In 2022, there were 313,017 cases filed by the NCIC where the race of the reported missing was White. In the same year, 18,928 people were missing whose race was unknown.

What is the NCIC?

The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is a digital database that stores crime data for the United States, so criminal justice agencies can access it. As a part of the FBI, it helps criminal justice professionals find criminals, missing people, stolen property, and terrorists. The NCIC database is broken down into 21 files. Seven files belong to stolen property and items, and 14 belong to persons, including the National Sex Offender Register, Missing Person, and Identify Theft. It works alongside federal, tribal, state, and local agencies. The NCIC’s goal is to maintain a centralized information system between local branches and offices, so information is easily accessible nationwide.

Missing people in the United States

A person is considered missing when they have disappeared and their location is unknown. A person who is considered missing might have left voluntarily, but that is not always the case. The number of the NCIC unidentified person files in the United States has fluctuated since 1990, and in 2022, there were slightly more NCIC missing person files for males as compared to females. Fortunately, the number of NCIC missing person files has been mostly decreasing since 1998.

The dataset contains year-, state-, type-of-crime- and gender-wise compiled data on the number of different types of crimes which were committed against children and the number of victims who were affected by the same crimes. The different types of crimes covered in the dataset include kidnapping and abduction crimes such as kidanapping and abduction for the purpose of murder, begging, ransom, compelling for marriage, procuration of minor girls, importation of girls from foreign countries, missing deemed as kidnapped, etc., fatal crimes such as murder, attempt to commit murder, muder with rape, abetment of suicide of child, infanticide, foeticide, trafficking and sexual crimes such buying and selling of minors for prostitution, use of children for pornography, transmiting sexual content and material involving children in sexually explicit acts, sexual assualt, penetrative sexual assault, rape, and other crimes such as child labour, child marriage, exposure, abandaonment, simple hurt, grievous hurt, insult and assualt of damage modesty, crimes under juvenile justice act and transplantation of organs act, etc.

Abstract

Background: Adolescent girls in Kenya are disproportionately affected by early and unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortion and HIV infection. The In Their Hands (ITH) programme in Kenya aims to increase adolescents' use of high-quality sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services through targeted interventions. ITH Programme aims to promote use of contraception and testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV or pregnancy, for sexually active adolescent girls, 2) provide information, products and services on the adolescent girl's terms; and 3) promote communities support for girls and boys to access SRH services.

Objectives: The objectives of the evaluation are to assess: a) to what extent and how the new Adolescent Reproductive Health (ARH) partnership model and integrated system of delivery is working to meet its intended objectives and the needs of adolescents; b) adolescent user experiences across key quality dimensions and outcomes; c) how ITH programme has influenced adolescent voice, decision-making autonomy, power dynamics and provider accountability; d) how community support for adolescent reproductive and sexual health initiatives has changed as a result of this programme.

Methodology ITH programme is being implemented in two phases, a formative planning and experimentation in the first year from April 2017 to March 2018, and a national roll out and implementation from April 2018 to March 2020. This second phase is informed by an Annual Programme Review and thorough benchmarking and assessment which informed critical changes to performance and capacity so that ITH is fit for scale. It is expected that ITH will cover approximately 250,000 adolescent girls aged 15-19 in Kenya by April 2020. The programme is implemented by a consortium of Marie Stopes Kenya (MSK), Well Told Story, and Triggerise. ITH's key implementation strategies seek to increase adolescent motivation for service use, create a user-defined ecosystem and platform to provide girls with a network of accessible subsidized and discreet SRH services; and launch and sustain a national discourse campaign around adolescent sexuality and rights. The 3-year study will employ a mixed-methods approach with multiple data sources including secondary data, and qualitative and quantitative primary data with various stakeholders to explore their perceptions and attitudes towards adolescents SRH services. Quantitative data analysis will be done using STATA to provide descriptive statistics and statistical associations / correlations on key variables. All qualitative data will be analyzed using NVIVO software.

Study Duration: 36 months - between 2018 and 2020.

Geographic coverage

Narok and Homabay counties

Analysis unit

Households

Universe

All adolescent girls aged 15-19 years resident in the household.

Sampling procedure

The sampling of adolescents for the household survey was based on expected changes in adolescent's intention to use contraception in future. According to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2014, 23.8% of adolescents and young women reported not intending to use contraception in future. This was used as a baseline proportion for the intervention as it aimed to increase demand and reduce the proportion of sexually active adolescents who did not intend to use contraception in the future. Assuming that the project was to achieve an impact of at least 2.4 percentage points in the intervention counties (i.e. a reduction by 10%), a design effect of 1.5 and a non- response rate of 10%, a sample size of 1885 was estimated using Cochran's sample size formula for categorical data was adequate to detect this difference between baseline and end line time points. Based on data from the 2009 Kenya census, there were approximately 0.46 adolescents girls per a household, which meant that the study was to include approximately 4876 households from the two counties at both baseline and end line surveys.

