[1] They work with the information they have – if they know just the age, they assume that the person’s behaviors will be typical of that age. If you want them to use different assumptions, you need to give them specific information.

[2] Just saying that a child (or adult) is “autistic” is not very helpful because of both the wide variation in “autistic” behaviors and the even wider variation in SAR team members’ understanding of autism. BE SPECIFIC. If the missing person is afraid of dogs, let the team know – if they love dogs, that information is also useful. Note: this applies with ANY search and rescue, whether the victim is autistic or not.

[3] Communicate with the SAR team supervisor directly, not with a police officer or team member. Information is lost with each “link” in the chain of communication, so going to the “boss” is best. If you can’t go to or call the supervisor, write everything down and give a copy to whoever you can. In fact, you should write it down and give it to them anyway – even if you have a face-to-face meeting.

[4] In my area, the SAR team has a lot of experience looking for demented/Alzheimer’s disease patients. In some ways, this experience should serve them well if they have to search for an autistic person because many of the same problems – fearfulness, inability to communicate, etc. – are similar. If the SAR team you are working with seems to have a problem understanding what autism is all about, tell them that it is similar (for their purposes) to Alzheimer’s disease.

[5] For people who are at a high risk of getting lost (whether they are autistic or not), there are a number of radio beacons available that can be used (by the parent or family member) to track down the wearer and there are even units which periodically transmit an ID number and the GPS coordinates of the wearer (one of these is small enough to put on a cat – I’ve done it with our cat). If the person gets out of range of the parent/family member’s receiver, it can still be picked up by airborne searchers.

Hope that helps,

Prometheus

As I say, I am not an expert in this at all. I will say that a couple of the comments above resulted from a discussion with a search and rescue person a few years back. That person noted that the team made some assumptions based on age that were not valid.

1 – Because mom said “don’t talk to strangers”
2 – They are afraid parents will be mad
3 – They get hypothermic and confused
4 – They are afraid of the search team’s uniforms and dogs (if any)
5 – They crawl into a reasonably sheltered spot and fall asleep exhausted and don’t hear us.

The Western US’s wilderness SAR teams are mostly volunteer, with sheriff teams doing the briefing and assigning areas … and they DO ask about that stuff. I think it’s on a form they fill out.

I’m part of a search and rescue team in the UK and just wanted to say I’ll be passing this information on to our training officer.

It’s worth noting that both in the UK and in North America SAR organisations collect statistics of the people they look for, where they were found and try to analyse them to make better predictions about where to look next time a ‘similar’ person is missing. Obviously everyone is different, but patterns can be recognised that really help when planning a search, deciding which areas to check first, how far to draw a perimeter and so on.

As volunteers, it’s nice to know we’re appreciated…