I've just returned from a training seminar in Seattle dealing with how to put together a CART.  CART stands for Child Abduction Response Team.  Wichita and Sedgwick County already have an exploited and missing children's unit, but I was invited to join the EMCU team for a learning experience that I took a lot away from.

The seminar was funded by the US Department of Justice, which ranks recovering missing and endangered children as their 2nd top priority right behind countering terrorism.

We talked a lot about prior responses from other agencies across the country.  The Adam Walsh case.  Jessica Lunsford.  Natalie Holloway, etc.  Did you know that stranger abductions in the United States are extremely rare?  Familial abductions are the most common form of the crime.  Many times one parent has been granted sole custody of a child and the second parent becomes upset and finds the child and takes him/her.  In fact, there are an average of 204,000 reports of familial abductions in the United States every year!  An estimated 1.3 million children go missing each and every year either through running away or being kidnapped.  Those statistics blew me away.

Another form of child abduction that is common is when children are taken by people they have a relationship with or a person who has business in the area where the child has been kidnapped.  Like stranger abductions, ransom abductions are also very rare.

One of the hottest topics of the seminar dealt with the Internet.  I cannot stress enough how much parents need to monitor their child's Internet activity.  Obviously, when our kids get to be teens, they want/need their own privacy.  But time after time, when young teens are kidnapped, the investigation reveals that the child met their abductor and developed a relationship in Internet chat rooms.

Another thing that caught my attention was the fact that nearly half of the time when a child has been abducted and killed, the child was already dead by the time police had even been notified.  Many times, parents or guardians realized their child was missing, but searched for the child on their own for a few hours before becoming frantic enough to call police.  By that time, it was too late.

If there was one thing I took away from this training, it was that a parent cannot be too cautious in regards to their children's safety and security.  I hope I never have to report on another serious child kidnapping/abduction, but I know now that I will be better prepared to work with local law enforcement to do it in the right way.