I’m old enough to remember, in 1978, the distressing disappearance in Devon of 13-year-old Genette Tate.
Also the vanishing of London estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in 1986.
It is also nearly 20 years since Blackpool teenager Charlene Downes went missing on the night of Saturday, November 1, 2003.
As recently as two years ago, police were urging anyone with information to come forward.
North Yorkshire police are also still hunting for York chef Claudia Lawrence who disappeared in March 2009.
And the hunt for Madeleine McCann goes on, 15 years after the three-year-old went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal.
All of these cases led the national news agenda.
Rightly so. To this day there are loved ones still devoting their lives to the search for clues and for answers.
Even ahead of the upsetting conclusions to the disappearances of Libby Squire in 2019 and Sarah Everard two years later, we were all repeatedly flooded with appeals and asked to remain vigilant. We wanted to help.
Sarah in particular continues to lead important conversations around the safety of women.
Which makes the glacial pace of the search for Owami Davies, a Black woman from Essex, all the more concerning.
The 24-year-old student nurse has now been missing for six weeks, yet the average person wouldn’t know who she was.
My Daily Mirror colleague Melissa Sigodo is one of a handful of national reporters actively pursuing the case.
Too few others are.
Melissa has done a fine job highlighting the questions that have led to the Independent Office of Police Conduct investigating the handling of the case.
Officers had contact with Owami on July 6, the day she was reported missing. Their body-worn cameras show her looking dishevelled.
Why was all this not visible on the official missing person database until the next day?
And why on earth was the wrong picture used in the police appeals to find her? That is simply unforgivable.
Mina Smallman is the mother of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman – the murdered women whose bodies were found in a park in North West London two years ago.
Once details of the police’s shoddy handling of that case emerged there was a stampede to speak to her.
But Mina called out the unwillingness to help her find her daughters in the first place. “It wasn’t because I didn’t do interviews,” she said. “It was because they didn’t get the airtime.”
Carol Morgan, mum of murdered student midwife Joy Morgan, was similarly uncompromising over the lack of help she received when her 20-year-old daughter vanished three years ago.
“Why wasn’t my Black Rastafarian face on the TV doing a press conference sitting with police officers on either side?” She asked. “It’s because I was Black and I wasn’t newsworthy.”
Jebina Islam, sister of murdered primary school teacher Sabina Nessa, maintains her loved ones would have had more widespread support had they been a “normal British white family”.
In America they have a name for it: “Missing White Woman Syndrome”, a phrase coined by the late, highly-respected news anchor, Gwen Ifill.
It isn’t particularly comfortable to read or hear – nor should it be. But it remains fact. Because the cases you’ve read here are a tip of the iceberg.
There are more – far, far more.
Black people on both sides of the Atlantic now use social media to spread awareness when they need the support denied to them by police and some sections of the media.
Their loved ones’ lives depend on it.
