With the fresh exposure given to the subject of missing children recently after the recovery of two Missouri boys, the media has been full of statistics. Big, scary, ominous statistics. One of the biggest (scariest, most ominous) numbers I've heard bandied about on the news is this: 800,000. That is, according to various news outlets, the number of children that disappear in the United States every year.
800,000? Holy crap, that's a lot of kids! But are those statistics we're hearing, most of which are attributed to "experts" and "sources", accurate? Slate Magazine's Explainer column gets to the bottom of the question, and the results are, to me, simultaneously comforting and unnerving: 800,000 happens to be pretty damn close to the number of children reported missing in a twelve-month period in 2002. However, that takes into account a lot of different definitions of "missing", which Slate Explainer breaks down. Most of those reports weren't abductions of any kind, and most of the reports that were abductions were, as we're also frequently informed by the media, family related. Slate also notes the grey areas within the categories themselves.
The number of "stereotypical kidnappings", those that involve ransom, the intent to keep a child permanently, or death? 115. That puts those boys in Missouri in rare company, indeed.
