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How Safe Are Our Children? By Gillian Bodwitch 9/2/05 |
The
abduction of a child by a total stranger is a crime so rare that when it does happen, the entire country holds its breath and silently prays for a positive conclusion to the police investigations. Parents know that, given the potential dangers their children face — road accidents, coming into contact with drugs and alcohol, street violence — abduction is simply a possibility too remote to worry about.
Yet when it comes to The
children's safety, emotional intelligence, instinct, primeval knowledge — call it what you will — kicks in and overpowers rational thought. We understand that it is unlikely that any child we are acquainted with will ever be snatched, but the fear of stranger abduction lurks near the top of our concerns whenever our children are more than ten minutes late.
"It is the thing that many parents are most scared of, because it is the thing they are least able to control," says Elizabeth Bruce of
the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which campaigns to raise awareness of personal safety issues.
Academics, childcare experts and the police are all keen to reassure parents, particularly in the aftermath of a tragedy such as the murder of 11-year-old Rory Blackhall in Livingston. Yet little-publicized research recently carried out by the Home Office suggests that abduction and
attempted abduction of children by strangers has increased dramatically in the last few years.
Child Abduction: Understanding Police Recorded Crime Statistics by Geoff Newiss and Lauren Fairbrother, analyses data from five police forces in England and Wales and comes up with shocking findings.
"Attempted abductions by strangers were the largest single type of
child abduction, involving 47 per cent of cases," the authors say. "The number of these offences appears to have increased dramatically since 2001-2." According to the report, the most common scenario was a lone man attempting to entice a child into a car or physically attempting to drag a child from a public place. The most likely victims of such crimes, says the report, are white, ten-year-old girls.
Between 2001-2 and 2002-3 there was an increase of 160 per cent in the number of successful and
attempted abductions of children by strangers across the five police forces. In the latter year, there were 445 such crimes recorded in the whole of England and Wales. Changes in the way police record crime may have contributed to the massive rise but, even if that is the case, it is little comfort. The research shows that this type of crime is much more common than we have previously been led to believe.
All abductions of children — including
parental abductions or crimes in which a child knows their abductor — rose 45 per cent in the year to 2002-3. A further increase of 12 per cent last year, which took the figure to more than 1,000 in England and Wales for the first time, scuppers the theory that the rise in child snatching and attempted child snatching is a one-off blip due to changes in the way these crimes are logged. In Scotland, Scottish Executive figures suggest that abductions of children, whoever the perpetrator, have remained constant at around 350 a year for the last five years.
The Home Office research quashes the myth that most snatching of British children is the result of tug-of-love custody battles. Abductions and attempted abductions by strangers account for half of all cases, while parental abductions account for less than a quarter.
Abductions by people children know, including "grooming" by pedophiles, accounts for just over a fifth.
So why has the dramatic rise in
attempted child abductions by strangers gone unnoticed and unreported for so long? Part of the reason is that, when attempted abductions fail, the intended victim is rarely harmed and prosecution is extremely unlikely, so in the past these crimes have not always been meticulously recorded. The Home Office research shows that in only 87 per cent of attempted abductions, the perpetrator is identified. While successful abduction of children by strangers receives massive publicity, attempted abductions are rarely reported nationally.
Four weeks ago a man in Leicester tried to snatch a three-year-old girl who was in the care of her teenage sister. Two days later in Darlington, two men in a white van tried to entice two schoolboys to come with them with the offer of "a really good job." In June in Darlington there were eight suspected child abduction attempts involving white van drivers. None of them made the national news. It seems that for every victim there are dozens more who have had a narrow escape, which we never hear about.
Source: news.scotsman.com |
