Dispelled kidnap myths do little to allay parents' fears
Zyola T. Mix grew up in the 1980s hearing warnings about stranger danger, seeing milk cartons
bearing the faces of the lost and feeling "abject fear of the white van" — because news accounts of children gone missing invariably seemed to include that haunting detail.
So when her daughter's school offered an identification kit that included fingerprints and other tools to help find a missing child, Mix gladly paid the $25 fee. She feels
safe at home but worries about losing track of an active youngster in crowded places.
"Not so much that somebody will reach out and take off with her," says the 39-year-old Denver mom. "I'm
more concerned that she'll wander away and be picked up by somebody who has other purposes. Until she's old enough to fight back and say no, I feel I need to be prepared in the event something happens."
That abundance of caution hints at one lingering effect from the now decades-old national frenzy over missing kids, a supposed epidemic defined in the '80s by shocking statistics and some chilling high-profile cases that touched parents' most primal fear.
But estimates of stranger abductions circulated at the time glossed over the reality that about 95 percent of missing-child reports were on runaways, while most of the rest involved custody disputes.
The Denver Post's stories by reporters Louis Kilzer and Diana Griego in 1985 debunked the "national paranoia" surrounding missing kids, won a Pulitzer Prize and led to changes in the way organizations approached the issue.
A quarter-century later, authorities have a more clearly defined,
technologically
equipped and well-organized response to such cases. And yet, some experts say, parental
anxiety over child safety has only intensified.
Cellphones now provide kids and parents a crucial line of communication and protection. The Internet arrived, both for better and worse: Tools such as sex-offender
databases give parents a heads-up, but
online predators present a new threat.
Law enforcement operates under revamped rules that dictate swifter action on missing kids. Every state has developed a
missing children's clearinghouse for cases. Systems like Amber Alert helpfully spread the word on a child abduction in minutes to highway signs and even your cellphone, but also subtly tap into broader parental concerns.
"Missing" mostly runaways
Statistically, reports of missing kids have plummeted — both in Colorado and nationally. Efforts to more accurately classify the cases have made some progress, but organizations from law enforcement to advocacy groups still put the largest, though sometimes misleading, numbers front and center.
"Emphasizing missing children is a holdover from that (1980s) period and not the best way to approach these problems," says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children
Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
"The largest portion of the so-called missing children issue is runaway kids. To
lump them into a problem that's largely a police problem has always been a question of whether you're mixing apples and oranges. They got lumped together in part because they gave heft to the numbers."
In the '80s, those weighty numbers gave political clout to an emerging issue. Even in decline, they remain attention-grabbers.
According to the
Colorado Bureau of Investigation, 11,695 missing-child reports were filed in the state last year — an average of about 32 a day. An annual Missing Children's Week in June highlighted those figures and urged parents to educate kids about preventing child abductions.
But authorities also note that 99 percent of those Colorado reports involved runaways, lost children or
family abductions.
That deep-seated parental fear — abduction of a child by a stranger — remains a very rare occurrence.
"Typically, we see more cases of predators on the Internet luring kids," says Kristina Bomba, a CBI criminal intelligence analyst and state Amber Alert coordinator. "They may be viewed as runaways, but they're lured like an abduction. That's what we see more than a stranger grabbing someone from the street."
Since Amber Alerts went into effect with 2002 legislation, Bomba says, only four cases have been true stranger abductions where the intent was to harm the child.
According to CBI figures through 2009, the number of missing-children reports has declined from the previous year's total in 11 of the past 13 years. The number peaked in 1996, with 19,950 reports filed, but now stands at its lowest level in at least 20 years.
A national study of 1999 data under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice — the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children — went to new lengths to more precisely define the circumstances surrounding missing kids.
Among the findings:
• Nearly 800,000 children were reported missing.
• An estimated 58,200 children were victims of non-family abduction, which included perpetrators who were friends or acquaintances as well as strangers.
• Included among the non-family abductions were an estimated 115 "stereotypical kidnappings" — the most serious category defined as abductions by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was transported 50 miles or more, detained overnight, held for ransom or with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.
Crimes against kids decline
Researchers are preparing to replicate the study to update those numbers, Finkelhor says. He adds that all crimes against children are down substantially — by about half — since the late 1980s.
And while he allows that media don't contribute to the statistical
confusion as much as they did in the 1980s, parents remain "quite concerned" about the risk of stranger abduction.
