Missing children are young people whose whereabouts are unknown or who are not where they are supposed to be. There are several types of missing children. The most common categories are children who become lost (these tend to be young children, and most are recovered fairly quickly) and runaways (usually adolescents who return home after a short absence, although some stay away for prolonged periods). Public concern tends to focus on two less common types of missing children: those abducted by family members (typically this occurs during custody disputes between divorced parents); and those abducted by non-family members (such children may be held for ransom, be sexually abused, and suffer other forms of serious exploitation).

The label "missing children" was promoted during the early 1980s by a social movement that claimed the problem was widespread (at that time, activists estimated that perhaps 2 million children went missing each year in the United States), and that too little was done to recover missing children. In most cases, missing children were reported to local law enforcement agencies that, particularly in the case of adolescents, often presumed that the youths had run away and would return on their own, so that officials might not begin searching for 2 or 3 days; there was no system for notifying law enforcement agencies other than those that took the initial report. Activists pointed to cases of murdered children and children who had permanently disappeared as evidence that more needed to be done to locate missing children. The issue attracted considerable media coverage, and the federal government passed laws, including the Missing Children's Act of 1982 (which authorized the FBI's National Crime Information Center to accept reports of missing children); the Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984 (which led to the establishment of the federally supported National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [NCMEC] that could coordinate search efforts, and which also ordered the government to conduct periodical efforts to measure the number of missing children); and the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990 (which required law enforcement agencies to report cases to the NCMEC). In response to the publicity about the problem, images of missing children began to appear on milk cartons, shopping bags, and so on.

By the mid-1980s, journalists began questioning some of the movement's statistics. While some kidnapped children certainly were victimized in terrible ways, such cases were less common than activists implied. The Denver Post received a Pulitzer Prize for stories arguing that there was a "numbers gap" between the movement's estimates (such as claims that strangers abducted 50,000 children each year) and law enforcement records (the FBI investigated about 75 child kidnappings annually). Grouping various kinds of cases under the single heading of "missing children" had rhetorical advantages: including runaways (who far outnumbered abducted children) allowed activists to argue that hundreds of thousands--perhaps even millions--of children went missing each year; including non-family abductions let them point to frightening examples of child victimization to illustrate the problem. Families who had lost children through family abductions (and who had been frustrated by the reluctance of law enforcement to get involved in those cases) provided much of the movement's leadership.

Partly in response to the debate over the number of missing children, the federal government funded the NISMART (National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children) research. NISMART involved large-scale social scientific research that included surveys of law enforcement and social service agencies, as well as household surveys designed to measure the proportion of households that had experienced a missing child. The first study (NISMART-1) was conducted in 1988; it was followed by NISMART-2 (done in 1999). Because missing children statistics had become controversial, NISMART developed two definitions for most categories of missing children: "broad scope" definitions encompassed all cases counted as missing children (for example, all runaways), while "policy focal" definitions included only the more serious cases (such as runaways who lacked a familiar, secure place to stay for at least one night).

In general, NISMART estimated that most categories of missing children were less common than activists originally had suggested. NISMART-1's estimates for the most serious cases in different categories of missing children were non-family abductions: 200-300 cases per year; family abductions: 163,200; runaways: 133,500; and throwaways (children ordered by their families to leave their homes): 59,200-127,100. NISMART-2 found that the rates for most types of missing children (per 1,000) declined between 1988 and 1999.

This missing children movement did affect public policy. Increased public awareness led to various prevention programs (which tended to focus on the danger of abductions by strangers--a relatively uncommon phenomenon) and also to improved search procedures. The NCMEC became a national clearinghouse for reports of missing children, and several states required all law enforcement agencies to report all cases to newly established statewide clearinghouses. In addition, the movement called attention to the need for improved social services for long-term runaways, as well as thrownaway children who had been rejected by their families.

While intense concern over missing children abated after the 1980s, the issue sometimes is revived following heavily publicized cases. Thus, during the summer of 2002, reports that an adolescent girl had been abducted from her bedroom one night led to renewed media coverage of the missing children problem, including suggestions that there was a "wave" of child abductions (although the evidence for this was anecdotal). This illustrates how heavily publicized cases can revive interest in a social problem, even if the number of people affected is neither large nor growing.

Bibliography:

1) Best, Joel. 1990. Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2) Finkelhor, David, Gerald Hotaling, and Andrea Sedlak. 1990. Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children in America. Washington, DC: U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

3) Hammer, Heather, David Finkelhor, Andrea J. Sedlak, and Lorraine E. Porcellini. 2004. National Estimates of Missing Children: Selected Trends, 1988-1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

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