Accounting for the Remaining Cases of Children Reported as Missing
The NISMART–2 study concluded that of the nearly 800,000 children who were reported missing to police or child-search agencies, almost 360,000 (45 percent) turned out to be either runaways or throwaways (driven out of their homes). A roughly equal amount, 340,000 (43 percent), were consid- ered missing by their alarmed parents because of “benign explanations”—misunderstandings and miscommunication about where the children were going and when they would return. The remaining youngsters, almost 62,000 (8 percent), did not return home on time because they were lost or injured.
SOURCES: NISMART–1: Finkelhor, Hotaling, and Sedlak, 1990; and Forst and Blomquist, 1991. NISMART–2: Sedlak, Finkelhor, Hammer, and Schultz, 2002.
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periods when crime rates were much higher, it is likely that the current numbers of youngsters abducted, molested, and murdered have declined substantially. The FBI’s National Crime Informa- tion Center (NCIC) maintains a missing persons database. During 2013, it contained information about 335 cases that were designated as “abducted by a stranger,” down from 518 in 2007 (FBI, 2014d). Nevertheless, horror stories that send shock waves through the media serve as a reminder that the threat of a worst-case scenario always looms as a possibility whenever a child disappears.