National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Warns About Unsafe 'Back-to-Schooling'
You're more likely to be struck by a meteor than to have your kid abducted by a stranger.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) gets about $40 million a year in federal funding. It spends at least a few of those bucks crafting unnecessary emails like the one I got last week with the subject line: "Are your kids safely back-to-schooling?"
Not only is "back-to-schooling" not a verb, but also the question seems geared less toward making kids safe and more toward making parents terrified to ever let their kids leave the house.
Dear Lenore, the letter begins:
Routine bus stops, children biking or walking to school, and after-school pick-ups by parents are back all over America as we embark on another year of learning.
"While we are all excited for the year ahead, it is important to keep in mind one of the most important statistics we at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) know all too well—that attempted abductions occur more often when a child is going to or from school or school-related activities."
But why are we talking about attempted abductions at all? I get that kidnapping is NCMEC's calling card, but if we're really concerned about keeping kids safe on the way to school, why focus on the least likely of all dangers? Why not talk about pedestrian safety? Or the danger of driving the kids to school? After all, about 1,000 kids under age 14 die as car passengers each year.
Meanwhile, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics for 2019, just published this year, somewhere between 52 and 306 children were abducted by strangers in Law & Order style kidnappings. About 8 percent of them were killed.
Those cases are horrible and heartbreaking. They are also extremely rare, thank goodness. In a country of 73,000,000 minors, we're talking about 1 in 2.5 million. For comparison, National Geographic estimates that your chance of dying from a "local meteorite, asteroid or comet impact is" 1 in 1.6 million.
Maybe NCMEC should warn about that? Don't let your kids leave the house without an iron umbrella?
The email goes on to tell parents—in bold—that: "School-age children are at greatest risk on school days before and after school (7-9 a.m. and 3-4 p.m.) and after dinner time (6-7 p.m.)."
That makes it sound as if all children are at risk of being kidnapped anytime they are not sitting at home on the couch.
I asked NCMEC why it bothers warning parents about such rare events, and a spokesperson replied: "At NCMEC, our number one priority is the safety and protection of children.We are able to empower families with information to better protect their children and highlight the importance of having conversations about personal safety."
I agree that it's good to tell kids never to get into a car with strangers. Run, scream, etc. But these kids-are-in-danger-anytime-
The authorities act as if those parents put their kids in serious danger. I recently testified on behalf of a mom accused of neglect for letting her son play at the park for half an hour. The state's rebuttal was that it didn't matter how unlikely abduction was—as long as it was possible at all.
Just like the meteor strike.
We don't arrest parents for feeding their kids solid food, or living in a house with stairs, even though the very sad statistics show that 140 children choke to death each year, and about 100 die from falls. The authorities understand that, yes, rare tragedies happen, but we can't start criminalizing everyday life—except when it comes to giving kids some outdoors independence.
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LENORE SKENAZY is president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement.
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Lenore, do yourself and the world a favor: read about the Maturation of the adolescent brain. Brain development continues till age 25. IOW, no, children should not be allowed to free-range. Promoting childhood independence is reckless and Marxist.
Arain M, Haque M, Johal L, Mathur P, Nel W, Rais A, Sandhu R, Sharma S. Maturation of the adolescent brain. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2013;9:449-61. doi: 10.2147/NDT.S39776.
In that case then they should not be allowed to drive, vote marry, have kids or drink. Let’s make child support until 26. Next war they should all be exempt from the draft and their parents have legal guardianship over them. All credit cards and loans must be co-signed and the parents can take them as tax exemptions. Now let’s look at how many under that age are successful adults because their parents raised them that way instead of helicoptering. You like others forget you are not supposed to be raising children but adults. You believe a three year old can make major medical decisions concerning trans policies but in other areas children. Do you even see the irony here.
Changing genders, General; don’t forget changing genders.
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Gah! Accidentally flagged the comment for review! I blame Reason’s poor website quality, but apologize nonetheless.
