Missing Children 15,000 GDs in 7 months

Nearly 15,000 General Diaries (GDs) concerning missing children have been filed at police stations across Bangladesh in just seven months, highlighting growing concerns over law-and-order and exposing major gaps in the country’s system for tracking missing children.

The figure translates into about 2,143 GDs a month, or roughly 70 a day. But the absence of a coordinated national database means authorities cannot clearly say how many children have returned home, been rescued, remain missing, or
may have fallen victim to abduction or trafficking.

A missing-person GD, however, does not necessarily mean a child remains missing. Many children return home or are found by their families without police intervention. Families often fail to inform police after a child is located, leaving the GD officially unresolved.

In 2022, 5,984 missing-person GDs were filed in Dhaka, but police could not confirm how many people had subsequently returned, illustrating the difficulty of assessing the true scale of the problem.

Authorities urgently need to disclose how many of the nearly 15,000 cases have been closed, how many children were rescued or returned voluntarily, how many remain active, and how many developed into abduction or trafficking cases.

District- and police station-level data, along with age, gender and locations from which children disappeared, are also needed.

A Deputy Inspector General of Bangladesh Police Headquarters said filing a GD should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of abduction or trafficking.

“The moment a missing diary is filed at a police station, it cannot be assumed that the child has been abducted or trafficked. A large portion return safely to their families within a short time,” he said.

However, he acknowledged that families often do not notify police after recovering their children, leaving cases pending in official records.

“To remove this lack of coordination, we are moving toward a centralized digital surveillance system by connecting police station-level databases with CID and PBI, so that the real rates of missing and rescued persons become clearly visible,” he added.

Missing children, unidentified bodies
Data collected by Ain o Salish Kendra (Law and Arbitration Centre) show that 195 children died as victims of social and domestic violence in the first half of 2026.

In 30 cases, the recovered bodies were of children who had previously been reported missing.

There is no specific evidence directly linking those 30 cases to the nearly 15,000 GDs, but the figures highlight the lack of coordination between missing-person records and unidentified bodies.

In 2022, the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) identified 316 of 1,093 unidentified bodies. By June 2023, it had identified only 154 of 569.

The absence of systematic cross-checking between unidentified-body and missing-person databases risks leaving the fate of many missing children unknown.

A prominent human rights activist said the scale of the figures demanded urgent state action.

“Fifteen thousand is not an imaginary figure; behind every number lies the immeasurable pain and anguish of 15,000 families,” the activist said, calling for a National Missing-Child Outcome Database recording whether each child was rescued, returned home, abducted, trafficked, found dead or remained under investigation.

Trafficking risk
UNICEF’s 2025 report Stopping the Traffic said Bangladesh faces significant risks from trafficking of women and children and is simultaneously a source, transit point and destination. Climate displacement, poverty, child marriage and unsafe migration increase children’s vulnerability.

An ILO rapid assessment of 61 missing children in Patgram, Shibganj and Teknaf found that 61 per cent were boys and 39 per cent girls, while 67 per cent had disappeared from their own homes. More than half-54 per cent-were aged 13 to 18. Half were rescued, but 10 children from Teknaf were later identified as trafficking victims.

Updated UNICEF data show Bangladesh has about 58.7 million children aged up to 17. Among children aged 1 to 14, 85.7 per cent experience extreme violence, while 9.2 per cent of those aged 5 to 17 are engaged in child labour. Some 47.2 per cent of women aged 20 to 24 were married before 18, and only 59.2 per cent of children under five have birth registration.

Calls for national system
CID and Amber Alert for Bangladesh launched ‘MUN Alert’, short for ‘Missing Urgent Notification’, in January 2026.

Data obtained in early June showed that the system had handled more than 200 missing-child cases and issued three to four emergency alerts a day, but had rescued only 29 children in Dhaka.

Although MUN Alert does not cover all police GDs, the figures underline the need for a national system linking police, CID, PBI, hospitals and other relevant agencies.

While it would be misleading to attribute all 15,000 GDs to trafficking or crime, ignoring that possibility could leave vulnerable children at greater risk.

A transparent national database showing the outcome of every missing-child case is urgently needed.