What might surprise parents about child abduction?

    Published: 06-16-2009
    Views: 13,472
    Nancy McBride from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children talks about what might surprise parents about child abduction.

    Host: What might surprise parents about child abduction?

    Nancy McBride: I think parents or guardians would be surprised to know that the people who are abducting children are generally somebody that are/is known to the family in some capacity. Certainly, we have family abductions in which one of the parents abducts the child, usually in a custody dispute. But we also have also situations where it might be an acquaintance of the family or someone known to the family but not part of that family.

    We call those non-family abductions, but there is still that segment of the population that is known to the family unlike the random individual who might be driving around in a car. We would all like to believe that there is a faceless, nameless person and that is the greatest danger to kids. That is very dangerous when we have a person like that who is randomly abducting kids, but that is the smallest segment of the population of people who abduct and I think we really need to change our view point and change our ideas about what the real dangers are to children, address those random individuals but also make sure that we are taking every precautions to make sure kids are safe even from people they know.