That’s not much of an apology.
Doesn’t matter. Flagging does nothing.
Promoting independence is Marxist? Are you a parody or an idiot?
Could be both
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Both is more likely than not.
> Promoting childhood independence is reckless and Marxist.
Yes, instead let’s all send them to state schools for indoctrination.
Lenore, you need to have someone who knows something about basic math review your articles. You compared the annual probability of a child being killed in an abduction to the lifetime probability of being killed by a local meteorite, comet or asteroid.
Are you saying that SMOD isn’t coming?
Wasnt he killed at the end of the Hobbit? 😉
And that doesn’t even get into the straw man argument of conflating actual abductions by strangers with attempted abductions (which neither needed to have succeeded nor did they have to be strangers)
Also, she’s comparing fatal meteor accidents to non-fatal abductions. Why? Because non-fatal meteor accidents are almost never reported, and would run counter to her argument.
Zounds! Dost thou accuse Lenore of hearsay-splitting? Assume childhood is 1/7 of life expectancy and adjust the probability. Better yet, arm all girl students with guns or poison spray weapons. If they are called upon to rescue the occasional male child, fine.
She’s a sincere, kindly idiot. Someone who knows nothing, doesn’t know she is ignorant, and is sincerely happy to continue helping people and get paid for it.
This is the worst kind of idiot, because she will get some kid accosted or worse, all while saying, “that’s the exception that proves I’m right.”
I’m guessing that the kids who are abducted only experience this once in their lifetime as well…
In 2000 I helped a friend recover his daughters after he was awarded full custody. He took them and moved to a different part of the country. For over 10 years the girls were listed on NCMEC’s website as missing. They were never “missing”.
This is all about funding and fundraising.
Only $40 million?
What is that? 5 seconds interest on the debt?
Chump change.
The real threat is abduction by free-range meteorites.as noted by Jules Verne in Off On A Comet
So according to NCMEC, I am being a great dad by allowing my 9 year old to play video games all day and never leave the house. He thinks this would make me a great dad too!
We trace the action… The pedofilia is coming from… In side the school
Today’s American children have a lower life expectancy than their grandparents, and it’s not from unsafe “back-to-schooling.” It’s from obesity caused by sitting at home playing video games and having the bus pick them up on their front porch lest they walk ten feet. Toss in ceaseless propaganda about how racist they are and how awful their country is and you get an uneducated, hopeless, infantile generation of big government babies waiting for their universal basic income checks after five years of free college. You know whose kids went to school and went on fun trips the entire “pandemic”? Same people who were locking your kids at home.
Is NG really saying that 5000 people alive will die of meteor strikes?
That doesn’t sound right at all.
Also what’s with the between 50 and 350 estimate? That sounds pretty sketchy too.
It’s more like they’re saying there’s a 1 in 1.6 million chance in our lifetimes that a really big meteorite strike will literally wipe humanity out of existence.
Or to put it another way, on the average there’s an extinction level meteor hit every 112 million years. Doesn’t sound that unreasonable.
But whutabout the possibility of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children missing out on funding or donations? Lenore could spare a thought for their kids and bodyguards being chauffeured back and forth to chi-chi Academies and Lycées. It would be dreadful if the National Center itself were to have to abduct some kids to ramp up demand and prime that pump!
it didn’t matter how unlikely abduction was—as long as it was possible at all.
Reminds me of an ongoing debate I used to have with a friend who insisted that since some thing (I don’t remember what) *could* happen, then the chanced of it happening were by definition 50%. Since then, I have noted many examples of this sort of insane confusion of binary logic with probability – it’s one of the reasons that we have the frakin TSA groping us every time we try to get on a plane.
Ahh sho your friend is a climate scientist
If you are worried about falling meteors then dust off that old Atari 2600 in your closet and have your spawn play a few rounds of Asteroids. Problem solved. Have you played Atari today?