9-Year-Old Kidnapping Victim Charlotte Sena Recovered Safely

Let's celebrate her return without exaggerating the relevant dangers; stranger abductions are rare.

Charlotte Sena, the 9-year-old abducted while riding her bike in upstate New York, has been found alive and returned to her family.

Authorities also seized the alleged perpetrator after finding his fingerprints on the ransom note he sent through the mail. When police raided his home, they found Sena there.

The joyous resolution of this event brings the number of active Amber Alerts in the U.S. to a grand total of one: Keshawn Williams, a 15-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio. One missing child is obviously still tragic—but it's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of missing children wrongly tallied by the media during coverage of Sena's disappearance.

The Washington Post, for instance, reported that "about 460,000 children in the United States are reported missing each year, according to the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention."

The reporter added that "most are found and returned to safety." That phrasing made it seem as if "most" had been taken by someone, because "returned to safety" implies that the cops or someone else found the children. It also suggests that a sizable chunk never made it home.

In fact, the number of stranger abductions every year is somewhere between 52 and 306.

The 460,000 number just can't survive a reality check. In a country with nearly 50 million kids of elementary school age, half a million abductions would mean a couple of children per elementary school were snatched (and later found) each year. By the time your kids graduated fifth grade at a medium-sized school, they would have had several abducted schoolmates. Obviously, this is not the case.

Need more statistics? According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the number of children abducted by strangers in 2022 whose cases remained open is three. Another 98 were "resolved." These numbers are dwarfed by the number of runaways—over 25,000—and family abductions (kids taken during custody disputes between separated parents), of which there were 1,500.

Stranger abduction is every parent's nightmare. But for the sake of our own sanity, we must try hard not to let it dictate every single parenting decision.

For instance, some parents might fear to let their kids walk to school on their own and choose to drive them. But far more children die from car accidents than from kidnappings. Keeping kids cooped up has other ill effects, including negative impacts on their mental health.

Let's celebrate Charlotte Sena's safe return—without overstating the relevant dangers.