Assisting Families of Missing or Unidentified Persons

OVC has a web forum coming up next week that might be of interest to some of you: Assisting Families with Missing or Unidentified Persons. The web forum will be held on May 19th from 2-3pm, ET. At that time, questions will be answered in real time, online. However, the session will be fully archived for later review, if you can’t make the forum itself.

“…in commemoration of National Missing Children’s Day, the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will present a Web Forum discussion with Duane Bowers, LPC, and Debra Culberson on the best practices for assisting families of missing or unidentified persons. Mr. Bowers is a therapist, educator, and author of Guiding Your Family Through Loss and Grief and A Child Is Missing: Providing Support for Families of Missing Children. He is a training consultant for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, through which he provides support to families of abducted, missing, exploited, and murdered children. The Center also deploys him as a member of Team Adam to provide crisis intervention at Amber Alert sites. Mr. Bowers also is a consultant and trainer for Team HOPE, a support network for parents of missing children. Ms. Culberson is a tireless supporter of rights for victims of domestic violence and an advocate for victims and missing persons. In 1996, Ms. Culberson’s daughter was kidnapped and murdered by her ex-boyfriend, and her remains were never found. Ms. Culberson has presented nationally and received countless awards for her activism and victim advocacy. She also has worked as an advisor on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), a free online directory of missing persons and unidentified decedent records.”