Have been browsing the UK Missing Persons website since seeing the link here - so many unidentifiable young males that appear to have suffered fairly miserable deaths, and many older males who had evidently fallen on tough times, it really clobbered me.
We hear so much about abused and murdered women/girls, which feature heavily in the news (as they should), but looking through these often faceless galleries of lost souls and random shoes made me consider how the plight of desperate and ruined men deserve much more attention and compassion than they are given.
One poor man described as a possible vagrant found in a skip in Manchester....you wonder how some of these could have been overlooked. So many of them sound suspicious, and I dare say without evidence of foul play, there's not much to go on without identity. A few people washed ashore too, and more than one immigrant having fallen from a van only to be hit by a passing vehicle. I would imagine the majority of these individuals were a combination of desperate, poor, in deep trouble, mentally distressed and alone.
It doesn't bear thinking about how these people's lives panned out.
Edited to add: Certain details confuse me, such as a middle aged man with a newspaper and his door keys found in woodland having suffered a heart attack. This was in the early 90's, yet no one in all this time has missed him. It makes me think about how easy it might be to literally 'fall off the radar'. But one would surely hope that his home could/would have been located, and at least one neighbour able to identify him. Some of them are quite baffling.
