The nature of child abduction offenses is examined in terms of the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim, and the apparent motivation for the offense. It was hypothesized that for the offense of child abduction, discrete offense types could be identified; that for the majority of child abduction offenses, the motivation was sexual; that child abduction involving a male child would be prosecuted as "child abduction;" and that a large proportion of sexually motivated child abductions would be against male victims, as there was no specific offense relating to the sexual abduction of a male in England and Wales. The Offenders Index was used to generate a sample of offenders who had been convicted of the offense of child abduction between 1993 and 1995. The current study examined the offense of child abduction, which is categorized as violence against the person. For each conviction further data were gathered from police records at New Scotland Yard. The resulting sample comprised 149 offenders who were categorized in terms of relationship to victim and motivation. Results indicated four different motivational types of child abduction: sexual, custodial, maternal desire, and "other." Most child abductions were non-familial. The majority of child abductions were sexually motivated, and most child abductions involved female victims. The sexually motivated group was the only group that had a history of child abduction. The maternal desire group was entirely composed of non-familial female perpetrators. The "other motivation" group represented child abductions with a mixture of motivations ranging from religion to theft. The custodial group predictably consisted of exclusively familial perpetrators. Offense categories are useful for summarizing criminal data, but mask factors such as the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim and offense motivation. It is misleading that child abduction is categorized in criminal statistics as a violent offense. 1 figure, 3 tables, 16 references