Day 51
I had no idea so many kids went missing each year.
It’s staggering.
As many as 8,000,000.
The truth is we don’t really know exactly how many kids go missing. Some countries don’t even bother to keep records of such things.
It’s possible the number could be higher—much higher.
It’s also possible it could be lower, but even if it’s a lot lower, it’s still stunning.
It’s an epidemic.
Some reports say as many as 800,000 kids go missing in the US alone. That’s 2,000 a day. Every single day 2,000 children vanish.
Others contend that the number is closer to 460,000, but regardless of which number it is, it’s surreal. Hard to even imagine.
I can’t believe I have been so naively cocooned in my own little self-centered existence that I didn’t know any of this. It actually took my child being one of the missing for me to even become aware of the reality.
Even without knowing any of this, Keith and I knew our most important job was to protect our little girl, which is why we had and still have such an elaborate security system in place. But not even that was enough. I still can’t figure out how it was compromised. It seems impossible. What went wrong? Where did we fail? Who could’ve breached the barrier of all our precautions?
Of the kids that go missing each year, whatever the actual number is, about 92 percent are endangered runaways, 4 percent are family abductions, 3 percent are critically missing young adults, ages 18 to 20, less than 1 percent are non-family abductions, and around 1 percent are lost or injured.
The so-called stranger abductions account for a very small percentage overall, but it’s still between 4,000 and 8,000 children—as many as 30 a day.
15 to 30 children a day taken by a stranger.
I have to believe that Magdalene has to be one of them because nobody we know would do this—not to her and not to us.