to much that the social worker wants to accomplish. The children look
forward to his reappearance with dread or with joy (for many deserters
have a way with them, decidedly, and are welcome visitors to their
children). In short, he is usually at the key point in the situation. No
plan can safely be made that leaves him out, but--there's the rub!--you
cannot include him at once for he is not to be reached, certainly not at
the outset. The discovery of the deserter's whereabouts is not only the
first but the most urgent of the problems that confront the worker who
tries to deal with a deserted family. Unless he can be found the whole
plan rests upon shifting sand.

A prompt and vigorous effort to find the absentee is therefore a first
requisite in dealing with family desertion. Unfortunately, many case
workers, having started bravely and exhausted the first crop of clues,
become discouraged and fall back on the supposition that the man is
permanently out of the scene, and that it only remains to make plans for
the family. Numberless case histories attest the unwisdom of this
assumption. It is not making an extreme statement to say that, as long
as the family remains under active care or until the missing man is
proved to be dead, the effort to find him should not be abandoned. Mr.
Carstens, in discussing this point, says:

To carry on this search persistently is the great safeguard. It is
rare when in the course of a few months the true state of affairs
will not have been revealed, though it may have been quite hidden at
the start.[18]

This is not to say that time must be spent unprofitably in going over
the same ground, or that out-of-town agencies must be badgered to
reinvestigate old clues. But the frame of mind that pigeonholes the