4 ms·

I'd like to see a list showing each kidnapping, the motive of the kidnapper, and the result of the situation. Is it mostly for sexual abuse? Child labor? What

• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• neilk 17y ago
  Are you talking about the 115 abductions by strangers? Can you even get statistically significant results out of that small sample?
  • jibiki 17y ago
    It's not really a small sample, is it? You're sampling (allegedly) 100% of the stranger abductions in the United States, so your sample is perfectly representative of stranger abductions in the United States. But yeah, I would expect the numbers to change quite a bit from year to year.
  • throw_away 17y ago
    It's a sufficiently small sample that we could study each case, figure out how it may have been prevented, and maybe get the metric up from four nines to five. Also, I wonder what the historic measures are. Back in the eighties, we weren't coddled nearly this much, but there was a reasonable amount of crime. How many children were abducted then?
    • scott_s 17y ago
      When you're already at 115 out of all of the children in the United States, there's not much else you can do that a free society would accept. (There are things that, unfortunately, a free society does accept, but I doubt those have an actual impact.) It's similar to school buses and child fatalities. On the face of it, making school buses safer sounds like a noble goal and something we should do. But when you consider that less than a dozen children die each year in school bus accidents out of, again, all children in the United States, there's probably not much that can be done. (Source: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-there-no-seatbelts-on-school-buses http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-there-...)
      • throw_away 17y ago
        I agree that there probably aren't any top-down things at a societal level that can be done, but I'm not convinced that this information wouldn't be useful for parents who want their kids to be independent, but to take the proper precautions. For example, were the children lured or were they forcibly taken? Were they alone? How old were they? If there is info on failed attempts, how did the child get away? If I had children, I wouldn't want them to live a sheltered life and, obviously, there are a lot of common-sense precautions, but I still think that analysis of this information could be useful to the public.
      • maxwell 17y ago
        Only if the circumstances of the abductions were random, which seems doubtful. If, say, a significant number of those kids were taken by strangers in cars who lured them over verbally, simply informing parents to push the "Don't talk to strangers" bit might alone prevent some future occurrences. Just because the number is small relative to the overall population size doesn't mean that there isn't some correlation between many of the incidents, on which some acceptable measures could be taken.
• elai 17y ago
  A good chunk of the time, it's the result of a divorced/estranged parent trying "get" their child back.