Introduction

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is committed to improving the justice system's response to crimes against children. OJJDP recognizes that children are at increased risk for crime victimization. Not only are children the victims of many of the same crimes that victimize adults, they are subject to other crimes, like child abuse and neglect, that are specific to childhood. The impact of these crimes on young victims can be devastating, and the violent or sexual victimization of children can often lead to an intergenerational cycle of violence and abuse. The purpose of OJJDP's Crimes Against Children Series is to improve and expand the Nation's efforts to better serve child victims by presenting the latest information about child victimization, including analyses of crime victimization statistics, studies of child victims and their special needs, and descriptions of programs and approaches that address these needs.

The kidnaping of children has generated a great deal of public concern, not to mention confusion and controversy. These crimes, from the kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby to the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, have been some of the most notorious and highly publicized news stories of recent history, occupying a central place in the fears and anxieties of parents. Yet, an ongoing debate has raged over how frequently such crimes occur, which children are most at risk, and who the primary offenders are.

Part of the problem has been confusion about the definition of kidnaping. While lengthy ransom abductions and the tragic recovery of bodies have molded the public's perception of the crime, in a strict legal sense, kidnaping also involves both short-term and short-distance displacements, acts common to many sexual assaults and robberies. Kidnaping occurs whenever a person is taken or detained against his or her will and includes hostage situations, whether or not the victim is moved. Moreover, kidnaping is not limited to the acts of strangers but can be committed by acquaintances, by romantic partners, and, as has been increasingly true in recent years, by parents who are involved in acrimonious custody disputes.

Confusion about kidnaping has been exacerbated by the absence of reliable statistics about the crime. Kidnaping is not one of the crimes included in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) national Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system, and individual States or other jurisdictions have rarely made any independent tally of kidnaping statistics. As a result, a national picture of, or even a large data set about, this crime from the law enforcement perspective has been unavailable. In the past, several attempts were made to collect abduction data, but they were limited in scope or time. For example, OJJDP's 1988 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) estimated the number of family and nonfamily abductions for a single year but contained no police data on family abductions (Finkelhor, Hotaling, and Sedlak, 1990, 1991). The Washington State Attorney General's Office has compiled data on abduction homicides known to police, and the FBI has a database on the very serious kidnaping cases that have been reported to it (Hanfland, Keppel, and Weis, 1997; Boudreaux, Lord, and Dutra, 1999).¹ However, despite these various data sources, a broad picture covering the full spectrum of kidnaping offenses that are reported to and investigated by law enforcement has not been available.

Kidnaping of Juveniles: Patterns From NIBRS	Juvenile Justice Bulletin • June 2000