Every parent has something in the corner of their mind about how they can effectively protect their children today. They cannot explore the secret underworld of child kidnappers to prevent their children from being kidnapped. The responsibility may refer to the law enforcement agencies to get rid of child kidnappers, abusers, and pedophiles next door or somewhere else. However, the real responsibility is for the parents to make sure that they look after their children to the fullest. Parents need to completely rethink their attitude about child kidnapping incidents.
It happens when parents lack their moral responsibilities by taking the initiative to look after their kids all day long, and at the end of the day, when an incident does take place, they remain stunned. Most of the parents these days want to keep their kids safe from the neighborhood, in particular, and increasingly, in the online world.
No matter what, child abduction is relatively less likely on the roads or online by strangers. However, the kidnapping of a child takes place by the people who know the victim very well or the victim knows the culprit. It happens when a child in need goes missing without realizing the consequences.
What is Child Kidnapping?
Well, there are plenty of kinds of child kidnapping or abduction, and they could happen in terms of family kidnapping, divorce, parents can kidnap their child, and typical kidnapping or abduction. When a person attempts to remove, conceal, and retain a kid is known as child kidnapping. It can happen by using the force wrongfully, likewise using the real method of kidnapping, or persuading a child to come alongside a person.
When a family member tries to take a child somewhere against the will is known as family kidnapping. Mostly divorced parents do that at the time when a child under court–ordered custody finally announces the decision in favor of another parent, then one out of two does parental kidnapping or abduction, taking their child from his father or mother.
What is the Typical Child Kidnapping?
Most of the parents believe that their child was taken by a stranger. On the other side, the victim is unfamiliar with the kidnapper at all. In this situation, the kidnapper brutally takes a child, using force, attacks, and lures the child.
Mostly these sorts of incidents do take place almost ¼ miles away from the house. The rise and the rise of technology in terms of cell phone devices and internet usage has made it quite easier for the kidnapper to follow a child on social media, school name, and other information.
However, it has also favored parents to use the technology to look after their children, even while sitting at their offices, by tracking the GPS location of the device by installing the parental monitoring software.
Parents can remotely record and listen to the surroundings and the real-time location, alongside the location history. Parents can constantly teach their children not to engage with online strangers and not to allow someone online to track and monitor their location by keeping their GPS of cell phone at off mode.
Safety Tips to Prevent Kidnapping
Keep an eye on the kids all the time
The young kid loves to explore things with the hell of curiosity about the world; these sorts of things are escape artists. While you are visiting places outside, in the park, shopping mall, in the crowd, keep a bird’s eye on your child. In case your child is prone to going here and there, keep physical contact with your child.
Choose a school for your child with the best security measures
At the time when your kid grows up enough to join school, keep in mind the security measures before choosing a school. It would include the nearest to your house, the school that takes responsibility for the kids, unless parents come to take them home, or someone is there for your child when you come to take them home.
Before hiring a babysitter
Most of the working parents have to hire babysitters. Therefore, being one of the working parents, make sure to get the reference and ID of the babysitter before handing over your children. So, trustworthy childcare centers trained their babysitter employees in such a way that makes them not leave children alone at the house when parents are not there.
Be friendly with your children
Teach your child about safety, and win their heart and trust, and they will follow your instructions. Guide them when a stranger encounter happens, don’t take anything to eat, and don’t go alongside if they say your mother or father has told me to take you home, no matter what.
Child Kidnapping Staggering Statistics
Do you know? Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing anywhere in the United States of America. According to the FBI NCIC Missing Person Unidentified person Statistics, there are more than 460,000 missing children incidents happened. Out of all the missing children incidents, 1500 of them were kidnapped.
Child kidnapping incidents happened in a year
- Almost 1435 incidents of kidnappings happen every year. However, the numbers are rough because all the incidents get reported, especially when a family member does the evil job.
Child kidnapping cases happen at the hands of a family member
- Out of all the total kid kidnapping incidents, mostly has done by family members, in which family abduction or taking of a child before adulthood against the legal rights of the person.
Kids kidnapping done by strangers
- Stranger abduction means that when an unknown person abducts or kidnaps a child for abusive purposes, it could be a pedophile, under the age of 17. Out of 1435 kidnapping cases in a year, 205 were done by strangers.
The common age of a typical stranger child kidnapping
- Female kids and teens (12 -17) were the commonly kidnapped or abducted group, and most of the female victims were those who did not want to live with their two parents, no matter what if parents are biological or adopted.
