The other day while I was filling my car with gas, my daughter noticed one of those missing-children posters plastered above the pumps. She commented that she sees so many advertisements for missing kids, if she ever came across such children she’d never be able to associate their faces with the posters. I replied that it would be more likely she would recognize a missing child as a schoolmate or neighbor rather than someone encountered by pure chance on the street. Her comment got me to thinking about the success rate of the posters though. How many children displayed in those posters have actually been found? Among those that have been found, how many have been “true” abductions, as opposed to disgruntled/estranged spouses/partners running off with their own children due to domestic disputes? In short, have the posters and milk cartons proved to be worthwhile in terms of recovering missing children?
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But let’s take a look at those studies. The one more or less official analysis of missing-kid statistics is the “National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children,” prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice by David Finkelhor et al in 1990 based on data for 1988. NISMART provided the following estimates:
Nonfamily abductions–114,600 attempts, 3,200-4,600 actual.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
