The truth behind “460,000 kids go missing each year”
By Lenore Skenazy . . . Stunned joy is what most of us felt when we learned that Charlotte Sena, the 9-year-old abducted while riding her bike in upstate New York, has been found and returned to her family — alive.
The alleged perp has been seized, bringing the number of active Amber Alerts in the entire USA to… one: Keshawn Williams, a 15-year-old from Cleveland, not seen since June. One is one too many, obviously. But it is a far cry from the hundreds of thousands that the media mentioned in the coverage of Charlotte’s disappearance.
The Washington Post reported that “(a)bout 460,000 children in the United States
are reported missing each year, according to the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.”
The reporter added that “most are found and returned to safety.” But that phrasing made it seem to me, at least, as if “most” had been taken by someone, because “returned to safety” sounds as if the cops or someone else found the child and returned them to their parents. (And by the way, “most” seems to imply that at least a sizable chunk never made it home.)
Read the rest of the piece at creators.com.
