Anyone can try and understand the grief and desolation when a loved one dies. But what about the crushing uncertainty when somebody just disappears?   

Hundreds of thousands of people are currently missing around the world from armed conflicts, violence, natural disasters, or migration.    

In recent weeks, so many times  – Grenfell Tower, Sierra Leone, Barcelona – in so many ways, we catch our breath on witnessing the anguish people face when they don’t know what has happened to someone they love.  Imagine, if that lack of information continued for weeks, months, years, or if you believed the person you love had been ‘disappeared’ by a government, or an armed group.  

The Day of the Disappeared, which began in South America and is now marked internationally, gives us all a moment to stand alongside those who yearn for their family, as well as honouring those who are missing.    

For more than 100 years the International Family Tracing Unit of the British Red Cross has worked to help people look for family members with whom they have lost contact.  We recognise the crisis this loss presents, immobilising whole families whilst they wait for news.  

Family tracing is a free, confidential service, delivered on a neutral and impartial basis, enabling us to search sometimes in hostile contexts.  We work with the network of National Societies within the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement and the International Committee of the Red Cross to search worldwide, as well as in the UK, so that people longing for missing loved ones can feel that much less alone, and hold onto hope.