Suffer the Missing Children?

Taxpayer dollars continue to disappear while children don't.

Tadd Wilson from the November 1995 issue

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However, the center contends that runaways are missing children. NCMEC president Allen maintains that specific criteria for NCMEC cases are set up by Congress and the Justice Department. "We have no control," Allen says, citing guidelines which state that an "endangered runaway" is one who has been on the street more than 30 days, is less than 13 years of age, is prescription-drug dependent, or is in the company of someone considered a threat. According to Allen, these are not just "normal, routine runaways."

The center claims a 76 percent recovery rate in the few stranger abduction cases it does handle. However, 27 percent of the 391 listed as recovered between January 1, 1990 and June 30, 1995 have been found dead, yielding a live recovery rate of 55.3 percent. Of those lost, injured, or otherwise missing, the live recovery rate was 48 percent.

Bill Treanor, executive director of the American Youth Work Center, testified before the House Subcommittee on Human Resources two years after the NCMEC's 1984 creation that "the truth is that the Justice Department's NCMEC has a desperate supply probleman acute shortage of stranger-abducted children. Desperate to validate the raison d'être of the NCMEC, its leadership is currently engaged in an irresponsible effort to falsely build up the number of cases of stranger -abducted children." Treanor attacked the NCMEC and its federally funded allies for trying to "put the private organizations out of business," quoting "one embittered director of a legitimate private, volunteer organization" as asking: "Has the NCMEC and the Office of Juvenile Justice become the 'national center for exploiting missing children?'" NCMEC president Allen responds that Treanor "misses the context of what was set up. The intent of the effort was to create a national resource."

Although the NCMEC has backed off some of its mid-'80s scare tactics, it still responds to clear incentives to make the missing children problem appear as large as possible. First, while the NCMEC is a "private, nonprofit" organization, its existence is federally mandated by the Missing Children Assistance Act of 1984. The center works closely with the Justice Department, the Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and other government agencies, and has been described by Treanor as a "wholly-owned and controlled subsidiary" of the Office of Juvenile Justice.

Though the center maintains its official status as a private organization, it receives $3 million annually, nearly half (45 percent) of its budget, via a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. The center's funding depends upon its political appeal in Congress and appearance of necessity to the public: High numbers of missing children seem to justify the center's continued funding with federal tax dollars. Allen says that the center's melding of private sector know-how and public sector information is a "model Congress should look at for solving lots of problems."

Second, the center is associated with several for-profit private firms seeking to capitalize on the missing children problem. In August 1994, Preferred Contingency Insurance Services (PCIS), a Beverly Hills insurance company, began to offer non-custodial child abduction coverage, underwrit ten by Lloyds of London. The center, along with Paul Chamberlain International, a team of former FBI agents recognized as leaders in crisis negotiation and abduction investigation, worked closely with Preferred Contingency to develop the policy. Through a special arrangement with PCIS, the center receives 2.5 percent of the gross premiums collected. Coverage up to $100,000 can be pur chased, and the minimum premium is $5,000. Overestimated figures and public insecurity are very powerful means of inflating demand for such services.

Treanor maintains that "groups such as Child Find, Contact Center, and the National Child Safety Council can do the job better, cheaper, and without the kind of nauseating self-promotion campaign which has become the number one priority of the NCMEC." However, according to Allen, prior to 1984, there was "no mechanism for quick dissemination of information" concerning missing and exploited children. Allen defends the existence of a centralized national center, saying that there is a pressing need for "greater uniformity in response" among the 17,000 law-enforcement agencies spread throughout "50 states that act as 50 different countries."

Efficiency and taxpayer interests are not the only objections to some programs of the NCMEC and related organizations. Private access to FBI records raises serious questions for privacy rights, and though Allen emphatically denies the formation of a national database, centralization of informa tion and technology brings such a possibility closer to realization. Moreover, Allen favors a policy of requiring polygraph tests for parents reporting missing children, to avoid incidents such as the Susan Smith case.

The effects of the first wave of hysteria in the 1980s were immediately obvious. Renowned child doctor Benjamin Spock, a strong opponent of ID programs, maintained that the emotional trauma resulting from fingerprinting far outweighs any value that might come from the identification effort. In a 1985 Denver Post interview, Spock said that children understand that fingerprints are used to identify the victims of violent death, and that being fingerprinted gives them the impression that "children are being abducted all the time and that this child may be next." Nevertheless, state and local police (150,000 of whom have received "free" training from the NCMEC and the Justice Department) have conducted identification programs ranging from fingerprinting to placing serial numbers on children's teeth for bodily identification in the event of abduction and murder.

In addition to the immediate psychological trauma they inflict on individuals, fear-inducing numbers also have implications for society as a whole. Earlier this year after police came to his child's elementary school to encourage dental IDs, University of Texas criminologist Mark Warr responded, "Now what in the hell are we doing to the children of the United States, teaching them something like that? The probability of being abducted and murdered is less than a million to one, literally. And yet we're scaring the hell out of thousands and thousands of our kids. What happens is we end up with a society in which nobody trusts each other."

Unfortunately, after 10 years of research debunking the child-abduction hysteria, scare tactics still work.