The Rediscovery of the Plight of Kidnapped Children
A six-year-old boy wanders over to the toy counter in a department store in a mall near a police station. A few minutes later, his mother realizes he has dis- appeared. An intensive search is launched, but two weeks later and 120 miles away, a fisherman dis- covers the boy’s severed head. The local police mis- place crucial evidence implicating a serial killer as the prime suspect. Twenty-seven years after the abduction took place, and 12 years after the serial killer dies behind bars while serving consecutive life sentences for committing other terrible murders, the police charge him with decapitating the little boy on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Over the years, the boy’s father helps set up an organization that aids and comforts parents searching for missing children and helps galvanize support for legislation that compels the FBI to set up a massive computer database to assist investigations to locate youngsters who have disappeared anywhere in the country and creates a nationwide registry to monitor the whereabouts of previously convicted sex offenders. Upon learning that his son’s kidnapping has been officially declared “solved” and “closed,” he declares, “… he didn’t die in vain. For all the other victims who haven’t gotten justice, I say one thing: ‘Don’t give up hope.’” (Almanzar, 2008)
An eight-year-old boy is walking alone for the very first time from his day-camp bus stop to meet up with his parents a few blocks away in a bustling, urban enclave of devoutly religious people. He becomes lost and asks a man for directions. The man offers to drive him home, but first takes him to pay a dentist’s bill and later drives him to a suburban community for a wedding. Meanwhile, busloads of members of the close-knit religious community arrive, and soon thousands of volunteers are combing through the neighborhood, putting up posters about the missing child and reviewing footage from surveillance cameras in stores along the child’s route home. The next
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morning, the man goes off to work but returns home in a panic when he hears that already $100,000 has been collected for a reward fund, and realizes that the entire community has been mobilized to locate the boy. While the child is watching television, the abductor drugs him with painkillers and then smothers him, and then dismembers his body. The police find some remains in a dumpster and quickly close in on the killer. “We pray that none of you should have to ever live through what we did,” his parents write on the website of a charity for needy children and families that they establish to “perpet- uate the feeling of collective responsibility and love” expressed during the search for their missing son. (Baker, Robbins, and Goldstein, 2011)
An 11-year-old, his brother, and a friend are riding their bicycles on a gravel road by a farm near their home. A masked man carrying a gun appears and orders the boys to throw their bikes into a nearby ditch and lie face down on the ground. He tells two of them to run off into the woods and not look back, and then grabs the 11-year-old and disappears. The police are called, arrive minutes later, and launch a search that soon mobilizes hundreds of volunteers and generates over 50,000 leads. The nearby farm is periodically scoured by the FBI and rescue dogs. Twenty-one years later, the case is featured on a cable network news program and the sheriff’s department receives 11 new leads. The boy’s mother becomes an activist in behalf of missing children and never loses hope. Whenever she is asked, “How do you do it?” she answers, “How could I not? Every parent knows, you would do anything for your children….” (Wetenhall, 2010; and Kampshroer, 2011)
Kidnapping a youngster symbolizes the ulti- mate clash between good and evil: innocent and defenseless little children in the clutches of ruthless adults. No other group of crime victims has so cap- tured the attention and hearts of the public. Rarely has citizen involvement been solicited and supplied on such a grand scale as in campaigns to rescue stolen children. Few victims’ rights organizations have been so instrumental and successful in drafting
new laws and reforming criminal justice procedures as the child-search movement.
Tragedies like the cases above periodically rivet the nation’s attention. But how often do such shocking kidnappings take place? How should par- ents react to this threat? And what is being done to prevent abductions and locate captives before it is too late?
Hundreds of years ago, kidnapping was out- lawed as a vicious crime under English common law. In the United States, news reports of abduc- tions began to appear in the late 1800s. During the 1920s, several cases embodied a parent’s worst nightmares about stranger danger (Gado, 2005). In the early 1930s, a kidnapper killed the baby of a celebrity aviator even after he picked up money for the child’s safe return. Ever since then, demand- ing a ransom or transporting a hostage across state lines constitutes a federal crime and the FBI can enter the manhunt. Under current state and federal statutes, force is not a necessary element of the crime of taking and holding a person (of any age) against his or her will; the abducted individual can be detained through trickery or manipulation, termed (inveiglement). Besides extorting a ran- som, the kidnapper might capture and hold some- one for some other nefarious reason, such as robbery (for example, to compel an adult to divulge a password to withdraw money from an ATM), or to steal and raise a very young child, or to cruelly exploit someone as a sex object.
At the start of the 1980s, the agony suffered by kidnapped youth and their families was rediscov- ered by members of the victims’ movement, repor- ters, and government officials. The problem was subsumed under the broader catchphrase missing children, which is applied to youngsters whose whereabouts are unknown to their parents and caretakers. In essence, the designation “missing child” refers to the lack of knowledge of a fright- ened adult responsible for the child’s well-being. The designation does not necessarily establish that a youngster is in danger. But many people immedi- ately assume the worst and fear foul play. It was no coincidence that the rediscovery of this age-old parental nightmare took place at the same time
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(the late 1970s and early 1980s) that widespread concerns were intensifying that the traditional fam- ily structure for raising children was disintegrating in America because of teenage pregnancies, single motherhood, divorce, and daycare.
Some of the major developments that marked the rediscovery of the kidnapping problem and the efforts to locate missing children are listed chrono- logically in Box 8.1.