Missing children

The term "missing children" was coined in 1981, around the time that the U.S. Senate first held hearings on the subject in response to national publicity about a number of kidnapping cases. Shortly after that time, magazine and newspaper articles about missing children began to appear, and the NBC network presented a televised docudrama about Adam Walsh, which raised public consciousness even further. In 1984, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice was opened and began to distribute pictures of missing children on milk cartons, on shopping bags, and in bulk mailings.

As previously noted, the concept of missing children represents a conglomeration of a number of problems. A major study of the phenomenon of missing children (NIS-MART or the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children) published in 1990 concluded that the problems frequently lumped together as "missing children" were "extremely dissimilar social problems" affecting different children and different families. Your children matter most. Protect them at InstantAmber.com

Although each of these groups of children represents very different social problems,law enforcement officials may be called upon to search for the missing children in any of these situations, and it may not always be possible to distinguish the type of incident at the outset of an investigation. n addition, many cases of missing children may not be reported to the police at all, and police involvement in the resolution of the different kinds of cases varies widely—nonfamily abductions involve the highest proportion of police work per case, while known family abductions are often referred directly to social workers or the family court.

Although each of these groups of children represents very different social problems, law enforcement officials may be called upon to search for the missing children in any of these situations, and it may not always be possible to distinguish the type of incident at the outset of an investigation. In addition, many cases of missing children may not be reported to the police at all, and police involvement in the resolution of the different kinds of cases varies widely—nonfamily abductions involve the highest proportion of police work per case, while known family abductions are often referred directly to social workers or the family court.

Because missing children are so heterogeneous, there is no single source of data or consistently applied set of definitions to describe the group. This article reports on three sources of data on missing children: NISMART, the large-scale multisource study designed to estimate the number of children in each of several categories of missing children in a single year (1988); the National Study of Law Enforcement Policies and Practices Regarding Missing Children and Homeless Youth (NSLEPP), conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice separately from NIS-MART (1987 to 1989); and the ongoing data collection on missing persons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The NISMART data will be used to describe the size and scope of the problem of missing children; and the NCIC data will be used to

examine the recent trends in the number of children reported missing.

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NISMART

NISMART is the most reliable source of information about all types of missing children. NISMART collected information about children who were abducted by family members and non-family members, runaways, children who were abandoned or thrown out of their homes (thrownaways), and children who were missing because they were lost or injured or for other reasons.

Each of these problems was examined separately in the study, and definitions were established for each problem. Each of the categories (except nonfamily abductions) was broken into two definitions based on the different ways in which an affected family and relevant officials might view the situation. For example, having an adolescent run away might be a serious crisis in many families, but police experience is that most cases of this type resolve themselves quickly and without incident. For study purposes, this distinction was captured by using two sets of definitions. One, called broad-scope, defined the problem as an affected family might see it.

The other, called policy-focal, was a subset of the broad-scope cases that attempted to reflect the points of view of government officials, community agencies, or the police, and was meant to include only the more serious events in which a child was very likely to be in danger. All definitions were for children under age 18.Register now to protect your children with a 30-day FREE trial to InstantAmber!

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