Sexual Predators Are Watching! Are You Doing Enough To Protect Your Children? Article

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Sexual Predators Are Watching! Are You Doing Enough To Protect Your Children?

In order to quickly locate a missing child, the MobilEye wireless service instantly notifies thousands of cell phone users in the area where the child was last seen, via text and picture messages.

Author: Attila Medl

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By Attila Medl, PhD
August 19, 2006

Being a father of two very active kids – one girl and one boy – I know how quickly they can get out of sight. Now I remember what someone told me many years ago: “If your child disappears in the supermarket, you age ten years on the spot.”

And they do disappear. In large numbers. According to government statistics, some 800,000 children are reported missing every year in the US. Fortunately, most of them are found quickly – giving their parents only a mild heart attack – and 203,900 children are the victims of family abductions (divorce dispute, etc.). These are usually found unharmed.

However, what scared me when I started to look into this problem was the frightening fact that 58,000 children are abducted by strangers (the legal term is ‘non-family member’) every year. Just do the math; this adds up to 158 children every single day!! You can take a guess what those people intend to do with the children.

Sexual predators are everywhere and they are watching. Just do a Google search with the words “sex offender” and your State; you’ll be surprised how many live in your neighborhood.

You need to take this threat seriously. You probably have heard of the most publicized crimes against children: the kidnapping and murder of little Carlie Brucia (her kidnapping was caught on tape by a security camera), the brutal murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford, the senseless murder of Polly Klaas, and the most recent events in the JonBenet Ramsey case.

What you have not heard of is almost as scary as the above cases. Just a few months ago in a New Jersey mall a man dressed up as a woman was caught trying to steal a baby while the baby’s mother was shopping. She only turned away for a second; the predator was watching and acted. Now, imagine the sick mind of that man who disguises himself as a woman, in order to blend into the crowd of moms shopping for baby stuff. And imagine what would have happened had he escaped with that baby. Most likely, the parents would never have seen her again.

This other story happened to my friend: they were at Disney World and his wife was holding the hand of their 3-year-old daughter. She turned away for a second to pay for cotton candy and when she turned back, she saw a man leading away her daughter. She yelled, the guy let the girl go and disappeared in the crowd.

These stories sent chills up and down my spine, and I started to look into the child-kidnapping statistics.

Probably the most authoritative study is the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrown-away Children (NISMART), the most important excerpts can be found at http://www.mobileye.org/faq and the entire study at http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/nismart2_nonfamily.pdf . Let me tell you, the NISMART study is shocking and eye-opening. For example, the analysis on 58,200 child kidnappings (all these happened within one year!) shows that 46% of all non-family abduction victims were sexually assaulted, while 31% were otherwise physically assaulted. 115 children are the victims of the most serious, most long-term abductions (stereotypical kidnappings) every year, of which 56% are recovered alive, 40% are killed.

You will also be in interested to see who is being kidnapped. It turns out that girls are much more likely to become kidnapping victims as boys: 65% of all victims were girls and 35% were boys. Other factors such as race and place of kidnapping also play a role, and you can calculate your child’s risk factors with the interactive risk calculator at http://www.mobileye.org/risk .

Now, these are the facts. These statistics are based on historical facts and unfortunately we cannot do anything about it. But we can change the future!

What can you do to protect your children from these sexual predators? Basically you can do two things: (1) prevent the kidnapping, or (2) if a kidnapping happens, make sure we do everything possible to return your child unharmed as quickly as possible.

Excellent education resources and tools are available on the Internet that teach your child how to stay away from strangers who might be dangerous. These can be found on Marc Klaas’ http://www.beyondmissing.com and http://www.klaaskids.org as well as Joe Brucia’s http://www.carlieslaw.org and http://www.jessicamarielunsford.com .

The question arises: what strategies and tools can we use to rescue a child if she or he has been kidnapped?

One powerful tool is the Amber Alert system. However, there is one major problem with Amber alerts: they take a long time to be issued! Authorities may take up to 24 hours to alert the public about a missing child … it might be too late by then. Why?

Because according to the State of Washington’s Office of the Attorney General (see also at www.missingkids.com ) “the murder of a child who is abducted ... is a rare event. There are estimated to be about 100 such incidents in the United States each year, less than one-half of one percent of the murders committed”; however, “74 percent of abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction.”

Having worked in wireless communication for some time, I did some research and saw that Amber alerts are being distributed to wireless users. However the devil is in the details: those systems only distribute Amber alerts issued by authorities (which may come too late), and only to those who sign-up in advance to receive these alerts (so called "opt-in" users). Now, you can imagine how ineffective this is: the alert might come many hours after the kidnapping, and only to a few wireless users which may be hundreds of miles away from the incident.

Wouldn’t it be great if you, the parent, could initiate a geographically targeted missing child alert immediately after notifying authorities? Let many people look for your child! Not in a few hours, but right now! Initially I thought that we will face two problems: we cannot geographically target the messages, and the messages would be considered spam if we just bombard cell phones in the area. It turns out, neither of these is a problems!

Why? Because we developed a geographic targeting method based on publicly available cell phone numbering records (The North American Numbering Plan Administration), which tells us approximately where a certain number range might be located. Remember, most people stay close to home, even when they commute to work. The method is similar, but more refined, to the area-code based targeting. If you want to call someone in New York City, you just dial a random number with a 212 area code, and without knowing anything about that person, you can be sure that she or he is located in New York City. Simple enough? OK, MobilEye is a bit more complex, but the basic philosophy is the same.

The other issue is spam. Legal research reveals that wireless messages that do not advertise a product or service are NOT spam! The Federal Communications Commission-s (FCC) CAN-SPAM Act does not ban non-commercial messages, such as messages about candidates for public office, etc. Great! So we can send out text or picture messages about a missing child completely legally and it will not be spam!

Software developers at my company, Mtelegence Corp., worked hard for a few months and created a service called MobilEye. We picked this name to show that we use mobile wireless technology to keep an eye on your child and instantly MobilEye-ze the community when your child is missing. No delays, no excuses, just a super-fast alert to thousands of people in the area asking them to open their eyes and report if they see the child.

Parents, grandparents and legal guardians can register on www.mobileye.org for a small yearly subscription fee. All registrants receive membership cards and a toll free number which they can call in emergency. Should a child in their family be suddenly missing, the parent notifies authorities who start the search. The parent also calls the MobilEye hotline and tells the operator to issue an urgent cell phone alert in the area. The operator authenticates the parent and sends out large numbers of text and picture alerts containing the child’s description to cell phones in the area where the child was last seen. All this happens in minutes.

During registration parents can optionally give detailed descriptions of their children and even upload their photos. Parents who are concerned about privacy and do not want to give a detailed description of their children have the option to register only themselves.

Remember, acting in time is crucial when your child is missing. MobilEye does not compete with the authorities or otherwise interfere with the search. Instead, being able to alert practically any cell phone in the US, we augment authorities’ efforts by communicating important information about the child to the public. It would be a mistake not to do that. Our common goal is to return missing children to their parents in the shortest time possible. And the public can certainly help there.

MobilEye is an insurance we hope you and your family will never need. But if you do, we’ll be here to help. For more information visit www.mobileye.org

About Author

Attila Medl is an expert in wireless messaging technology, artificial intelligence, and multimodal man-machine communication. He earned a PhD in computer science and was assistant professor at Rutgers University. He published papers in some of the world's most prestigious technical journals such as the Proceedings of the IEEE.
More information at http://www.mobileye.org

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