New Delhi, February 19 IPS officer Simala Prasad, in her new book, “She Goes Missing,” examines the disappearance of “thousands of minor girls” every year, while looking at the role of law enforcement and the failure of society to “notice, question, or act”.
Currently posted as Senior Superintendent of Police, Railways, Jabalpur, Prasad investigates the socio-psychological, cultural, and systematic factors that push young girls out of their homes and into invisibility, publisher Om Books International said in a statement.
“Unlike conventional crime narratives, ‘She Goes Missing’ refuses to reduce missing girls to statistics or episodic incidents… It challenges familiar explanations such as elopement, rebellion, or ‘bad choices’, exposing how emotional neglect, gendered conditioning, fear, coercion, and institutional apathy converge to erase young lives,” they said.
Based on true incidents, the book aims to reveal how disappearances are rarely sudden acts but “the end result of repeated silences, ignored warnings, and normalised injustice”.
“I hope this book serves as a call to action, urging us to look beyond mere statistics and into the lives and futures of these young individuals. By illuminating the factors that contribute to girls going missing and exploring avenues for rehabilitation, I aim to equip readers with knowledge and insight to approach these issues with sensitivity and informed compassion,” Prasad writes in the book.
Backed by her own professional experience in policing, Prasad also delivers an institutional critique, examining how law enforcement and administrative systems “often respond inadequately”.
“Each girl who goes missing is a story of vulnerability, shaped by a complex interplay of social, economic, and cultural pressures. And while our existing systems have made strides, there remains a pressing need for a more profound, empathetic approach that can only from truly understanding why these young girls vanish,” the author writes.
Prasad gives the example of a missing girl case compared to the murder of a woman in a village where she was stationed early in her career.
While the murder incident received complete attention of the police force, and local print and electronic media, the case involving the disappearance of the 15-year-old girl was summed up with a sentence in the morning crime briefing.
“I was flummoxed by this stark dichotomy: the case was heinous, yet it was not treated as heinous. We failed to acknowledge its gravity. And by ‘we’, I mean every stakeholder – myself included – the police, and society at large,” she writes in the book.
Prasad questioned herself for “behaving with such complacency” just days into her posting.
The indifference of a colleague and the questions that kept erupting in her mind after going through the files was “enough to harden my resolve”.
As she goes on to explore the reasons why minor girls go missing in the book, Prasad notes that the disappearances are “not simply acts of rebellion or impulsive decisions made in distress; they are symptoms of deeper societal fractures”.
“Real change begins when we acknowledge that to protect these young lives, we must reshape the world they live in. We must offer them not just safety, but a space to grow, to express, and to define themselves outside the narrow confines of societal expectations,” she writes.
The book, priced at Rs 395, is available on online and offline bookstores.