Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India has defined missing child as 'a person below eighteen years of age, whose whereabouts are not known to the parents, legal guardians and any other persons who may be legally entrusted with the custody of the child, whatever may be the circumstances/causes of disappearance”. The dataset contains the state wise and gender-wise number of children reported missing in a particular year, total number of persons missing including those from previous years, number of persons recovered/traced and those unrecovered/untraced. The dataset also contains the percentage recovery of missing persons which is calculated as the percentage share of total number of persons traced over the total number of persons missing. NCRB started providing detailed data on missing & traced persons including children from 2016 onwards following the Supreme Court’s direction in a Writ Petition. It should also be noted that the data published by NCRB is restricted to those cases where FIRs have been registered by the police in respective States/UTs.

Abstract (en): The National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) were undertaken in response to the mandate of the 1984 Missing Children's Assistance Act (Pub.L. 98-473) that requires the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to conduct periodic national incidence studies to determine the actual number of children reported missing and the number of missing children who are recovered for a given year. The first such study, NISMART-1 (NATIONAL INCIDENCE STUDIES OF MISSING, ABDUCTED, RUNAWAY, AND THROWNAWAY CHILDREN (NISMART), 1988 [ICPSR 9682]), was conducted from 1988 to 1989 and addressed this mandate by defining major types of missing child episodes and estimating the number of children who experienced missing child episodes of each type in 1988. At that time, the lack of a standardized definition of a "missing child" made it impossible to provide a single estimate of missing children. As a result, one of the primary goals of NISMART-2 was to develop a standardized definition and provide unified estimates of the number of missing children in the United States. Both NISMART-1 and NISMART-2 comprise several component datasets designed to provide a comprehensive picture of the population of children who experienced qualifying episodes, with each component focusing on a different aspect of the missing child population. The Household Survey -- Youth Data and the Household Survey -- Adult Data (Parts 1-2) are similar but separate surveys, one administered to the adult primary caretaker of the children in the sampled household and the other to a randomly selected household youth aged 10 through 18 at the time of interview. The Juvenile Facilities Data on Runaways (Part 3) sought to estimate the number of runaways from juvenile residential facilities in order to supplement the household survey estimate of the number of runaways from households. And the Law Enforcement Study Data, by case perpetrator, and victim, (Parts 4-6) intended to estimate the number of children who were victims of stereotypical kidnappings and to obtain a sample of these cases for in-depth study. ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.. Response Rates: Part 1: 35 percent. Part 2: 61 percent. Part 3: The JFS response rate for the institution-level interview was 100 percent. A total of 74 facility-level interviews were completed from the 75 sampled facilities. Three of the sampled facilities were found to be non-operational (hence ineligible), while a fourth sampled facility actually consisted of three separate juvenile residential facilities, all of which were included in the study. Thus, all in-scope facilities participated in the facility-level interviews. The JFS response rate for the episode-level interview was 93 percent. A total of 116 episode-level interviews were targeted. Episode-level interviews were successfully completed for 108 of these targeted episodes, yielding a 93 percent completion rate. Parts 4-6: Phase 1 mail survey -- 91 percent, and Phase 2 followup telephone interview -- 99.3 percent. Overall -- 90.6 percent. Datasets:DS0: Study-Level FilesDS1: Household Survey - YouthDS2: Household Survey - AdultDS3: Juvenile Facilities Data on RunawaysDS4: Law Enforcement Data - CaseDS5: Law Enforcement Data - PerpetratorDS6: Law Enforcement Data - Victim Parts 1-2: Households with at least one child aged 18 or younger who had lived in the house for two consecutive weeks in the 12 months prior to screening. Part 3: All group homes, juvenile detention centers, residential treatment centers, and runaway and homeless youth shelters serving the selected counties. Parts 4-6: All law enforcement agencies serving the selected counties. Parts 1-2: A list-assisted RDD (Random Digit Dial) methodology was used to select a nationally representative sample of telephone households from the GENESYS Sampling System frame. Typically, a list-assisted RDD design is a one-stage random selection process resulting in equal probabilit...

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.