The child goes missing reports
- In the year of 2016, almost 465,676 children were reported missing, and in the same year, 647,435 people were reported missing to the authorities.
The child goes missing reports
- Every year, almost 2.8 million teens run away from their homes between the ages of 10 t0 18. Most of the teen’s runaways happen due to sexual abuse by anyone of the family members.
Tools & Technology for Parents to Prevent Child Kidnapping
Make ID Ready
None of the parents has the attitude that it might happen shortly that their child will be abducted or kidnapped. If parents have already made the information ready, such as keeping a child’s recent photos, school information, friends, hobbies, weight, height, age, and fingerprints. It would help the law enforcers to act fast.
Advantages & risks
Since cell phone technology has evolved, parents can easily connect with their children, and they can monitor their whereabouts using reliable parental control software and GPS location trackers. However, strangers can also take advantage of the technology and can track your child’s location. Therefore, guide your children not to share their location with strangers at least using social media apps in particular, and don’t post their private information on social media at all.
Safe technology usage
Cyberspace and social media apps, instant messenger, and websites have changed the course of kids’ living standards. Nowadays, young kids and teens don’t even consider to take consent from their parents to connect online with strangers and are unaware of the fact that the social digital world is full of predators, abusers, kidnappers, abductors, and pedophiles that can approach them online. Therefore, it is easy for the predators in terms of child kidnappers to get information about a child with their will by pretending to their friends.
The social messaging apps like Google Hangouts enable children to do secret group conversations, share location, and photos. Therefore, parents should keep a hidden eye on their children’s online safety to the next level with proper consent. They can guide children in monitoring activities on their social media is for their safety. Parents can monitor GPS location, read text messages, and monitor social media apps logs when needed.
We have briefly discussed the statistics alongside the references about child kidnapping, prevention tips, tools, and technology. Now we are going to discuss the common queries parents mostly ask from us.
Why do People Kidnap Children?
It happens most of the time that family members are the ones who kidnap children. It occurs due to the family issues when anyone of the parents got the custody of the child. The person who got the decisions against their will usually disagrees with the court decision and finally persuades and lure the child and take without getting permission from the former partner.
However, kidnapping by strangers takes place in which strangers kidnap children for ransom, sexual abuse activities, and murder a child, for sexual abuse only, but these sort of cases occurs but not as much as parental abduction does. Therefore, parents have to completely rethink their attitude, and they should do something to prevent any sort of child kidnapping, and in my opinion, there is nothing as good as technology tools that can do surveillance on your child’s location, real –life activities, and as well make sure digital safety.
Can Father Kidnap a Child?
Apart from strangers kidnapping a child, parental abduction over the years is on the rise, in which parents get separated and then fight in court to be a custodian. When the mother got the custody of the kids, most of the fathers didn’t agree with the law’s decision, and somehow they got their child from anywhere without the permission of the mothers.
Ultimately, mothers have to approach the law enforcement agencies, having a court order in their hands sue the father. However, incidents have taken place in which separated couples have had issues on the custodianship, but a stranger kidnapped their children for ransom and even for sexually abusive purposes, and parents got blamed.
Who is Most Likely to Kidnap a Child?
The kids who are more likely to get kidnapped are between the ages of 12 and 17, and 80% of the kids are abducted in this age. On the other side, behavior and irresponsibility are the major factors before a kidnapper thinks of getting the job done. Mostly teens and tweens who do believe in strangers online or in real life are more likely to get kidnapped.
Kids who don’t go to school with their parents, who used to spend most of the time outside the house with friends are also got kidnapped. Female kids ages 13 -17 are more likely to get kidnapped by the child traffickers who ultimately use them for prostitution, drug trafficking, and other purposes. Female teens who have the habit of running away from home and do not agree to stay with their parents usually get kidnapped.
How to Keep Your Child Safe from Abduction?
Having said that, parents need to keep an eye on their children and teens all the time, especially kids who love to explore things of the world in their surrounds. Parents should keep physical contact with the child while in the crowd.
Additionally, contemporary technology has made it possible for you to know what your kids are doing online, to whom they are talking on social media, cell phone calls, text messages and even what they are sharing online and to whom within seconds. However, parents can do surveillance on kids’ and teens’ GPS location, which provides parents pinpoint and exact location of the child by tracking their digital mobile phones.
Conclusion:
Parents should completely rethink their lazy and irresponsible attitude when it comes to their children’s safety. They can simply prevent child kidnapping by strangers, child abduction by family members, parental child kidnapping, and even protect them from child abusers with a parental monitoring app installed on their digital devices.
