According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), every year, more than 200,000 children are abducted by family members. An additional 58,000 are taken by nonrelatives with primarily sexual motives. However, only 115 reported abductions represent cases in which strangers abduct and kill children, hold them for ransom, or take them with the intention to keep.
source: The FBI - Crimes Against Children Spotlight
That's a total of 258,115 child abductions per year, or a little over 700 per day average. Nearly four out of five are abductions by family members, usually over some disagreement about custody, and less than 1/20th of 1% of child abductions are the kind of criminal stranger abductions people most worry about. Anderson Cooper's analysis says that there are a total of 800,000 missing persons per year (more than 2,000 per day), with the other 540,000 being runaways and people kicked out of their homes by their families.
It's also worth noting that "About 99 percent were found within hours or days by usual law enforcement response." and "More than 7,000 children nationwide were missing for prolonged periods." - source - That means something like 20 US kids are kidnapped per day for prolonged periods.
Here's the age and sex breakdown of kidnapping victims:
source: DoJ via Project America
This international ranking
| | Countries Compared by Crime > Kidnappings. International Statistics at N...Number of kidnappings recorded by police in that country per 100,000 population. |
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of kidnapping rates doesn't include the United States. I suspect there's some fundamental difference in how the United States defines kidnapping compared to other nations. 258,115 kidnappings out of 311.6 million people would give the United States a score on that chart of 82.8 per 100,000 -- more than the top 11 nations on that list
combined. That defies all expectations. If the United States includes custody dispute kidnappings in their tally and other nations do not, that would mean the proper calculation comes from dividing 58,115 by the 311.6 million population to give the USA a score of 18.65 -- still top of the list by a significant margin, but at least somewhat plausible. If only those 7,000+ "prolonged periods" kidnappings are counted, the USA's rate would be 2.24 per 100,000 (about midway between France and Ireland on the list). If only kidnap-and-ransoms, kidnap-and-murder, and kidnap-to-keep criminal abductions are counted, the US rate drops to 115 out of 311.6 million, or 0.037 per 100,000 (near the bottom of the list, between Mongolia and the Philippians). It's also possible that other nations have a different term for the capture and restraint of adult individuals, and only use the term "kidnapping" to refer to minor children. I have no way of estimating how the USA would compare under that standard. Until I find some scholarly discussion about how these other nations count kidnappings compared to how the USA does, I can't be confident any of these national comparisons are fair or methodologically meaningful.
