Hunting for Children Who Have Vanished
A 12-year-old girl and her two friends are enjoying a slumber party when they hear a knock on the bed- room door. When it is opened, a tall, bearded man wielding a large knife barges in. As her two friends giggle, thinking it is a practical joke, the intruder ties them up and carries the 12-year-old off into the night. The abduction galvanizes a sleepy community into action. Waves of volunteers flock to a storefront command center. Thousands of people beg to be assigned some task, like answering telephones or cir- culating posters with a picture of the victim and a police artist’s sketch of the suspect. Shopkeepers close their stores, and workers give up their vacations to assist the search. A well-known actress donates a huge reward for information leading to an arrest or the safe return of the abducted child. Ironically, the police question a man for trespassing, but they do not know he is the kidnapper and that the missing girl is in the trunk of his vehicle, so they let him go. Two months later he is arrested. A crowd gathers for a vigil outside the jail, chanting, “Tell the truth and set your con- science free.” Shortly afterward the middle-aged man, who was out on parole after spending 15 of his last 20 years behind bars for abductions, assaults, and burglaries, confesses that he strangled the girl and leads police to her body. He is sent to death row. An outraged community demands that a “three strikes and you’re out” law be passed to prevent hardened convicts like him from ever being released. (“Kidnapping Summons City to Action,” 1993; Gross, 1993; and Noe, 2005)
Even though the platitude “our children are our future” was frequently voiced in the early 1980s, only a few groups were prepared to help locate missing children. They were staffed by a handful of people with very limited budgets.
Before child-search organizations were set up, parents were totally dependent on police depart- ments. Unfortunately, working relationships fre- quently became strained between frantic parents and the law enforcement agencies that were sup- posed to be carrying out the manhunt. The issues that divided them were delays in police responses, restricted access to law enforcement information, and a reluctance by local authorities to call for nationwide assistance.
When distraught parents turned to missing per- sons bureaus for help, they expected officers to spring into action by issuing all-points bulletins describing the child who had disappeared and by launching an intensive search. But many depart- ments followed procedures that dictated that a youngster had to be missing for 24, 48, or even 72 hours before an official investigation could be initiated. These mandatory waiting period regula- tions were based on past experience that indicated the overwhelming majority of cases were not life threatening and would “solve themselves.” The missing youths would turn out to be runaways who would soon return home tired, hungry, and broke. But infuriated parents condemned such arbi- trary delays as endangering the lives of their chil- dren. They claimed that it enabled abductors to escape from the local area to other jurisdictions, where any call for a manhunt would receive an even lower priority, and interest in the case would be difficult to sustain. The crux of the prob- lem for parents was that the burden of proof fell on them to somehow demonstrate that their children were victims of foul play (see Collins et al., 1983).
In 1990, responding to appeals by grieving par- ents for reform, Congress passed the National Child Search Assistance Act. The legislation prohibited law enforcement agencies from imposing waiting periods before entering the child’s description into computer networks linking the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, police departments,
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and state clearinghouses (Girdner and Hoff, 1994). Parents of formerly missing children who volunteer to undergo training have formed teams that provide emotional support and logistical advice to parents in distress. A family survival guide written by parents who have been through this ordeal suggests that immediate steps include putting out a “Be On the Look Out” (BOLO) bulletin to other police departments; preparing photos for dissemination to schools, hospitals, and media outlets; and searching with bloodhounds. Many states require police offi- cers to take in-service training courses about how to investigate missing children cases, to interact with their families, and to follow the FBI’s Child Abduc- tion Response Plan.
A federally sponsored National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) oper- ates a network linking 30 federal agencies, 50 state clearinghouses, and more than 60 private and non- profit organizations. It has a cold case unit, operates a national 24-hour hotline, trains police officers and prosecutors, provides parents with references to mental health professionals, furnishes reimburse- ment for reunification travel expenses, and helps recover missing youngsters (Aunapu et al., 1993; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Preven- tion, 1998; and Parilla and Allen, 2010).
In an effort to locate children who have been missing for a long period of time, the Internal Rev- enue Service has carried out a “Picture Them Home” program that sends photos in the same envelopes as tax forms to millions of homes each year. Since 2001, the program has helped recover more than 80 children (Kocieniewski, 2010).