The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Misc abductions Select a topic - - - - - - - - Home Searches AFU FAQ - - - - - - - - AFU Animals Books Celebrities Classic Collegiate Death Disney Drugs Food GIF Language Legal Medical Misc Movies Politics Products Religion Science Sex Songs TV - - - - - - - - Other sites

From: am908@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Jackie Laderoute)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Missing Kids
Date: 18 Nov 1996 05:03:18 GMT

In the previous stuff I posted about WalMart's "Code Adam" programme, I expressed some skepticism about the stats provided by the Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

While I am certainly not downplaying either the worth of the "Code Adam" system, nor trivialising the very real pain of the families involved, it did lead me to do some research.

Which led me to a simply terrific webpage, bound to appeal to those AFU denizens with a broad strak of cynicism:

http://www.proxima.com:8080/stats/

This is the homepage of the Statistical Assessment Service, an organisation whose sole purpose in life appears to be trying to get to the bottom of the very dramatic statistics bandied about by special interest groups of all stripes.

Here's what they had to say about missing kids:

Where Are All the Missing Children?

May 25 is Missing Children's Day, an occasion that is annually marked by broad bipartisan support for greater attention to the issue of abducted children. Last year, Senate Majority leader Bob Dole, Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle, House Majority leader Dick Armey, and House Minority leader Dick Gephardt are all appeared with Attorney General Janet Reno in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) at a ceremony to raise public awareness of this problem. The recent brutal murder of a child in Texas has refocused attention on the tragedy of abducted children.

But how many American children are actually abducted each year? Numbers as high as one or two million are routinely cited in the media. John Walsh, host of the television show America's Most Wanted, has testified before Congress about this issue, and has placed the annual total number of abducted children at more than 1.5 million, adding that "we don't have a clue what happens to over 50,000 of them," and that "this country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped and strangled children." Mr. Walsh, who has undergone the tragedy of his own son Adam being abducted and killed in a case that received national attention, joined Janet Reno in officiating last year's ceremony.

In the 1980's a mini-hysteria gripped the nation over the cause of missing children: milk cartons, direct mail campaigns, federal legislation, the creation of the Congressionally-mandated NCMEC, even the implanting of radio transponders and ID numbers on the teeth of elementary school children, so that their bodies could be identified in the event that they were abducted and murdered.

        Child Find now says that the actual number of abducted children is
        less than 600 a year.

When the numbers are analyzed more closely, however, the true scope of the "crisis" becomes clearer. In 1985 the Denver Post won a Pulitzer prize for its series of articles revealing the truth about the child abduction scare. Reporters Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer found that 95% of missing children are runaways (most of whom come home before three days) and that most of the rest are child custody disputes. Griego and Kilzer tracked down the sources of the abduction inflation: advocacy groups and a too-eager media.

"There's a tremendous scare on," said Louis McCagg, director of Child Find, the nation's oldest and best-known missing children organization. Once a strong supporter of the 50,000 estimate, Child Find now says that the actual number is less than 600 per year.

"Their figures are impossible," said Bill Carter of the FBI's public information bureau. "More than 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War. Almost everyone knows someone who was killed there. The numbers I've seen >from missing child groups on abducted children range from 5,000 to 50,000.
Do you know a child who has been abducted? That should tell you something right there."

"It's sad to say, but some organizations are exaggerating the figures to make their cause seem more urgent," said John Gill, director of Children's Rights of New York. "Why, our schools should be empty if there were that many missing children."

        163,200 "family abductions" indeed sound alarming until one notes 
        that only 2% of these incidents involved "child snatching."

What is the basis for these inflated numbers? The U.S. Department of Justice issued a report in 1990 that is highly informative, but, due to a number of factors, susceptible to easy misuse. Mandated by the 1984 Missing Children's Act, the National Incidence of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) breaks down "missing" children into five categories: family abductions, non-family abductions, runaways, "thrownaways" (children who were either told to leave their homes, were abandoned or deserted, or where the child ran away and the parent or guardian made no effort to get the child back), and lost, injured, or otherwise missing.

