This included grooming and exploitative relationships which accounted for 77 victims

This included “grooming” and exploitative relationships, which accounted for 77 victims. Four offences involved contact initiated over the internet.Just over 60 per cent of the children were recovered within 24 hours of being taken. There was no information as to when the remaining 25 victims were recovered.In a fifth of the cases the motive was clearly sexual, although researchers believe this is an underestimate.The biggest rise during the past year was in failed attempted abduction by strangers. Three-quarters were white.In 155 cases of child abduction, resulting in 173 victims, there existed some form of relationship between the victim and the offender. The detection rate for child abductions fell from 50 per cent in the year to April 2002 to 37 per cent the following year.Police identified a suspect in only 13 per cent of the attempted abductions by strangers, and in 54 per cent of successful abductions. In total there were 445 child victims of attacks by strangers.The sharp rise has been partly attributed to new police recording systems.

But Home Office researchers admit that the rise from 583 abduction cases in 2001-02 to 846 cases in 2002-03 “may provide a truer reflection of the extent of child abduction” Children’s charity groups reacted with alarm. A spokesman for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said: “This increase is very worrying. But we must all keep the threat of danger to children by strangers in context. The greatest danger to children still comes from people they know.”The research shows that child snatching is still an extremely rare crime.

Sixty-eight children were successfully abducted by strangers in 2002-03, 9 per cent of the total cases The average age of the victim was 10; about half were girls. Child abductions and attempted abductions in England and Wales have risen in the past year by 45 per cent to a record 846 offences, police figures indicate.
More than half of the cases involved abduction by strangers, challenging the widely held belief that most cases are “tug-of-love” battles between parents. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said that they had passed on to the family everything they knew about his possible whereabouts.The return of Monir Ali’s three friends to Tipton will give the family an invaluable opportunity to gain first-hand information about the events that led to his disappearance.”I just want to know what really happened so that the speculation will end,” says Montaz, who is never without the family’s only surviving picture of his brother.. Why didn’t they say these things at the time? Why did they wait until they went to Pakistan?”The local British National Party (BNP) also used these stories to stir up racial hatred by distributing literature denouncing activities organised by the Tipton Muslims.A focus of their campaign is Monir Ali’s sister, Syeda Khatun, a Labour councillor who has been awarded an MBE for her work on behalf Asian women. The BNP referred to her brother as a terrorist in order to secure her resignation from the council.Mrs Khatun, 34, one of only two Bangladeshi councillors in Britain, was forced to defend her brother, denying that he was involved in terrorism.She too is very troubled by the silence surrounding her brother’s fate and waits anxiously for the return of his three friends.But there is a suspicion among some members of Monir’s family that the Foreign Office could do more to help find him.”We have had very little information from the Foreign Office about him,” complains Montaz.This may be because there is so little known.

Forget the indistinguishable Ant and Dec, the boy next door and the boy next door to him. Essential to most successful double acts is a combustible contrast of physique and personality, set off against a strong, almost conjugal interdependence. This is true all the way from Laurel and Hardy to The Right Size, the duo who took the West End and Broadway by storm with The Play What I Wrote, their meta-tribute show to another pair of not-so-easily confused clowns, Morecambe and Wise.
No one pushed this convention of difference and mutual reliance to a more grotesque comic extreme than Samuel Beckett in his 1957 play Endgame. Here, it’s no mere case of fat-and-pompous vs thin-and-gormless. The strangely symbiotic twosome at the centre consists of Hamm, a blind tyrant who cannot stand up, and Clov, his complementary – though far from complimentary – crippled servant who cannot sit down. In this piece, the binary principle seems to have gone quietly berserk.