‘Going Missing’ as a Maladaptive Coping Behavior for Adults Experiencing Strain

ABSTRACT

This study applied the Threat Appraisal and Coping Theory to explore the mechanisms influencing a person to go missing. We examined the negative emotions and stressors – proximate stressors/stressful events, underlying life stressors, emotional states, and other dysfunctional behaviors – of adults who were reported as missing from 2014–2018. Our results indicate that missing persons experience significant underlying life stressors, stressful situations, and proximate stressors that can ‘trigger’ a missing episode. We also found that most missing adults are described as facing negative emotions, such as anger, and engaging in maladaptive behaviors, such as drug and alcohol use, that are related to these events. These findings, we suggest, highlight that affectual and individual-level mechanisms are influential factors contributing to why adults go missing. Lastly, it was revealed that missing adults are commonly reported as experiencing strains and stressors in their personal relationships, indicating that this phenomenon may be attenuated through social support as an adaptive coping resource. Through these results, we can begin to understand missingness as driven by a negative event, stressor, or emotion in which the person engages in the maladaptive coping behavior of ‘going missing’ as a way to escape the situation and achieve some level of emotional or cognitive distance.

Notes

¹ Since the bulk of missing person reports involve youth – typically youth who have run away from group homes – applying age criteria immediately narrowed the number of reports significantly.

² To clarify, given that the service categorized those as 21 years old and under as ‘youth,’ we did not include these cases in our sample of adults. The criteria regarding which case is ‘youth’ or ‘adult’ is based on how the service classified (and handled) the cases and is not researcher-determined.

³ Unfortunately, in relation to histories of individuals being reported previously missing, we only had partial data upon which to draw, as one of the services did not provide such information.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Huey

Dr. Laura Huey is the Executive Director of the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing and Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. She is also a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, a Senior Research Fellow with the Police Foundation, and a Research Fellow for the London Police Service. She also formerly sat on the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police Crime Prevention Committee, and was formerly a member of the Board of SERENE-RISC (a Canadian Centre of Excellence on Cybercrime).

Lorna Ferguson

Lorna Ferguson is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology department at the University of Western Ontario, Canada and is the Director of Operations for the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing (Can-SEBP). Lorna’s research focuses on missing persons, policing, and evidence-based policy and practice. Specifically, her recent work examines police responses to missing persons in Canada to fill in knowledge gaps on ‘what works,’ ‘what doesn’t work,’ and ‘what we still don’t know’ in terms of how to most effectively and efficiently search for and investigate missing person cases.