That second report found that an estimated 797,500 people under the age of 18 went missing for any reason. The study then broke that number down and showed the largest category by far was runaways. Another large portion involved more than 200,000 cases of “family abductions”—which typically meant a divorced parent keeping a child longer than legally permitted. There were also 58,200 “non-family abductions.” That may sound like strangers stealing children, but it’s not. It is in fact a very broad category that can include, for example, a seventeen-year-old girl whose ex-boyfriend won’t let her get out of his parked car.
In order to get a number that matches the sort of pedophile-in-the-shadow attacks that terrify parents, NISMART created a category called “stereotypical kidnappings”: A stranger or slight acquaintance takes or detains a child overnight, transports the child more than fifty miles, holds the child for ransom or with the intention of keeping him or her, or kills the child. NISMART estimated that in one year the total number of stereotypical kidnappings in the United States is 115. If that number is adjusted to include only children younger than 14 when they were kidnapped—kids like Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck—it is 90.
To look at these statistics rationally, we have to remember that there are roughly 70 million American children. With just 115 cases of kids under eighteen being stolen by strangers, the risk to any one American minor is about 0.00016 percent, or 1 in 608,696. For kids fourteen and under, the numbers are only slightly different. There are roughly 59 million Americans aged fourteen and under, so the risk is 0.00015 percent. That’s 1 in 655,555.
To put that in perspective, consider the swimming pool. In 2003, the total number of American children fourteen and younger who drowned in a swimming pool was 285. Thus the chance of a child drowning in a swimming pool is 1 in 245,614—or more than 2.5 times greater than the chance of a child being abducted by a stranger. Also in 2003, 2,408 children fourteen and younger were killed in car crashes. That makes the probability of such a death 1 in 29,070. Thus, a child is twenty-six times more likely to die in a car crash than to be abducted by a stranger.
The numbers vary from country to country, but everywhere the likelihood of a child being snatched by a stranger is almost indescribably tiny. In the United Kingdom, a Home Office report states, “There were 59 cases involving a stranger successfully abducting a child or children, resulting in 68 victims.” With 11.4 million children under sixteen, that works out to a risk of 1 in 167,647. (Note that the British and American numbers are based on different definitions and calculation methods; they aren’t directly comparable and we shouldn’t make much of the differences between them.)
In Canada, Marlene Dalley of the RCMP’s National Missing Children Services carefully combed police data banks for the years 2000 and 2001 and discovered that the total number of cases in which a child was abducted by a “stranger”—using a definition that included “neighbor” or “friend of the father”—was five. As for abductions by true strangers, there was precisely one in two years. There are roughly 2.9 million children aged fourteen or younger in Canada. Thus the annual risk to one of those children is 1 in 5.8 million.
As to how these terrible cases end, the statistics flashed briefly by CNN were almost accurate. According to NISMART’s rounded numbers (hence they don’t quite add up to 100 percent), 57 percent of children abducted by strangers in a stereotypical kidnapping were returned alive, while 40 percent were killed. Four percent were not located. One critical fact not mentioned in the show is that nine out of ten stranger abductions are resolved within twenty-four hours.
Having a child abducted by a stranger and returned later is awful, but the ultimate nightmare is having a child stolen by a stranger and murdered—or having a child simply vanish from the face of the earth. According to NISMART, that nightmare scenario happens to about fifty teens and children a year in the United States. That’s fifty out of 70 million Americans under eighteen. Thus the annual risk of a teen or child being abducted by a stranger and killed or not returned is 0.00007 percent, or one in 1.4 million.
Risk regulators use a term called de minimis to describe a risk so small it can be treated as if it were zero. What qualifies as a de minimis risk varies, with the threshold sometimes as big as one in 10,000, but a one-in-a-million risk is definitely de minimis.
All these numbers boil down to something quite simple. First, the overwhelming majority of minors are not abducted. Second, the overwhelming majority of minors who are abducted are not taken by strangers. Third, the overwhelming majority of minors abducted by strangers are not taken in circumstances resembling the stereotypical kidnapping that so terrifies parents. Fourth, the number of stereotypical kidnappings is so small that the chance of that happening to a child is almost indescribably tiny. And finally, in the incredibly unlikely event that a child is snatched by a lurking pedophile, there is a good chance the child will survive and return home in less than a day.
This is not what Anderson Cooper told his audience. In effect, it is the opposite of what Cooper told them. There was no mention of the key facts, but the show did present case after case of children snatched by strangers under the most frightening circumstances. And in almost every case on the show, the child was held for months or years, or vanished forever.
The problem here is not Anderson Cooper. The total reversal of reality portrayed on “Taken: Children Lost and Found” is actually typical of how news media cover child abductions. A child not abducted is not news. And parental abductions are generally ignored unless there’s a strange twist, such as a particularly violent ending. But pedophiles snatching children are always a big story. Uwe Kolbig, a forty-two-year-old German with a history of sexually abusing children, made the news around the world when he kidnapped, raped, and murdered a nine-year-old boy in February 2007. “Monster and His Prey,” read an Australian headline. What made the crime particularly sensational was videotape taken by a security camera on a Leipzig tram that showed Kolbig chatting and joking with the little boy. Still pictures from the video appeared alongside every newspaper article, and Kolbig’s grin was shown on national TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Britain, and Europe.
It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated knowledge of psychology to understand how people who saw the Kolbig story were affected. They felt horror and anger—emotions Gut would use to conclude that this is a serious danger. Rationally, of course, a single crime in Germany says absolutely nothing about the safety of children in other countries and continents—or in Germany, for that matter—but that rational conclusion is likely to be blown away in the storm of emotions whipped up by such horrific images.
It’s understandable, then, that stranger abductions have been the source of some of the biggest media frenzies in recent years. When Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared in August 2002, the British media talked about little else until the girls’ killer, Ian Huntley, was arrested three weeks later. In that short time, the ten national newspapers published 598 articles on the case. An even bigger storm followed the June 2002 abduction of Elizabeth Smart from her parent’s upper-middle-class Utah home. Day after day for weeks, and then months, television shows like CNN’s Larry King Live talked about the case from every conceivable angle. With concern for abductions high, the media gave greater prominence to reports that even vaguely resembled the Smart case, which inevitably created the appearance of a rise in such incidents—a classic feedback loop. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly declared 2002 “a summer of hell for America’s kids.” The kidnappings edged out the looming invasion of Iraq as the fourth-most-followed story of 2002, according to the Pew Research Center’s surveys, with four out of five Americans saying they followed “very closely” (49 percent) or “fairly closely” (30 percent). In May 2007, the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was with her vacationing British parents in Portugal, resulted in massive media coverage not only in the United Kingdom but all across the Western world—a snapshot of the little girl made the cover of the May 28 edition of People magazine.