The real statistics
Child abduction is the airplane crash of parental fears.
Intellectually, we know the odds: The chances of dying aboard a plane are slim (Lifetime odds: 1 in 500,000, and that’s for frequent fliers). But emotionally, we aren’t convinced. Flying scares us.
The difference, though: Despite our fears, we continue to fly. To refuse to board a plane would be to condemn ourselves to a limited life.
But we think nothing of limiting our children’s lives, based on fears that are even less likely to be realized.
As most people know by now, the majority of child abductions are custody related. There are also thousands of “lesser” nonfamily abductions, which “do not involve elements of the extremely alarming kind of crime that parents and reporters have in mind,” according to a 2002 U.S. Department of Justice report. Examples included in the report: a 17-year-old girl held in her ex-boyfriend’s car for four hours; a 14-year-old boy held at gunpoint by a man who accused him of hunting on his property; a 15-year-old girl forced into the boy’s bathroom at school and sexually assaulted.
Not happy scenarios, but not Lifetime television special material, either.
But how common are what the Justice Department calls “stereotypical” abductions, the nightmare-caliber crime involving a stranger or slight acquaintance who whisks away a child with the intention of holding him for ransom, keeping him or killing him?
Statistics vary, but not by much. Some estimate about 40 such cases occur each year in the United States. The Justice Department report says there were 115 cases in 2002.
Either way, with 60,700,000 children 14 and under in the United States, the odds of your child being the victim of an Adam Walsh-style abduction are roughly 1 in a million.
You’d be wiser to cancel those horseback-riding lessons. Your child is more likely to be killed in an equestrian accident. (Odds in one year for people who ride horses: 1 in 297,000.) Or better yet, pull him off the football team. (Yearly odds of dying for youth football players: 1 in 78,260.) And if you really want to protect them, sell your car. (Lifetime odds of dying as a passenger: 1 in 228. Odds of dying this year alone: 1 in 17,625.)
Or, to put another spin on it, your child is 700 times more likely to get into Harvard than to be the victim of such an abduction.
Chances that the kidnapped child will be killed are smaller still. The U.S. Department of Justice says 40 percent of the 115 victims were murdered.
Horrific, yes, but “almost certain not to happen,” says Stearns.
“But our emotions overwhelm our ability to calculate reality.”
What we’ve given up
Some say that if altering our lifestyles saves even one child, those measures are worth it.
But in protecting our children from the unlikeliest of scenarios, in the vain hope that no child will ever be hurt, we are inflicting greater harm on all of them.
To be continued…
This article is reprinted with the permission of the author, Nicole Neal, The Palm Beach Post.
Perhaps the reason why the statistics show “only” 112 cases of textbook-style kidnapping cases is because parents are more vigilant and protective of our children.
I believe that my children are growing up to feel safe and secure because they know their parents are doing the watching and worrying for them. They have an awareness of how to protect themselves…which is a lot more freeing and empowering than walking around in fear because they’re given too much freedom or the other extreme, blithely never even having the thought that something bad could ever happen to them.
There are many precautions that parents take these days to guard against incidents that will never actually occur if we are fortunate enough. For me, I don’t mind buckling my infant into his rear-facing seat, even though everyone my own age survived without such a benefit. My kids are glad that I drive them to school and to/from places. They wear helmets when they ride their bikes. I didn’t have these things when I was a kid and I was fine, but to me, I don’t see how any of these things are harmful to my children, even though their helmets or seatbelts have ever had to save any of their lives. The consequence of not doing these simple things and opening them up to unnecessary risk is just not worth the minor amount of inconvenience it spares me to not do these things for them.