He received social services support as a returned trafficking victim.

He was monitored by officials from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

He had contact with law enforcement personnel.

All of these contacts involved professionals whose job it was, in various ways, to work with vulnerable young people and to verify their situations.

None of them, for an extended period, focused skeptical attention on the question of whether this was actually Nicholas Barclay.

This is partly because the family had already established the social reality of Nicholas’s return.