Romanian Center for Missing & Sexually Exploited Children

The calls received by the Operational Department of Focus are operated at the level of the Call Center Department, which provides the permanent operation of the single emergency number for reporting cases of missing children (116000). The permanent emergency hotline represents the first contact of the Center with parents, children, authorities and the general public.

During workdays, the call-center operators are organized in two shifts, covering the intervals 08.00 - 16.00 and 14.00 - 22.00. Together with the call center operators also work the volunteers of the association, who assist the work of the organization staff in this department.

Over the night, weekends and public holidays, the calls are rerouted to a private company, with whom our Center has been cooperating for 3 years, on the basis of the agreement and working methodology established with Focus.

Although in the above mentioned period, the reports sent to the Call Center are rerouted towards another company, the case managers provide a 24-hour readiness service. Moreover, for ensuring a unitary intervention, on the basis of the agreement concluded between Focus and this company, the same minimal working procedures used by Focus team are observed during weekends and public holidays.

The Call Center Department uses a special soft that allows the recording of all the conversations carried on the permanent emergency line 116000, so that depending on the case to be able to transfer it to our partners (mainly, the police and the social services) all the details that FOCUS obtained for each case.

The FOCUS team that operates the hotline is specially trained for tackling with professionalism the following types of reports:

• Missing-child reports;
• Reports of sightings;
• Missing-adult reports;
• Requests for technical assistance (e.g. information concerning the organization and operation of FOCUS or other general information which don’t fall within the ambit of FOCUS).

All the call-center operators which intake the reports have a bachelor’s degree in social work/psychology and they have also benefitted from a special training.
Parents, third parties (relatives of the child, neighbours) or other public authorities (police, general directions for social assistance and child protection) report the disappearance of a child to FOCUS.

The call-center operator finds as much information as possible about the child and the circumstances in which the disappearance occurred. Moreover, the operator assists and guides the family of the child to submit a written report, as quickly as possible, to the police department which has jurisdiction in the area where the child disappeared (if the disappearance hasn’t been reported yet). It must always be established whether the legal representative has given his consent for disseminating the photo and the characteristics of the missing child. In this respect, the operators try to obtain a very recent and clear photo of the child.

Total number of calls recorded on the permanent emergency line has grown significantly during the years 2009 and 2010 reaching to 109,602 in 2010 and 34,620 in 2009 compared with 2395 in 2008 and with 881 received calls during 2007 due to the launch of 116000 phone number. The effective operation of this number is performed by Romanian Center for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children-FOCUS starting with 25th May 2009 and it represents the single European hotline for reporting missing children being free of charge from any fixed or mobile network.