Professor David Finkelhor
speaker
15 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2015
last heard Apr 2015
Professor David Finkelhor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The missing child concept is widely misunderstood.
The number of kids who are actually kidnapped by strangers in these kind of most horrific kinds of situations that parents worry about, that's quite small.
There are only about 115 of these what we called stereotypical kidnappings that had occurred over the course of a year.
We define a stereotypical stranger kidnapping as one that lasts at least overnight or taking the child a distance of 50 miles or more or involves an attempt to keep the child permanently or in which the child is killed.
We also found that the largest category of the missing children were children who had run away from home, usually for a short period of time.
They had to be gone overnight to be counted, but they didn't tend to be missing all that long.
The landscape has changed dramatically, and the biggest change has been the acquisition of cell phones.
So, for example, these benign missing episodes are likely to have declined a great deal because parents can call and find out what's happening.
Similarly, running away is probably less common.
We suspect that's true from other data.
Then in addition to that, in the United States and to some extent in other places in the world, crime has declined tremendously.
Crimes against children are down.
Sexual assaults are down.
Homicides are down.
So it's very likely that some of these episodes that are motivated by criminal intent are also down as well.
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