Here's where the potential for confusion begins. Each category is further broken down into "broad scope" numbers, and "policy focal" numbers. Broad scope defines the problem the way the affected families might define it. This definition includes both serious and minor episodes "that may nonetheless be alarming to the participants." The policy focal approach, by contrast, defines the problem from the point of view of the police or other social agencies; this category "is restricted to episodes of a more serious nature," where, but for some intervention, the child may be endangered or at risk of harm. In other words, the report gives two sets of numbers, one that reflects subjective impressions, and another, "serious" set of numbers on which policy can be based. Needless to say, in every category the broad scope number is significantly higher - as much as 35 times higher - than the more important policy focal number.

Furthermore, even the policy focal numbers get a bit sketchy when one takes a closer look at the definitions. For instance, 163,200 "family abductions" are recorded - which does indeed sound alarming until one notes that only 2% of these incidents involved "child snatching" from school or day care centers, that half of these incidents lasted less than a week, and that in only 17% of these cases did the parent or guardian not know where the "abducted" child was.

        Are we really helping combat this problem by overstating it by 
        a factor of hundreds and whipping parents around the country
        into a frenzy of suspicion?

We can see this type of distortion again when we look at the category of runaway children. The shocking broad scope number of 450,700 pares down to 133,500 more tangible incidents. Still alarming, though, until we factor in that two thirds of these are sixteen or seventeen year olds (many "running away" with boyfriends or girlfriends), and that nearly half return home within two days. Again, only about a quarter of the parents or guardians involved did not know the whereabouts of the "runaways."

The total of 59,200 "thrownaway" children provokes images of desperate orphans tossed out onto cruel streets, or babies being abandoned in dumpsters. The fact is that 84% of "thrownaway" children are sixteen or seventeen years old, and 59% of these incidents involve the teenager leaving after an argument, usually over house rules or friends. 68% returned within two weeks.

The words "lost, injured, or missing" strike terror into the heart of any parent, and a total of 438,200 children annually falling into this category would certainly seem to constitute a national crisis. But, again, attention to terminology and methodology reveals the far less chilling reality. This category includes children missing for as little as "a few minutes." Nearly three quarters were found within 24 hours, in 79% of these cases the child suffered no physical harm, and these incidents were deemed sufficiently serious to alert the police only 32% of the time.

The most tragic cases, of course, are stranger abductions. This is, ostensibly, what the entire law enforcement and public awareness effort is focussed on, and what most frightens parents. NISMART numbers give a range of between 3200 and 4600 nonfamily abductions of children annually. But even these low numbers (compared with 1.5 million) are worth scrutinizing.

The definition used here applies when a child is abducted for a period of more than one hour, or the coerced and unauthorized taking of a child into a building, a vehicle or a distance of more than twenty feet, or the child is lured for the purpose of committing a crime. Almost half of the children involved were 13 or older. Ransom is requested in only 8% of these cases. Even in these nonfamily abductions, only 62% of the perpetrators were strangers. Ben Ermini, director of case management at NCMEC, has said that within this group there are "between 200 and 300 cases" that can be commonly understood as very serious, i.e. where the abductor takes the child a notable distance and possibly kills the child.

However horrific even this number is (again, a far cry from 50,000), and whatever devastating effect such terrible crimes may have on the families of the victims, are we really helping combat this problem by overstating it by a factor of hundreds and whipping parents around the country into a frenzy of suspicion and paranoia? Mark Warr, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in the study of fear of crime, was recently quoted in the Los Angeles Times about his personal experience with this phenomenon:

"Several years ago, when one of my children was in elementary school, the police came by and wanted each of the kids to participate in this program where they put an ID number on the teeth of the children. This was a national program. And the point was, if you're ever abducted and murdered, we can identify your body. Now what in hell are we doing to the children of the United States, teaching them something like that? The probability of being abducted and murdered is less than a million to one, literally. And yet we're scaring the hell out of thousands and thousands of our kids. So some of the things people do out of fear aree very harmful. To me it's even questionable whether parents ought to ingrain in their children a fear of strangers. What happens is we end up with a society in which nobody trusts each other."

Jackie "by the numbers" Laderoute