Here are 7 Facts About Child Abduction

When planning for your family’s safety, knowing the facts is important. Compiling real-world information allows you to make an accurate plan based on cold, hard data.

If you’re trying to keep your kid safe from abduction, you’ll definitely want facts about child abduction. We would like to share seven areas that you can keep in mind while planning safety for your child.

1. Family Abductions are Incredibly Common

Some years, family abductions make up at much as 90% of abductions that occur, especially by parents. This usually happens in homes where the parents are separated, divorced, or estranged and is more common in lower-income households and during custody disputes.

2. 99.8% of Missing Children Come Home

This is good news if you’re part of the majority, but not as good if you’re part of the minority of this statistic. Regardless of that, if your child goes missing you have very good odds that your child will be returned to you.

3. Most Abductions Are Committed by Someone Familiar

If your child wasn’t taken by a family member, the odds are that it was done by someone you know. Unfortunately, it is common for abuse to occur during this kidnapping, but it’s also common for your child to be returned to you.

4. A Fraction of 1% of Child Abductions is Total Strangers

About 100 children a year are abducted by total strangers as you hear on the news, so it’s exceedingly rare for a child to disappear this way. While this is the rarest, it is also the least likely that your child will come home if they are taken by a total stranger. Out of the approximately 100 kids a year that are taken this way, only 50 come back.

5. Children Abducted by Violent Predators are Dead within 3 Hours 74% of the Time

This is a statistic that many people misrepresent. This is referring to a very small minority of kidnappers, about 1 in 10,000, but it’s true that with certain kidnappers it’s very likely that the child will be killed within three hours.

6. About 90% of Reported Missing Children are Runaways or Misunderstood Directions

Literally nine times out of ten, every child reported missing is either missing because they ran away, didn’t understand the family’s plan, got lost, or anything like that. Most missing children were not kidnapped at all, and if you’re looking at the number of yearly disappearances and getting worried about it, just know that if a child runs away multiple times and is reported each time, they are counted towards that number for each instance because they were reported as missing.

7. There Were Less Missing Children in 2019 than in 2018

In 2018 the FBI reported 424,066 missing children over the course of the year, while in 2019 they reported 421,394 missing children. Just looking at the number, the significance may be lost but keep in mind that that’s nearly 3,000 fewer kids being reported missing with 99.8% returning home.

Knowing is Half the Battle

Making plans to keep your family safe is important. Some families even try to have contingencies no matter what the situation, and with child abduction and sexual predators out in the world making sure that you’re ready for anything is for the best. The world can be a scary place, but if you plan for the worst at the very least you can be prepared.

Registeredoffenderslist.org is a great resource that lists all the laws by state that protect children from sexual predator abductions. They offer a search by zip code to find registered sex offenders that live near you and for a monthly fee, you can monitor up to three areas as well as receive notifications if a registered sex offender moves into your monitored areas.