How Parents Can Help Prevent Abductions

Seatbelts in the car. Helmets on the bicycle. Bug repellant in the great outdoors. Like most situations involving a child, taking steps to help prevent harm is the best thing you can do.

After all the years of being taught “Stranger Danger,” it may come as a surprise to know that the opposite comes more recommended. In child abduction cases, most perpetrators are known to the victim. Therefore, it is important to know who your child is with, to be aware of who may have access to your child, to understand that a child’s definition of “stranger” may be different than yours, and so on. For example: Would your child know that accepting a ride from an acquaintance, perhaps someone you regularly chat with when you see them at the store, is unsafe?

Ask your child questions about the people in their lives who you may not know in a way that encourages openness and honesty. New friends are made every day.

It may start to sound arduous in this day and age of busy lives, but the extra involvement can make a difference.

Have you run a background check on the babysitter? Are the parents there when your child is at a friend’s house, and have you spent any time getting to know those parents? Is a troubled relative picking them up from school? Has a non-custodial parent been consistently angered by their lack of custody? Is your child on the Internet?

The Internet is more public than the mall. Using sites like MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, Friendster, AIM and many others, children are easily creating their own webpages for the world to see. Since MySpace is the most popular — a virtual phenomenon — that will be our example.

Millions of people use MySpace, a social networking website that makes surfing for new and old friends fairly simple, especially when having around 100 friends means that you are connected to close to 200 million people by way of your friend’s connections.

Be aware of what is happening on your child’s page. Make sure it is set to private so that only their friends can see its content; But, remember that their main photo, their chosen screen name and/or URL, their chosen tagline, their sex, their age, their location, their last log-in date, and their chosen mood/emoticon are items on MySpace that can still be seen by the general public next to that banner that reads, “This profile is set to private. This user must add you as a friend to see his/her profile.”

Is your child’s public information appropriate? With MySpace having identified and removed 29,000 registered sex offenders’ profiles in July, you’ll want to be aware of how your child is portraying themselves on the World Wide Web. Is their default picture of them and their friends at the pool in their swimsuits? Is their URL “www.myspace.com/sexygurl12”? Is their mood set to “horny”? Is their tagline…well, I think you get the picture.

Either have complete access to your child’s profile, i.e. knowing their password, or make your own profile and make sure you are added as one of their friends. If they object to your seeing what’s on their page and want their privacy, then the rest of the world probably shouldn’t be seeing it, either.

Still, you can’t know everything, you can’t be around all the time, you can’t make any assumptions, and you can’t have many expectations. But you can do your best. Arm yourself with knowledge and preparation.

The AmberAlert.com Child ID Drive is a password protected and encrypted portable USB device for storing details about your child in the event of them being abducted, missing or lost. Using a device such as this can have you and law enforcement more prepared than ever, and speed up the investigation and recovery process. It can even contain their MySpace address.