MSC Investigat & Forensic Psy

Multi-agency Management of Risk in Relation to Missing Children
In the UK, 'missing' is defined as 'anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established and where the circumstances are out of character or the context suggests the person may be the subject of crime or risk of harm to themselves or another' (Association of Chief Police Officers, 2013). Duty of care for preventing children from going missing, and acting when they do, belongs to multiple agencies, including police, social care, health, and education. However, police perceive the responsibility to be falling heavily on their shoulders, creating strain on resources (Hayden & Shalev-Greene, 2016). I will work in partnership with police and their partners, adopting a phenomenon-driven approach to conceptualise the problem of multi-agency management of risk for children missing from care, leveraging existing theories relating to inter-team coordination to better understand and address this.

Driven by findings of recent national policing reports, the aim of the PhD project is to identify how agencies 1) define their roles and responsibilities, 2) conceptualise risk, and 3) how these conceptualisations impact on responses in relation to children missing from residential care homes.

Adopting a Grounded Theory (GT) approach with theoretical sampling, I will conduct interviews with practitioners across police, social care, health and educational settings to develop in depth understand of i) how each agency defines their own and other agencies' roles and responsibilities, ii) how they conceptualise risk in relation to children missing from care), iii) how they understand the varieties of harm suffered as a result of children going missing, and iv) to compare conceptualisations across populations. This data will be used to inform the design of a new scenario-based framework for developing a shared frame of reference between agencies regarding roles and responsibilities. This will be tested to examine whether it can improve response consistency and effectiveness between agencies.