I picked up a life insurance brochure (from the Monumental Life Insurance Company) because their poster next to the brochures made some wonky statistical claims. To wit:
Here’s a website from a different insurance company that makes the same claims.
They cite the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as their source. That site does include the quote:
But, I don’t see a cite for their quote.
These numbers seem ludicrously high. What’s the real Straight Dope on this?
I assume ‘reported missing’ includes stuff like my friend’s three-year-old who was found - after a full-family search of the house and grounds, a call to the police, and the beginning of a police search - fast asleep down behind the cushions in their big squashy sofa. In other words, kids to whom nothing at all had actually happened, but who were un-findable for long enough that their families called the police.
There’s a little more info here.
You can see that the number reported missing is far greater then the number actually abducted.
I’ve lost my niece and nephew multiple times. Of course we were playing hide and seek at the time.
What’s any of this got to do with life insurance? Is there a suggestion you should get life insurance on the kid in case he goes missing? How long would you have to wait before you could collect on the policy if there’s no body?
Post-divorce custody disputes often escalate into a “kidnapping,” which is pretty different from the stereotypical kidnapping described above.
I have heard that most kidnappings are exactly this.
I have an acquaintance who calls 911 to report her children missing if her ex-husband is more than 15 minutes late returning them at the end of their visitation with him. Even during a snowstorm, or if he has told her in advance that they will be delayed. She thinks that multiple reports of the children being ‘missing’ while with him will help in her court fights to reduce his custody time.
Things like this could certainly run up the number of children reported ‘missing’.
I guess I just cannot believe that the number of children that were victims of non-family abductions (58,200 per these reports), is almost DOUBLE the number of vehicular fatalities each year (33,808 in 2009 per this list).
In this area, there’s a car fatality or two reported just about every day. I can’t even remember the last time an Amber Alert was issued locally, or the last time a child’s kidnapping was reported on the news. It simply does not pass the smell test.
Can this question be sent to Cecil for further study?
Scare tactic to sell stuff.
I don’t much believe it either, that seems like way too many. I wonder how they count that. Maybe they also mean people who are not ‘family’ but are related, such as a step parent or something like that. Otherwise it goes against what they say about the couple of hundred who are abducted by strangers.
This still leaves 58,200 kidnappings per the ad. I call bullshit.
But only 115 victims of “stereotypical kidnapping”. That’s the real number for what we’re thinking about. The other definitions are just overly broad.
So, what would count as a non-family abduction, but isn’t a kidnapping the way we think of it? My guess is that it’s still a lot of custody disputes that are being escalated. It’s not Mom or Dad taking the kids without having legal custody, it’s their new girl/boyfriend, or the babysitter they arranged for.
There’s probably some childcare services that are refusing to release kids according to some policy or other to someone who calls the police as a result.
I bet there are some foster parents who bear the brunt of biological parents lashing out against the system. I have some friends who have just completed the adoption of children that they fostered for a while. When they were discussing things with their caseworker at one point, the caseworker started a topic with “When an accusation of abuse is made—not ‘if’, ‘when’—here’s how we handle it…”
Maybe you’re not paying attention? These get reported on the news frequently around here. They don’t get too much attention, though, because messy family dramas aren’t usually as interesting (apparently) as a home invasion or a car crash.
I’m only referring to the non-family kidnappings. Severian’s link is more helpful. I guess **OH NOES! 115 kidnappings a year! ** wouldn’t sell as much insurance.
I found their source which breaks down that 58,200 number. First of all the 58,200 doesn’t include children taken by family members but it does include those taken by friends and acquaintances. Of the 58,200 about 60% were between the ages of 15 and 17.
Of the 58,200…
33,000 times the child’s “caretaker” didn’t know where the child was and tried to locate the child but did not notify any authorities. It looks like they got this number doing surveys asking something like, “in the last year were you ever worried because you didn’t know where your kid was.” Note that child in this case includes 17 year olds.
Statistically this number is really “somewhere between 24,100 and 92,400 with 95% confidence.” That is if they conducted the survey 100 times then 95 times the number they got would be between 24.1k and 92.4k.
12,100 times the child’s caretaker was concerned enough that he/she notified the police that the child was missing.
This is an estimate based on a very small sample so the study authors say that there is no statistical confidence for this number however they believe it to be between 2,000 and 64,000.
115 is the actual number of Stereotypically kidnapped children where the police were notified by someone who discovered the child was missing or someone who witnessed the abduction and it turned out the child was with a stranger.
Oh, I guess it would be nice of me to provide the actual link…