Various events mark 10th anniversary of Cedrika Provencher’s disappearance

MONTREAL – Ten years to the day that a young Quebec girl named Cedrika Provencher disappeared from her home and was later killed, her grandfather is trying to ensure other children aren’t the victims of similar attacks.

The young girl was just nine when she vanished in 2007 from near her home in Trois-Rivieres, halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.

More than eight years later, her remains were found in a wooded area in December 2015.

To date, there have been no arrests in her disappearance and slaying.

Cedrika’s grandfather, Henri Provencher, unveiled plans Monday to create a non-profit research centre aimed at preventing child abduction that will be linked to a foundation he helped set up in his granddaughter’s name several years ago.

The independent centre will follow up on projects of the separate Cedrika Provencher Foundation, but will be open to suggestions from other organizations or individuals interested in submitting their ideas on preventing the abuse of children.

“The foundation seeks to innovate and find new tools for prevention, intervention and research for children, and it is within this framework that we have chosen to start a new research organization,” Provencher said.

“I think it will be a rather special research centre because it will ask the public and all companies to work together in the same research centre.”

Various events were planned in her hometown to mark the anniversary of her disappearance — a family picnic, a concert and the formation of a human chain to symbolize the blocking of child predators.

Cedrika’s parents also granted interviews to the province’s major French TV networks to mark the grim date, suggesting an arrest in the case will bring true closure.

But the centre was the key announcement, with Provencher inviting the public, specialists and companies to get involved financially with the end goal of developing new tools that could help avoid having to play catch up after a disappearance occurs.

According to RCMP statistics from last year, child abductions by a stranger, as is believed to be the case in Cedrika’s disappearance, remained quite rare amid thousands of disappearances and runaway events.

And numbers provided by the Mounties show 59 per cent of disappearances involving children in 2016 were solved within the first 24 hours, with the figure climbing to 92 per cent within a week.

As for abductions that ended with a slaying, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection documented those cases.

Their figures show 155 young Canadians aged 16 and under were slain in this manner between 1970 and 2010, including 31 from Quebec.

The centre also analyzed the circumstances surrounding the abduction of those victims:

— 41 per cent occurred in the summer;

— 45 per cent occurred on a Friday or Saturday;

— 67 per cent of the cases involved the child walking or cycling to a destination such as a park or a friend’s home.

Pina Arcamone, director of the Missing Children’s Network in Quebec, said missing children figures have been stable for 30 years.

“Criminal kidnapping is still an extremely rare occurrence, and we are talking about less than one per cent of all disappearances of children here in Quebec and Canada,” she said.

But because it is so rare, it captures the public’s attention because, for a parent, it’s the worst-case scenario, she added.

— with files from Stephanie Marin and Vicky Fragasso-Marquis in Montreal.