We collected data among a representative sample of adolescent girls living in both urban and rural ITH areas to understand adolescents' access to information, use of SRH services and SRH-related decision making autonomy before the implementation of the intervention. Depending on the number of ITH health facilities in the two study counties, Homa Bay and Narok that, we sampled 3 sub-Counties in Homa Bay: West Kasipul, Ndhiwa and Kasipul; and 3 sub-Counties in Narok, Narok Town, Narok South and Narok East purposively. In each of the ITH intervention counties, there were sub-counties that had been prioritized for the project and our data collection focused on these sub-counties selected for intervention. A stratified sampling procedure was used to select wards with in the sub-counties and villages from the wards. Then households were selected from each village after all households in the villages were listed. The purposive selection of sub-counties closer to ITH intervention facilities meant that urban and semi-urban areas were oversampled due to the concentration of health facilities in urban areas.

Qualitative Sampling

Focus Group Discussion participants were recruited from the villages where the ITH adolescent household survey was conducted in both counties. A convenience sample of consenting adults living in the villages were invited to participate in the FGDS. The discussion was conducted in local languages. A facilitator and note-taker trained on how to use the focus group guide, how to facilitate the group to elicit the information sought, and how to take detailed notes. All focus group discussions took place in the local language and were tape-recorded, and the consent process included permission to tape-record the session. Participants were identified only by their first names and participants were asked not to share what was discussed outside of the focus group. Participants were read an informed consent form and asked to give written consent. In-depth interviews were conducted with purposively selected sample of consenting adolescent girls who participated in the adolescent survey. We conducted a total of 45 In-depth interviews with adolescent girls (20 in Homa Bay County and 25 in Narok County respectively). In addition, 8 FGDs (4 each per county) were conducted with mothers of adolescent girls who are usual residents of the villages which had been identified for the interviews and another 4 FGDs (2 each per county) with CHVs.

Sampling deviation

N/A

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f] for quantitative data collection and Focus Group Discussions and In Depth Interviews for qualitative data collection

Research instrument

The questionnaire covered; socio-demographic and household information, SRH knowledge and sources of information, sexual activity and relationships, family planning knowledge, access, choice and use when needed, exposure to family planning messages and voice and decision making autonomy and quality of care for those who visited health facilities in the 12 months before the survey. The questionnaire was piloted before the data collection and the questions reviewed for appropriateness, comprehension and flow. The questionnaire was piloted among a sample of 42 adolescent girls (two each per field interviewer) 15-19 from a community outside the study counties.

The questionnaire was originally developed in English and later translated into Kiswahili. The questionnaire was programmed using ODK-based Survey CTO platform for data collection and management and was administered through face-to-face interview.

Cleaning operations

The survey tools were programmed using the ODK-based SurveyCTO platform for data collection and management. During programming, consistency checks were in-built into the data capture software which ensured that there were no cases of missing or implausible information/values entered into the database by the field interviewers. For example, the application included controls for variables ranges, skip patterns, duplicated individuals, and intra- and inter-module consistency checks. This reduced or eliminated errors usually introduced at the data capture stage. Once programmed, the survey tools were tested by the programming team who in conjunction with the project team conducted further testing on the application's usability, in-built consistency checks (skips, variable ranges, duplicating individuals etc.), and inter-module consistency checks. Any issues raised were documented and tracked on the Issue Tracker and followed up to full and timely resolution. After internal testing was done, the tools were availed to the project and field teams to perform user acceptance testing (UAT) so as to verify and validate that the electronic platform worked exactly as expected, in terms of usability, questions design, checks and skips etc.

Data cleaning was performed to ensure that data were free of errors and that indicators generated from these data were accurate and consistent. This process begun on the first day of data collection as the first records were uploaded into the database. The data manager used data collected during pilot testing to begin writing scripts in Stata 14 to check the variables in the data in 'real-time'. This ensured the resolutions of any inconsistencies that could be addressed by the data collection teams during the fieldwork activities. The Stata 14 scripts that perform real-time checks and clean data also wrote to a .rtf file that detailed every check performed against each variable, any inconsistencies encountered, and all steps that were taken to address these inconsistencies. The .rtf files also reported when a variable was