘You can see how a lot of children would go missing in a place like this,’ McKoy told the Dispatch.
Article posted with permission from Sons of Liberty Media
The post The City Where Children Keep Vanishing – And No One To Look For Them appeared first on The Washington Standard.
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Author: Tim Brown
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