ELEANOR HALL: Every hour across the country, two children are reported missing to police.

While authorities say most of them are returned to their families, there are hundreds of grieving parents who still haven't found their children.

But police say social media technologies offer hope of finding children more quickly in future.

Josh Bavas reports.

JOSH BAVAS: It's been four years since Jim McDougall saw his daughter and granddaughter. The 26-year-old and seven-year-old were supposed to go on an overseas holiday but authorities say they never left the country.

JIM MCDOUGALL: My daughter made a phone call to me and said they were going to Brazil for a holiday and we accepted that and after a few months we decided there was something wrong so we filed a missing persons report.

JOSH BAVAS: He says the trauma hasn't eased with time.

JIM MCDOUGALL: You just have to cope. You just do what you can and probably we've been to media and everybody, there's Federal Police and missing police. They're helping us and you have to cope.

JOSH BAVAS: But Jim McDougall's case isn't rare. Every year up to 17,500 Australian children are reported missing from care.

And while police find most, Queensland detective senior sergeant Damien Powell says it's a huge strain on both their families and authorities.

DAMIEN POWELL: For the officers dealing with it as well, it's very draining on everybody. Particularly distressing for the family and we do as much as we can in any of those investigations to find the children as promptly as possible and it's very frustrating when we don't.

JOSH BAVAS: And are these missing children cases some of the hardest for police to deal with?

DAMIEN POWELL: Well, yeah they are very difficult for the police officers to deal with, but it's part of our job and it's our job to locate these children and solve if appropriate the crime related to the children. We try and focus on the positives and we do have a high success rate. In 2010 Queensland located 100 per cent of our missing children.

JOSH BAVAS: He says parents and carers need to be involved in their children's lives.

DAMIEN POWELL: Mainly our missing children are runaways; simply that. They fail to keep appointments or they could be children in care of the government agency. They come from various backgrounds; they could be running away from issues at home or issues at school. So there's a wide range of reasons that cause the children to do this.

JOSH BAVAS: Cairns teenager Declan Crouch still hasn't been seen by his family for over two months.
Detective senior sergeant Damien Powell says he's worried by the similarities to the case of Daniel Morcombe.

DAMIEN POWELL: Declan is a very similar age to Daniel Morcombe when he went missing. Declan has gone in or been missing in an area where there's been wildlife issues; snakes and crocodiles and waterways that are filled with their own dangers.

So we are very concerned and Declan had never been reported previously so it's an 'out of character' disappearance and we're desperate to find him. We're following up on any leads.

JOSH BAVAS: But when Daniel Morcombe went missing in 2003, the use of Twitter and Facebook weren't even considered. Child abduction alerts and runaways are now being reported to thousands of people within minutes.

DAMIEN POWELL: Social media is a tool used by a lot of children and when I say children; persons under the age of 17 in particular, to communicate. So we try and utilise the mobile phones and social networking such as Facebook to reach out to these guys to locate them and have them contact family members and friends.

JOSH BAVAS: Authorities from more than 12 countries are marking Missing Children's Day by joining forces to find the answers from some of the most disturbing cases.

Rebecca Koltz from the Australian Federal Police co-ordinates these types of campaigns. She says a special website launched just months ago has already proven successful.

REBECCA KOLTZ: Which is 'helpbringthemhome.org.au'. It was new as of last year. This year it's been updated with all the new profiles but also we've updated success stories of those children found as a result of last year's campaign. Three of four Australian children were located.

JOSH BAVAS: But she says it's still a never-ending battle for the rest of the families.

REBECCA KOLTZ: So every time you walk down the street and you see a girl walking ahead of you that seems to have the same sort of hair-style and walk as your daughter. Every time you see an ad and it features some kid or any time that you see anything that triggers a memory; you hear their favourite song or whatever, it all brings it all flooding back again and we saw that today with Mrs McDougall. She became very emotional just revisiting photos of her daughter and her granddaughter that are missing.

ELEANOR HALL: And that's Rebecca Koltz from the Australian Federal Police's National Missing Person's Co-ordination Centre. That report from Josh Bavas.

Josh Bavas

Source: abc.net.au