The two Amish girls abducted in Oswegatchie is a close-to-home reminder of the missing and abducted children problem in this country. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s law enforcement agencies entered just under 800,000 missing children cases into the National Crime Information database in 2012. These cases are categorized as follows:

1. The majority of missing children have misunderstood directions from their parents or caregivers, miscommunicated their plans to parents or caregrivers, are lost or have run away. Two-thirds of runaways are between 15 and 17 years of age, and almost all runaways return home.

2. Approximately 200,000 children are removed from their homes annually via family or parental abductions. This occurs when a family member takes or keeps a child in violation of the custodial parent or guardian’s legal rights. Family members become abductors for a number of reasons: They disagree with the custodial decision, they have been denied visitation for not paying child support, they believe they are protecting the child from abuse, and/or they are angry as a consequence of the relationship breakup.

3. In one of the most comprehensive studies of non-family abducted children, sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues examined available information on 58,200 such abductions in 1999. According to the FBI, there are two subcategories of these crimes:

-A non-family member takes a child via physical force or the threat of bodily harm, or detains the child for at least one hour in an isolated area by the use or threat of force without lawful authority or parental permission.

-A child younger than 15 years of age is taken or detained or voluntarily accompanies a non-family perpetrator who conceals the child’s whereabouts, demands a ransom or expresses his/her intention to keep the child permanently.

Based on their research, Finkelhor and his associates offer the following victim and perpetrator characteristics associated with non-family abductions. These findings are informative and, to some extent, instructive to parents:

-Four of five victims were age 12 or older, and almost two-thirds were female.

-Close to half of all victims were sexually assaulted, and a third were otherwise physically assaulted.

-Two of every three perpetrators were under 30 years of age, with a significant number of these individuals between 13 and 19 years old. Three of four abductors were males.

-While most kidnapping prevention strategies focus on the dangers posed to children by strangers, just over half of non-family abductions were committed by individuals known to the child, including friends, long-term acquaintances, persons in authority, neighbors, caretakers and babysitters.

-About 1 in 5 non-family abductions involved two or more perpetrators.

-Most abductions occurred in streets, parks or wooded areas. Almost one in five victims were taken from their homes or yards, or the homes and yards of others.

-A weapon usually a knife or a gun was used in 40 percent of non-family abductions, and a ransom was demanded in 4 percent of these cases.

4. The final category, stereotypical kidnapping, is a subset of non-family abducted children and refers to a narrower range of more serious crimes perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance. These crimes are labeled stereotypical because they are what most people think of upon hearing of an abducted child. Fortunately, this type of abduction is rare. Finkelhor notes there were approximately 115 such cases in 1999, with experts of the opinion this figure has not changed significantly in recent years. The victim is detained minimally overnight, held for ransom, abducted with the intent of keeping the child permanently, or killed. In approximately 50 percent of cases, the child is taken by two or more perpetrators. In about 40 percent of these abductions, the child is killed.

The FBI has become increasingly involved in non-family abductions and now has five regional CARD (Child Abduction Rapid Deployment) teams designed to investigate these events soon after the incident is reported to the bureau. CARD teams are comprised of agents with extensive experience dealing with violent crimes against children.

The subject of missing children has attracted the ranting of extremist groups and individuals who spin bizarre conspiracy theories. One such theory states the Newtown, Connecticut, mass murder that left 20 children dead in December 2012 was an elaborate hoax. These children were not gunned down; rather, they were kidnaped and sold into white slavery. Beginning in 1980, a “satanic panic” swept the United States and Canada. Proponents argued vociferously (especially on conservative talk radio) that as many as 60,000 children a year, most of them abducted, were being sacrificed by clandestine Satanic cults. The panic died in the mid 1990s as social scientists, police and prosecutors failed to uncover hard evidence substantiating abduction-for-sacrifice claims.

A related explanation as to the whereabouts of many abducted children is offered by Ted Gunderson, a former FBI agent. Gunderson believes that a secret CIA front group known as the Finders kidnaps “young children throughout the U.S.” Members of this organization “are trained government kidnappers known to be sexual degenerates who involve the kidnapped children in satanic sex orgies … as well as the murder of other children and the slaughter of animals.” The Finders use a fleet of unmarked vans to snatch children from parks and schoolyards across the country.

Jews are often the villains in conspiracy theories and figure prominently in fantastical explanations of missing children. In an interview with a so-called Rabbi Abe Finkelstein (no information regarding his affiliation or where and when this interview occurred), who for some reason decided to come clean about a sinister Jewish kidnapping operation, an especially bizarre conspiracy theory emerged. Finkelstein states that “we take children of our enemy, which is the white race, and we take them to basements of synagogues where we drain the blood and watch them die. … Then we mix it with a Passover bread, and so we eat the blood of our enemies.”

The blood-drained bodies (between 100,000 and 300,000 annually, according to Finkelstein) are then sold to slaughterhouses where they are turned into sausages and hamburger meat, most of it going to McDonald’s. Finkelstein states that Americans “are eating their children for breakfast and lunch.” Using the mid-range 200,000-a-year figure times 20 years means as many as 4 million children have been consumed at the Golden Arches.

The Internet has facilitated the distribution of these moronic explanations that, unfortunately, many people believe. They detract attention from the seriousness of the abducted child phenomenon as well as the efforts of law enforcement agencies from local police to the FBI to combat this problem. The FBI has a created a brochure entitled “A Parents Guide to Internet Safety” to inform parents about the dangers of Internet-related deductions. It s available at www.fbi.gov/stats-service/publications/parent-guide.

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P.S.: Check out “Blood Sacrifice for McDonald’s” on YouTube. The contrived (and very bad) stereotypical New York City Jewish accent of the unseen Rabbi Finkelstein is pathetically funny.

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale, retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego. He is the co-author (with Steven E. Barkan) of “Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice: What Every American Should Know,” Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2014.

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Sources:

“Facts and Stats About Missing Children” (accessed 2014), Child Find of America Inc., www.childfindofamerica.com

“Jews murder children and sell the meat to McDonald’s” (accessed 2014), Snopes, www.snopes.com

Finkelhor, D., H. Hammer and A Sedlak (2002), “Nonfamily Abducted Children: National Estimates and Facts,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org

“National Kidnaping Facts” (accessed 2014) Polly Klaas Foundation, www.pollyklass.org

“Non-Family Child Abductions” (2013), Federal Bureau of Investigation, www.fbi.gov

“Sandy Hook kids to be sacrificed tonight” (accessed 2014) David Icke, www.davidicke.com

“Satanic Ritual Abuse” (accessed 2014), Religious Tolerance, Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, www.religioustolerance.org

“Shocking declaration from Jewish Rabbi: You are eating your children in sausages and hamburgers!” (accessed 2014), Pragmatic Witness, www.whitewraithe.wordpress.com