Protecting Kids

"If your child was missing," blared the full-page ad in last week's New York Times, "could you give police an accurate description?" Most parents probably could, but doubt was at the heart of the campaign by Lafayette/Circuit City, a consumer-electronics chain with headquarters in Richmond. As an identification aid against the terrible day when a youngster might disappear, the ad offered a free videotape of any child brought to a Lafayette store in the New York City area, urging parents to "bring your own videotape or [we] will sell you one at cost."

The ad, the first in a campaign that Lafayette intends to run in all its U.S. stores, is the latest manifestation of a new American concern over finding children who vanish. Increasingly, local TV stations carry pictures and descriptions of missing children. Youngsters are now being photographed and fingerprinted in schools and shopping malls from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Buses, milk cartons and supermarket bags are used to display photos of missing children.

While even one kidnaped child is a tragedy, experts disagree over how widespread the problem really is. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in suburban Washington, which is partially funded by the Justice Department, estimates that every year 1.5 million children disappear, run away, are kidnaped or get kicked out of their homes. If true, that staggering figure means that roughly 1 of every 42 youngsters is in danger.

Although some child-safety advocates once claimed that 50,000 children a year are abducted by people they do not know, the FBI investigated just 68 kidnaping cases last year involving children. Says an FBI spokesman: "We lost 50,000 troops in Viet Nam over a ten-year period. Everybody knows someone who was killed. How many of us know someone who has had a child abducted?"

The typical kidnaper, in fact, is one of the child's parents. Says Harvey Greenberg, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City: "Most kids are abducted by one of the parents who is unhappy about the divorce settlement." Increased awareness of the dangers children face, not just from kidnaping but from sexual exploitation as well, is, of course, well worth teaching, if done wisely. "But you do this," says Greenberg, "without scaring a child out of its wits."