"It's gotten a boost in the last five years in the anxiety about Internet predators and the sense that people can make
contact with your kid online and potentially lure them away," Finkelhor said. "So that 'stranger danger' fear has gotten embodied in a new form. It has a new life."
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, created by
federal law in 1984, came about after a string of highly publicized cases dating to the unsolved 1979 abduction of 6-year-old Etan Patz off a New York City street on his way to school.
President and chief executive Ernie Allen feared that The Post's 1985 stories would send the message that there was no problem, just hype. But now he says they legitimately questioned the attention given extreme cases and led to new research that has more precisely defined the issues.
Today, the link between child abduction and sexual crimes has become better understood. Threats to a child have been shown to be less likely to come from "stranger danger" than family and friends.
Sex offender registries, which were few when NCMEC opened its doors, now exist in every state and feature online access. The Internet also has changed the way both individuals and law enforcement can search for missing kids.
"But we're dealing with an array of issues that were unthinkable in 1984," Allen says.
NCMEC staff have reviewed 40 million child pornography images — 12 million this year alone — in efforts to identify and locate the victims.
Since the 1999 incidence study, law enforcement statistics show the annual number of missing-child reports to be "moving toward 600,000," Allen notes — a 25 percent decline in little more than a decade.
"The difference between the capacity, the preparedness, the policy in place, the law underlining this situation today as opposed to 1984 is like alpha and omega," Allen says. "Law enforcement is responding seriously and swiftly in these cases. As a result, more missing children come home safely today than at any time in American history."
National statistics put that figure at better than 99 percent.
But experts like Bob Livingstone, a San Francisco-based psychotherapist who deals with traumatized kids and adults, says numbers provide small comfort and attitudes haven't changed much since the '80s.
"Everybody is fearful — if anything, it's escalated since then," he says, echoing an article he wrote on the negative effects of parental hypervigilance. "You can show people statistics 'til the cows come home, but they're still frightened. They don't want to let kids out of their sight."
In the 1980s, there also were larger societal issues in play, says Paula Fass, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose book, "Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America," explored more than 100 years of child kidnapping.
Twenty-five years ago, America had just begun to see more women enter the job market, which led to growing concerns about their children's welfare — with child abduction representing the emotional apex of those anxieties.
While falling crime statistics, as well as health and safety advances, now frame the world as a safer place, Fass sees parents viewing it through a different lens.
"As our children have become safer, we've become more panicked about losing them," she says. "We invest so much in the belief that our children will survive us that we're unable to maintain any sense of risk in our sensibilities about them."
Safety vs. independence
Lenore Skenazy allowed her son to experience risk — and found herself excoriated as a horrible mother.
The New York-based columnist turned author and public speaker addresses the issue of overprotective parenting through a blog titled Free-Range Kids. That venture grew out of what she thought would be an innocuous column about dropping off her 9-year-old son at a location in Manhattan and allowing him to find his way home on public transportation — an adventure he'd begged her to let him try.
The experience left him exhilarated and empowered.
It left many readers outraged that Skenazy would expose her child to such dangers. The backlash launched her on the speaking circuit as a counterbalance to what she sees as the overheated response to safety concerns exacerbated by media reports surrounding a relative few tragic cases as well as "CSI"-style crime dramas.
She says that anxiety triggered by worst-case scenarios forces parents to make a trade-off that they never stop to calculate.
"The illusion of complete and utter safety," she says, "is traded off against independence, health, a higher chance of getting fat or diabetic, all this stuff that doesn't make news the way an Amber Alert does."
Finkelhor isn't sure that a little overreaction is so bad, especially since kids can be exposed to a variety of dangers besides abduction.
"Look," he says, "if we have reduced crimes against kids by 50 percent in the last 15-20 years, and maybe overreaction has been a part of that, I'd say it's an acceptable cost."
While the heightened concern of the mid-'80s has shifted shapes, some themes remain. Child identification kits remain at least fairly popular. Businesses and organizations still offer them — sometimes for free, sometimes for a charge — and encourage parents to update them frequently with photos and to keep cheek swabs or locks of hair on hand for DNA evidence.
Even stories that ultimately end well, like the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Utah, continue to make real the threat of abduction.
"I know on a couple of occasions, I've woken up because I think, 'Is the door locked?' " says Sandra Hagen Solin, a Denver mother who obtained a child-identity kit at a safety fair. "Someone could come in and swipe my son. It has happened. So those anecdotes certainly factor into my thinking about the possibility of it occurring."
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