Stranger Abduction Research Articles

Examining 19 years of officially reported child abduction incidents (1995–2013): employing a four category typology of abduction

Child abduction has generated extensive media attention due to deep-seated fear elicited by infamous incidents. Perceptions of an abduction epidemic during the 1970s and 80s entrenched a perception of ‘stranger danger’. Limited research on child abduction overemphasizes stranger abductions, which account for fewer than half of all abductions. As a result, less is known about the victim/abductor relationship across other abduction types. Prior work has emphasized simplistic stranger vs. family dichotomies, and similar trichotomies. This study, drawing on officially reported child abductions employing NIBRS datasets (N = 29,293), emphasizes differences across abductors/victims in a four category relationship-based typology, including a newer category – ‘intimate partner abductions’. Findings contribute baseline knowledge about child abductions by countering misplaced media driven fears and placing empirical findings in a more accurate context. Findings also reveal that intimate partner abductions have a unique victim/offender/incident profile and are the most serious and most consequential to adolescent female victims.

Explaining gender differences in jurors' reactions to child sexual assault cases.

In three experiments, we investigated the influence of juror, victim, and case factors on mock jurors' decisions in several types of child sexual assault cases (incest, day care, stranger abduction, and teacher-perpetrated abuse). We also validated and tested the ability of several scales measuring empathy for child victims, children's believability, and opposition to adult/child sex, to mediate the effect of jurors' gender on case judgments. Supporting a theoretical model derived from research on the perceived credibility of adult rape victims, women compared to men were more empathic toward child victims, more opposed to adult/child sex, more pro-women, and more inclined to believe children generally. In turn, women (versus men) made more pro-victim judgments in hypothetical abuse cases; that is, attitudes and empathy generally mediated this juror gender effect that is pervasive in this literature. The experiments also revealed that strength of case evidence is a powerful factor in determining judgments, and that teen victims (14 years old) are blamed more for sexual abuse than are younger children (5 years old), but that perceptions of 5 and 10 year olds are largely similar. Our last experiment illustrated that our findings of mediation generalize to a community member sample.

Playing Politics with Sex Offender Laws: An Event History Analysis of the Initial Community Notification Laws acrossAmerican States

Despite a decline in crime rates, the 1990s witnessed extensive media coverage of several high‐profile stranger abductions and murders of children. State legislators' swift response to the public's growing fear of sex offenders with the adoption of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws raises questions about the role of politics. Punctuated equilibrium theory and the diffusion of innovation jointly provide a context to conduct an event history analysis to assess the extent to which politics enhanced legislative responsiveness to public opinion inSORNpolicymaking. Contrary to the commonly held belief that attributes legislative interest inSORNto salient crimes against children, the results suggest that factors such as the percentage of a conservative population, district‐level competition, and state innovativeness accelerated the diffusion of innovation of the laws.

Trusting Others ‐ How Parents Shape the Generalized Trust of Their Children

AbstractHow do parents in North America inculcate generalized values about trusting others in their children? Using a self-collected data set with over 1,400 children sampled in the U.S. and Canada as well as matching surveys and selective in-depth interviews with their parents, this article attempts to link parental child-rearing approaches and values to children’s generalized trust. We find that over the last decades children increasingly score lower on generalized trust than their parents. Moreover, most parents, independent of their own trust levels, attempt to instill in their children distrust in unknown people. This trend is potentially rooted in a dramatic rise in news reporting about child crime and stranger abduction. The thesis of this article is that drastic warnings about strangers and related child-rearing methods may not remain without consequences.

A Preliminary Examination of AMBER Alert's Effects

AMBER Alerts are public announcements designed to elicit citizen tips that could help rapidly recover abducted children before they can be harmed by their kidnappers. Using various media accounts as a data source to garner a convenience sample of 275 alerts, the authors gathered basic information, including victim–offender relationship, recovery time, and the direct effects of the alert. AMBER Alert does appear to provide some positive benefits in recovering abducted children, although the evidence suggests that the alerts are not often used in “stereotypical” stranger abduction cases, and rarely do they appear to have the effect of possibly saving lives. The alerts appear most likely to be “successful” in familial abduction situations instead of the more menacing stranger abduction cases for which they were intended. Policy implications are discussed.

Reconsidering the Leading Myths of Stranger Child Abduction

This paper addresses the two foremost myths of child abduction: (1) that it is generally committed by strangers; and (2) that the phenomenon is a growing problem. These commonly held views are considered in light of the extant empirical knowledge base, including the recently released NISMART‐2 study. Research indicates that stranger abduction occurs less frequently than family abduction or acquaintance abduction; stereotypical stranger abductions are rarer still, and stereotypical stranger abductions resulting in homicide are extraordinarily rare. There is no evidence of a stranger‐abduction epidemic, and there is no clear evidence for a child abduction epidemic overall. There is, however, strong evidence that parental abduction is widespread. Assessment of the extant knowledge base suggests the need for: (1) national longitudinal studies with consistent typologies and methodologies which could determine the scope and trend of child abduction; (2) increased efforts to verify interview data to avoid overestimation; (3) theoretical construction to predict/explain abduction behaviors; and (4) migration of new elaborated typologies into NIBRS and especially UCR data collection.

Children as Victims of Violence

Violence against children and youths has always occurred, but it has recently been subject to increased public attention. This heightened attention is spawned by high-profile cases of stranger abductions, sexual assault, child abuse, and homicide, and by statistics suggesting an increase in the number of cases of child victimization. For example, newspapers recently reported that almost twice as many individuals under age 20 (5,500) died from gunshots in 1993 as in 1984. 1 But deaths, while the most dramatic of victimizations, are only the tip of the iceberg. More frequently, children are abused and neglected by parents, assaulted by siblings, or intimidated by other children. When all of these types of victimization are considered as a whole, children suffer far more victimizations than do members of other age groups. Children are more prone to victimization than adults not only because they are smaller and weaker than adults but also because they are dependent on adults for their day-to-day care and can seldom choose where and with whom they will live and spend time. Problems such as neglect, family abduction, and psychological maltreatment are strongly related to dependency, and these are much more common for children than for most adults. As children age, they become more independent, so the types of victimizations that they are most at risk for change, and the risks arise more from associations with other youths than from dependency on adults. 2 The concept of children as victims brings together the disparate studies of child abuse, sexual abuse, kidnapping, and other forms of violence with studies of such victimizations as assaults by siblings and peer violence. This integration highlights the number of victimizations that children face and may make it easier to identify relationships among different kinds of victimization and to design appropriate interventions. 2 Ultimately, however, defining and measuring child victimization as an integrative category of experiences is useful only if doing so leads to a better understanding of the

Preventing Parental Child Abduction: Analysis of a National Project

Recent data from a study indicate that child abduction by a parent is up to six times more frequent than previous estimates had suggested. Relative to parental child abductions, stranger abductions occur on a very infrequent basis. While much attention has been placed on prevention programs for stranger abductions, prevention programs for parental child abduction have been nonexistent. The present study analyzes data from a national hotline program that targeted prevention of parental child abduction. Data were collected on 86 consecutive telephone calls from parents contemplating abduction of their child(ren). These data provide information on demographic variables, level of interparental conflict/violence, reasons for contemplating abduction, and abduction plans. Data are also presented that indicate a mediation program may be effective in preventing some cases of parental child abduction. However, such a mediation program is a very difficult course of action and impacts only a small percentage of parental child abduction cases.