Summer is over and school is back in session. Parents are busy preparing their kids for the challenges they will face as they start the new school year. Unfortunately, child-molesting predators living and working in your neighborhood are also busy making plans and devising methods to gain access to your children.
There are over 600,000 registered molesters in the United States and more than 3,000,000 others that are unregistered. According to statistics from the National Center for Missing Children, over 10,000 of every 1,000,000 children will become missing this year (40% will never be found), that 's a 1 in 100 chance your child will be the next victim.
Imagine you are waiting at the bus stop for your five-year-old to return from Kindergarten. The bus arrives and unloads. Your child is not on the bus. Or, you look out into the back yard where your daughter was playing just a moment ago. You don't see her anywhere. You call out for her, but she doesn't answer. These are just a few of over one million similar situations that occur each year. It's every parent's worst nightmare.
In this moment of crisis, would you know what to do? Who do you call first? Should you go out looking? Or, is it better to just stay home and wait? Making the right choice can mean the difference between finding your child alive, dead or not at all. Sure, this information is frightening, but it's also true. Pretending that these things don't happen is not the way to protect our children, but educating them is. If we don't educate our children with the latest information, they'll continue to be at risk.
You may be aware of ID programs, fingerprints and DNA kits. However, you may not know that these programs do nothing to prevent a child from becoming missing. In fact, many police detectives feel that these programs contribute to the problem. Parents participate in an "ID" program and think, "now my child is safe," when nothing could be further from the truth. The Amber Alert is a great program for missing children recovery efforts, but less than 1% of missing children cases qualifies for the issue of an Amber Alert.
Americans seem to place little value on the safety and protection of their children. You can tell what an individual values most by looking at his or her checkbook. We spend hundreds of dollars monthly insuring our cars, our homes and other possessions, as well as for such services as digital or cable TV and cell phones. All of these items are replaceable, and yet we balk at the ideal of investing in the safety of our most precious possessions, our children. Our children's life cannot be replaced! We seemingly place more value on protecting our "things" than on protecting our children. What will it take to open parents' eyes to the growing problem of missing children in America?
