We teach children not to talk to strangers. We tell them not to accept food from unknown people, not to get into unfamiliar cars, and not to wander too far from home. It is useful advice, but it may also give adults a dangerously comforting picture of where childhood is unsafe.
The disturbing truth emerging from recent cases is that the person who poses a threat to a child may not look like a stranger at all. He may be a relative, a neighbour, an acquaintance, a family member, or someone the child has seen often enough to trust.
That should force us to reconsider how we understand child safety in Bangladesh. The problem is not simply that some children are murdered. It is that the systems designed to protect them often become active only after something terrible has already happened.
The numbers are difficult to ignore. Between January and July this year, 15,717 children were reported missing across the country, according to Police Headquarters. Of them, 13,679 were rescued or returned to their families, while 2,038 remained untraced.
Among those still missing were 68 children aged nine or below and 1,970 aged between 10 and 17. These figures do not tell us how many of those children ultimately faced violence, exploitation, or trafficking. But they establish something more fundamental: Disappearance is not a marginal problem.
Another set of figures makes the issue even more unsettling. According to monitoring by child-rights organization Shishurai Shob, 86 children were killed in 78 incidents during the first six months of this year. 46 of the victims were aged six or below.
More than half of the killings occurred within a family environment, including the victim's own home or the home of a relative. Parents were implicated in 17 cases, relatives in 11, and neighbours or acquaintances in 22.
The numbers should not be interpreted as proof that every family home is dangerous or that every parent, relative, or neighbour represents a threat. They do, however, challenge the simplistic idea that child protection is mainly about keeping children away from unknown outsiders. Familiarity can create trust, and trust can sometimes become the very condition that allows abuse or violence to remain invisible.
There is another uncomfortable lesson here. A child does not have to disappear for society to fail that child. Violence can happen behind a closed door, inside a familiar neighbourhood, or within a household that appears perfectly ordinary from outside. By the time the crime becomes visible, the opportunity to prevent it may already have disappeared.
This is why the first hours after a child goes missing deserve much greater attention. A missing child should not initially be treated as a routine missing-person complaint that can wait for the machinery of bureaucracy to start moving. The first hours can contain digital traces, phone locations, CCTV footage, online activity, financial transactions, and eyewitness memories that may disappear quickly. Delay is not neutral when evidence is disappearing by the minute.
Bangladesh therefore needs something more sophisticated than periodic campaigns telling parents to be careful. It needs a national missing-child response mechanism with clearly defined responsibilities, rapid information sharing and a standard emergency protocol.
Police, cybercrime units, telecommunications operators, local administration, and relevant child-protection organizations should not have to discover how to coordinate after every tragedy. The procedure should already exist.
Technology can help, but technology alone will not save children. A phone can be tracked, but someone must decide to track it quickly. CCTV can contain crucial evidence, but someone must collect and preserve it before it is overwritten. An online account may reveal a child's last movements, but someone must know which digital traces matter.
There is also a dangerous tendency to measure success by arrests. An arrest makes a headline. A confession makes another. But neither necessarily tells us whether the system worked.
If a child disappears, is found dead, and an accused person is arrested, we should not automatically call the case successfully resolved. We should also ask what happened during the hours between disappearance and recovery. Was the report acted upon immediately? Were digital records secured? Were relevant people questioned? Were search efforts coordinated? Were warning signs overlooked?
Justice begins after a crime, but child protection begins before it.
The same logic applies to the way we discuss family violence. When a child is killed by someone close to the family, the tragedy is often described as a shocking individual act. That may be true, but the individual explanation can sometimes conceal the social conditions surrounding the crime.
The first six months of this year saw 19 child killings linked in monitoring reports to anger or quarrels, 18 to rape, and 14 to abuse. In 13 cases, no specific reason could be identified from available reports.
These categories are not explanations in themselves, and the organization has rightly cautioned that they are based largely on preliminary media information. Yet they point towards a wider problem that cannot be solved through policing alone.
A society that wants to protect children must learn to recognize danger before violence becomes fatal. Domestic conflict, sexual abuse, coercion, threats, unexplained injuries, sudden behavioural changes, and repeated disappearances cannot always be dismissed as private family matters.
Schools, teachers, relatives, neighbours, and community organizations need channels through which concerns can be reported without exposing children to further danger.
There is also a question of what happens after the cameras leave. Shishurai Shob found reports of arrests in 44 of the 78 cases it monitored during January-June, while 14 contained no information about legal action.
Arrest statistics are not the same as convictions, and media monitoring cannot capture the entire judicial process. But the gap itself should concern us. A child who has been killed cannot be brought back by a successful prosecution. Yet accountability matters because impunity teaches society that some lives can be taken at a manageable cost.
Perhaps the most important change we need is conceptual. A missing child should not be treated merely as a child who has left a place. A missing child is a child whose whereabouts are unknown and whose safety is therefore uncertain. That distinction sounds small, but it changes everything. It changes how quickly authorities respond, how seriously evidence is preserved, and how institutions understand their responsibility.
We have become accustomed to asking who killed the child. We should also ask a harder question: What happened while the child was still alive and missing?
That is where prevention begins. And that is where a serious child-protection system must learn to look.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
