Lucie Blackman"Faced with practical hurdles like language barriers, red tape and spiraling lawyers' fees, many parents lack the means to stop their child's case fading into obscurity. Many more still lack the means to mount a campaign in the first place".

Reuters news agency report - July 2000

Since the disappearance of Lucie Blackman in Japan in 2000, The Lucie Blackman Trust has assisted other families of missing relatives and has now established Missing Abroad to provide the unique expertise, practical help, advice and support gained by Lucie’s family.

Drawing on this experience, Missing Abroad is the first point of contact for families suddenly confronted with the unthinkable, providing access to both knowledge and, where possible, finance to ensure that every effort can be made to find the person as quickly as possible. Since its inception in mid 2008, Missing Abroad has successfully completed a number of cases.

We arranged for the family of a murder victim to fly to Fiji to bring home the victim’s autistic son and flew home the victim for burial in the UK. We continue to work with the family to help with the trial of the alleged killer.

We took a call late one night from a girl who had escaped from being forced into an arranged marriage in South Africa, who found herself stranded with no way of getting home. We flew her back from Cape Town the following morning.

We have re-united families who had people missing as far afield as Thailand and Zimbabwe.

Throughout 2008 we have also created and operated several telephone hotlines worldwide, collecting evidence and sightings of missing people. We received 41 individual sightings in one night on the Lindsay Hawker hotline after our appeal for information in Japan. Lindsay's alleged killer was arrested in November 2009, but we continue to operate similar hotlines for other missing persons, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

We helped repatriate the body of a murder victim from Brazil and a road accident victim in Germany, so that their families could bury them at home. Our work has taken in several countries and continents, and we continually give advice to people who find themselves in trouble and their families all around the world. People like you and me, who think it won’t happen to them.

We can only do this with your help – we rely entirely on charitable donations and receive no statutory funding.