Missing Children

History of the Issue

Concern about different types of missing children has a long history, but contemporary concern emerged around 1980, when activists began using the term missing children as a general category that included children who had been abducted by strangers and by family members, as well as runaways. The movement never offered a precise definition of missing children (or even of child—some cases involved people in their twenties). Still, activists argued that this was a common problem; they estimated that there were nearly 2 million missing children in the United States each year, including 50,000 serious cases involving children abducted by strangers. The activists warned that, because American law enforcement was not centralized, it was difficult to mount efficient searches for missing children. Parents usually reported a missing child to the local police or sheriff's department, but children often did not have to travel far to leave that agency's jurisdiction. Effective searching demands that [Page 1068]agencies share reports of missing children, but because most missing children were found or returned home within a couple of days, law enforcement agencies sometimes gave missing-children reports—especially those involving presumed runaways—low priority, and refused to begin searching until the child had been missing two or three days.

The missing children movement advocated reforms, such as listing children in the FBI's National Crime Information Center's (NCIC) computers, and requiring local law enforcement agencies to promptly report all missing children to both the NCIC and statewide missing-children clearinghouses that could circulate reports to other agencies. In response to the movement's campaign, the federal government passed several laws, including the Missing Children's Act of 1982 (authorizing the NCIC to take missing children reports), the Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984 (leading to establishment of the federally supported National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [NCMEC], which distributed educational materials and helped coordinate national search efforts), and the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990 (requiring that law enforcement agencies report cases to the NCMEC). In addition, many states enacted complementary reforms, such as establishing centralized clearinghouses to which all reports of missing children were to be sent, and which could in turn circulate the reports to law enforcement agencies in their state.

By the mid-1980s, critics had begun to question the statistics offered by the missing children movement. The Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of 1985 stories pointing to a “numbers gap” between the 50,000 stranger abductions described by activists and the less than 75 child kidnapping cases investigated annually by the FBI. In response, the federal government funded NISMART—the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children. The first NISMART report, released in 1990, found fewer cases than had been estimated by activists.

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