Mihrican Mustafa, also known as Jan, was 38 when she went missing from Canning Town, London. A drug addict, alcoholic and sex worker, Jan’s life had fallen apart after losing her job at T.K. Max and becoming homeless. Her sister Mel reported her missing in April 2018, but when she first rang the police, they asked her if Jan was a drug user. “I said, ‘yes’, and I told them where she had last been seen… They didn’t take any interest in it. She was a medium priority, she was never a high priority because of her drug use,” said Mel in an interview with the Huffington Post.
Jan’s body was found 11 months later together with that of Henriett Szucs, a 34-year-old sex worker from Hungary. They were found in their killer’s freezer in a flat in Canning Town. Szucs had vanished in August 2016, more than three years earlier, and was never reported missing in either the UK nor in Hungary. During the trial against Zahid Younis, who was later convicted for the two murders, prosecutor Duncan Penny described the two women as living “somewhat chaotic lives.”
Having a “transient lifestyles” – usually some combination of homelessness, sleeping rough, substance abuse, and sex work – is common among people who go missing. But recent studies have proved how such cases are often dismissed by police forces and categorised as low or medium risk despite the missing person’s obvious vulnerabilities.
Katy Griffith, programme lead at Fulfilling Lives, an organisation that supports people experiencing multiple disadvantages in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, says that social workers across different services have noticed how hard it is to report their clients missing. Griffith used to support a young woman who was also a sex worker. “I knew her really well and I knew that sometimes she would disappear for a few days. She would be holed up in a crack house somewhere or she would be off doing something, but then she would always come back. That time, I hadn’t seen her for two weeks; it was really unusual to have no contact, no sign of her. I checked other services, they hadn’t seen her. So, I called the police, explaining my role and who I was, I said I was reporting one of my clients missing. They took some details, but as soon as they heard she was a drug user and sex worker, they said that due to the kind of chaotic nature of her life, they wouldn’t accept a missing person’s report.”
Griffith stayed on the phone for 40 minutes, trying to convince the police officer to take the case seriously, but says they were just dismissive. “They said she would probably just turn up… It’s just disowning the lifestyle of these women.”
Joe Apps, researcher in Social Work, conducted a series of interviews with police officers and missing people national unit staff to better understand the relationship between vulnerability, institutional invisibility, and missingness. Dave, a police constable who took part in App’s study, said: “If it’s a missing three-year-old child, that would become the priority. If it’s missing drug user, that wouldn’t, and you could see the difference in how that was dealt with… not so much resources and no-one gripped the job up.”
Missing persons cases are ranked according to threat, harm and risk. But Apps’s study reveals how this box-ticking exercise fails to account for the complexities of people’s needs, especially when experiencing the vulnerabilities associated with a transient lifestyle. Fiona Gabbert, the director of the Forensic Psychology Unit at Goldsmiths, says: “It’s a mixture of the police being horribly underfunded and overworked due to government cuts to public services and the fact that going missing isn’t a crime.
“People with chaotic lifestyles are likely to go through periods of time where no one knows where they are, or where the people who know where they are, who might also be sex workers and drug users, might not want to have anything to do with the police.” Gabbert says that it would be vital to have groups on the ground – charities or sex workers organisations – that know what’s going on with these people’s lives and would be able to help the police with investigative leads were someone to go missing in unusual or out-of-character circumstances.
According to Griffith, part of the problem may lie in the fact that many homeless hostels have a strict 24-hour policy and would report missing anyone who has not checked in during that time. “They’re reporting women missing quite regularly. So, when you get somebody else saying, ‘this person is missing’, they might have had four other people calling about them in the past. So, it’s more about convincing them that you actually know this person and know this is not her usual pattern.”
The case of Alloura Wells, a transgender black woman, sex worker and drug addict, who went missing in Toronto, Canada, and whose body remained unidentified for four months despite her family reporting her missing, shed light on how structural inequalities and systemic bias against marginalised communities affect the likelihood for some missing people to be found. Police “risk assessment procedures” and “grading systems” identify a whole section of society as somehow “problematic”, “troublesome” or “low status” – the rough sleepers, the drug addicts and alcoholics, the sex workers, those involved in criminal activity. “Calls for service from these groups are likely to be seen as ‘rubbish’: unworthy of attention, difficult to deal with and likely to be the fault of the complainant themselves,” writes Apps.
“When people are making decisions, they quite often draw on the information and stereotypes they immediately have at hand,” says Gabbert. “If the police know this person has been missing before or they think ‘you’ve brought it on yourself, you’re the problem’, all of this paired with low sympathy and low empathy, this feeds into their decision [on what to prioritise].”
Marginalised missing people are missing twice: in policy and in life. Seemingly ungrievable and undeserving, these people cannot be reported as missing because they were never acknowledged as not-missing in the first place. Terms such as “transient lifestyle” and “chaotic lives” seem to suggest these people are at a point of their existence where little can be done to help them. “They said she would just show up,” says Griffith. “But as it turned out, she was in an abusive relationship. There was coercive control and physical violence. He had control over her benefits, her drugs, he wouldn’t let her go outside to see other people…”. Luckily she managed to escape without police help.
The woman Griffith supported is not the first sex worker to go missing; a lot of them are later found dead, victims of assault or murder. “They’re an at-risk group. The police needs to take them going missing more seriously.”