Background: Children in residential care face heightened risks of sexual and criminal exploitation. Going missing from care is often treated as a key indicator of vulnerability, yet it remains unclear whether these episodes reflect only risk or also ongoing patterns of exploitation-related harm.
Objective: This study examined how worker-identified sexual, criminal, and combined exploitation concerns intersect with missing episodes in residential care.
Participants and setting: Administrative data were drawn from four community service organisations participating in the Disrupting Child Exploitation project in Victoria, Australia. The dataset comprised 942 monthly records relating to 226 children and young people in residential care.
Methods: Each record captured worker-identified concerns about sexual and criminal exploitation, classification of exploitation evidence using a three-level safeguarding framework, numbers of missing nights, and counts of recorded care incidents. Quantitative analyses compared exploitation concern profiles and missing episodes across two nine-month reporting periods between 2023 and 2024.
Results: Statistically significant shifts were observed in exploitation concern profiles, with sexual exploitation concerns declining and criminal and combined concerns becoming prominent. Missing nights rose across all exploitation concern profiles, whereas recorded care incidents decreased.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that missing episodes may reflect not only vulnerability, but also cumulative and overlapping patterns of exploitation-related harm. These results offer an alternative interpretation of children going missing within residential care as part of sustained exploitation trajectories, rather than as isolated risk indicators.
