Parents have the ability to empower their children against abduction by educating them about the dangers of strangers and helping their children to help themselves. There were more than 950,000 missing persons reported in 1998, according to the Agency for Missing and Exploited Children. Of those, the FBI estimates that 85 to 90 percent were children.

Most parents will admit that their greatest fear is their children being abducted. To help prevent this nightmare from becoming a reality, parents can educate their children. Parents already take many precautions to protect their families and their children: installing and maintaining smoke and carbon monoxide detectors; composing and practicing fire escape plans; immunizing their children; requiring that children wear safety belts when in a car and that they wear helmets and pads while riding bicycles, skateboards or in-line skates; and checking Halloween candy before allowing their children to eat it.
“Don’t be afraid to speak to your children,” Jones says. “Education is truly the greatest weapon they can have. Children do not have to be scared to be prepared. Listen to your children and practice with them what they would do in certain situations.

Compliment them on their good thinking and good sense. Make them feel comfortable and empowered with the knowledge that they get so that they will feel capable of using it in the event of a problem.” Make a point of not calling them ’strangers’ because people who abduct can appear very nice and can even be someone sort of familiar. You can also run drills on what to say and how to act, to run and scream and get attention from a trusted adult — a parent, grandparent or teacher.

In the event that a child is believed to be missing, parents must act quickly. “If a parent even has the slightest suspicion that anything has happened to their child they should notify the police immediately,” Jones says. “There is absolutely no time to waste — quick response is imperative. Retracing their child’s steps is also extremely important to establish when and where something has occurred, but this should be happening simultaneously to contacting the police.”

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Family Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.