MPM35 - Project Proposal

It is normal for me to grab a newspaper before every trip downtown Toronto, or to drive behind a truck, or even pass by a street post with a piece of white paper with two of the most horrifying words, “Missing Child”. It becomes frightening how normal it is to see a missing ad for a child and then how quickly those children are forgotten. When a child first goes missing, the police, media, and community are involved to help the grieving family search for their child. As time goes on, the involvement slowly decreases and leaves the family to continue searching alone.
The data project that I want to create is going to be based on missing children in Canada. It is something I feel that people read about and feel empathy, but not something people take the time to look into and become aware of. I was inspired by Chris Jordan’s statistical portraits in which he provides Americans with statistics from their own society that people were never aware of, or never took the time to recognize. These stats are everyday occurrences and problems that go unnoticed until he brings them to the people’s attention. This is the same effect I want to create with my research.
I plan to collect my data from various resourceful missing children sites which consist of statistics of missing children in Canada. I will be collecting data from 1990-2009 which will include numerous missing children cases; missing and found boy and girls. It will also be split into other categories about reasons for disappearance. For example, stranger abduction, parental abduction, runaway, unknown, wandered off, accidental, and other. I want to include names and photos of all the children I find during my research and organize them on some kind of graph according to gender, year of disappearance, and a reason for disappearance.
Through this project and my statistics found, I hope to raise awareness of the current situation with missing children in Canada.