In this week’s Chronicle we have a report about fears that a car — in this case, an Audi — was trying to abduct children. It turned out to be a 17-year-old boy who has been “spoken to” by police, a phrase that possibly suggests something akin to Alex Ferguson’s hairdryer.
I’m not saying these things never happen or that parents shouldn’t be vigilant about people trying to abduct children, but the fact is that abductions by strangers are incredibly rare.
I checked, and the established figure seems to be roughly 50 children abducted by strangers each year (there are 12 million people under 16 in this country), although the stats note that the police picture of child abduction is incomplete.
Surveys suggest that roughly one in every 100 children experiences a stranger trying to lure them away in order to do them harm, and one in every 600 children will, at some point in their childhood, be made to go with a stranger.
Action Against Abduction claims that most of these cases are sexually motivated. Many attempted abductions are not reported to police.
However, offences by strangers are rare — the NSPCC says that more than 90% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child.
Another study I found said that children may be taken for trafficking, but being abducted or kidnapped is a simplistic view. This might be the scenario in a small number of cases, but the most common situation is that children are recruited and controlled through physical and psychological means — such as assault, preying on their fears of the police and immigration detention, or offering false promises. It’s not just cars parents have to watch for, but changes in behaviour.
Journalists tend to be a little unsure about reports of “attempted abductions” — although sadly, it makes good clickbait, so is more likely to be written up in dramatic terms.
A long time ago I worked in Lancashire, and we used to go to see Lancashire Constabulary’s finest in the morning to do “police calls” — a journalistic phenomenon now vanished because of technology.
As an aside, my first job was to go down to Malvern police station to be given a large ringbinder full of all the incidents over the previous 24 hours, and the police trusted me to lift the ones we could use — everything from sheep in the road to burglaries and the rest. It’s a shame we no longer have access to that grassroots information.
Anyway, we used to wander down to our Lancs Constabulary outpost to see what was occurring, and for a period it was alleged abductions by people pretending to be social workers. The first couple we reported seriously, but then alarm bells started to ring.
Older readers may remember this — a national panic in the early ’90s about children being approached by women who said they were from social services and that the children should go with them.
Eventually, the police told us they thought it was all just made up and that none of it ever happened. Or perhaps one incident happened and it propagated itself (I’m not sure how — we had no social media in those dark, barbaric times).
We also had reports of devil worship, and I know the police spent some time digging several sites.
From memory, one poor child was found in the River Thames who may have been ritually killed in an African folk religion ceremony, but soon there were reports of devil worshippers in Lancashire murdering children willy-nilly.
I can’t remember how much of it was on the record, but several sites were examined and nothing found, and again the police concluded it was largely made up.
Back to the modern day, the figures show that three-quarters of stranger child abductions are perpetrated against girls, and victims of attempted stranger abduction have an average age of 11 years.
Nearly half of attempted abductions by a stranger involve physical contact. While most children suffer no injury, many are grabbed, dragged or held.
Victims of completed abduction (with a clear sexual motive) have an average age of 14 years, and roughly two-thirds of abductions by a stranger involve a perpetrator in a car.
A long time ago, a member of staff at a nursery — declining to give us names for a caption — said she knew the risk of being abducted was tiny to negligible, but if it did happen and something happened, she would feel terrible, which is not irrational and probably reflects how parent feel, although the danger is no greater now that it ever was.
I read once that the fear of abduction was ramped up with the disappearance and murder of 10-year-old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, England. That was back in 2002 and, because they were pretty and blonde, they were in the newspapers for weeks, spreading fear about roaming predators taking children.
Yet, as in most cases, the killer was known to the girls — and his girlfriend was their teaching assistant. The killer used this familiarity to lure them into his house, proving that “danger” can come from familiar faces, not strangers, echoing the NSPCC’s point.
A study by Huddersfield University, reported by the BBC back in 2002, said that more than one in five children claimed they had been approached by a paedophile while away from home — yet in the main, they knew the person involved.
So while journalistic cynicism that it never happened is probably to far the other way, and vigilance is sensible, the panic is rarely proportionate — and the real dangers often lie much closer to home.
