Host: What age group and gender are most at risk for being abducted?
Nancy McBride: In our attempted abduction study, we do learn that girls are more at risk for attempted abductions than boys. And the age group for the attempted abductions is 10 to 14 years old and if you think about it, it really make sense because this is a time when kids maybe out and about more, they maybe on the streets going to and from school or playing, so it is an age range that makes a lot of sense, certainly, younger kids are going to be supervised more often by a parent or guardian than this particular age group.
We also know that in this country approximately 58,000 children are abducted every year by non-family members and what that means is that it's not a biological relative to the child. This could be an acquaintance, this could be somebody who knows the child and may even live with the child but is not a family member. And out of that 58,000, we have about 115 kids who are considered the stereotypical abduction, meaning, that a random individual abducted that child, a stranger if you will, and kept that child, took that child to certain distance, might have tried to get a ransom for the child or unfortunately might have murdered the child.
These are also the cases that we referred to as a long term missing cases in which we know something happened to a child, they were abducted by a non-family member but unfortunately, they have not been recovered yet.
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