Webinar Recording - Growing with the absence of a parent as a child

How does a child deal with having a parent missing? How does the concept of absence evolve with time? How to live with the “double absence” of the person missing physically and of the “psychologically absent” caregiver or sibling. How to support children specifically? On Thursday 15 October 2020, the ICRC Missing Persons Project talked about these questions with Marcela Granados Ballesteros from Colombia, Hiba Alhamed from Syria, and Sivakumar Thushanini from Sri Lanka - three young women whose fathers went missing when they were children and today chose to have an active role in the search, as accompaniers or by joining local civil society organizations' activities and campaigns. The webinar offered a space to present and discuss the main challenges of growing with a missing parent, identifying common threads and sharing experiences across different geographic contexts. We discussed the individual impact on children or teen-agers when a parent goes missing, the impact within the family, and what can help to support or accompany them in confronting this situation.