To think there are probably more attempted abductions of kids than we think?

[GoldRhino]

My aim in this thread is to spread awareness- apologies if it annoys anyone.

In the last few years we have had at least 4 attempted abductions of kids from local schools (‘naice area’). Our school sent out alerts to let everyone know. There were various men in vans attempting to grab kids and two children that we know well narrowly escaped being dragged into a car just around the corner from our house last year and were really traumatised.

Then earlier today I saw the headline about the Line of Duty actresses’ son who nearly got abducted yesterday in Beckenham. He was 11 and walking home from school.

All of these events have made me very concerned about letting my kids walk home alone.

I’m also wondering why these attempted abductions don’t get more press attention so that others are more aware.

Howard Hughes attempted to abduct someone I knew before his abduction and murder of Sophie Hook in 1995.

A friend of mine was also abducted and murdered aged 14 on the night of Christmas Day 2004. It didn’t get an awful lot of coverage because of the Boxing Day tsunami.

I'm always surprised at the amount of posters on MN who seem desperate to convince us it's all made up hysteria and we are foolish to believe it. There are incidents and I am glad to be made aware. I will believe school and the police I think.

I don't know it seems worse these days maybe because I was a child back then but I don't remember hearing about abductions as often as now.
Now it's daily.
I live in Greater London and it does scare me.
In the last week I think there's been two attempts on children the school is forever emailing us about it.

The Facebook page for the area I used to live in was inundated with claims of attempted child abduction, all of which were clear exaggerations of innocuous situations ('I could tell by the way he looked at her he was going to snatch her!'). They were also usually racist, as most of them seemed to take a group of Asian men being near a child as an attempted abduction in and of itself. The hysteria that got whipped up about it was terrifying and I think some of these people convinced themselves that there was a child abductor on every corner but this was clearly not the case - as a PP said, you'd expect a large percentage of abductions to be 'successful' as an adult can easily overpower a child, it just doesn't make any logical sense that there are all these people constantly ineptly trying it but being outwitted or overcome by children.

incompetent

It isn’t about being incompetent, it’s about having the circumstances absolutely right. A child you can overwhelm alone is probably going to be very young and not out alone. This was more common in the 80s and 90s. I can think off the top of my head of several abductions and murders in these decades. I can only think of one in the last decade.

(And yes - I know that family members will have been responsible for the deaths of many more children. But that’s not what the thread is about.)

During my DCs time at school there have been a few occasions of warnings about possible approaches to children but they have subsequently turned out to be genuine misinterpretations of innocent situations.

Yep. Children are rightly taught to be careful, but it means that they might misunderstand adults who talk to them for innocent reasons. But the police can't ignore those reports.

If these attempts happened a lot none than we realised, there would be more successful ones..and we'd definitely know about those.

An adult can overpower a child but not necessarily a big preteen easily.

Think about even getting a reluctant toddler into a car.

It is unusual for a child under the age of say nine to be out entirely alone.

Around two months ago there was a man who was filming children in the park so me and another lady confronted him.
He proceeded to call us white slags and just carried on.
We called the police they didn't give a shite and told us to go home and let him go!.

People are also getting their catalytic converters stolen of their driveway and threatened with sledgehammers and stuff and the police still haven't done nothing. It's 200+ cars and counting now.
One woman had it replaced and they got it again the week after.

Burglaries are through the roof and stabbings etc. It is worrying.

In the early 90s someone tried to abduct my brother, we were walking back from the shops with my mum and a man walked upto us and started chatting like he knew my mum and he just took my brother my mum ran across the road to get him back. As soon as we got home she rang the police. This was in broad daylight on a busy road in London. I think it's not as rare as we are lead to believe and I always keep an eye on ds because of it.

@Iseeyoulookingatme That's terrible . Something similar happened in our local Asda a few years back. The mum turnt her back for a second and the man had run a few aisles down and hid.
They caught him on cctv instantly and stppped him from leaving.

I've heard the odd thing on SM ('van slowed down... Man stared at teenaged girl' - he might have thought it was his niece and he'd offer a lift, or he was trying to find an address and was trying to read house numbers and spooked the girl in error...) but I have never, ever heard about anything like this affecting my DC or the DC of anyone I know.

Letching comments and pervs exposing themselves, sure. Attempted abduction? Nope. I would suspect it's very rare.

I think it's largely social media hysteria and the fact that parents are massively risk averse these days

The thing is, had social media existed in 1995 it is just possible Sophie hook could have been saved. IIRC Levi Bellfield also attempted to abduct a girl before Millie.

I know it isn’t a given but I do wish people wouldn’t be quite so dismissive.

A successful abduction (what a phrase) results in a child being subjected to untold terror and pain. It isn’t something to be flippant and hee haw aren’t people stupid about.

I think it's important to separate what goes round on SM, and actual police warnings to the community (including those that schools pass on)

Yes, I agree that there are more than we might otherwise realise. It's rare, rather than incredibly rare, but it does happen.

My DC are a bit older so warnings from schools all seem to be about muggings.

I can remember back when I was in school an assembly where the police came in to talk about staying safe after an attemtpted abduction of a girl in the year above me (lure by sweeties).

I've always known it's real IYSWIM because of that, but it's the sort of thing that maybe happens once that you know about during the whole of the childhood years

They are rare.

Unsubstantiated Facebook viral posts about it happening are not. One person mentions a van slowed down near their kid and suddenly a whole post about an attempted abduction in XXX area has been created by someone else and is shared thousands of times as a fact. Over and over they're shared, many originally posted years earlier and shared in Scotland when it happened in Clapham!
And when it is local, suddenly random men and their vans are photographed and posted "XX van seen trawling through XX streets! Keep your eyes peeled folks!"

Same goes for dog abduction planning. Painted fences and cable ties on lampposts. People went nuts lately panicking about the cable ties on the village lampposts. Not one person thinking, "Yeah, that'll be from the old paper posters about the Women's Institute coffee morning last month..."

People marking houses that have dogs could be done much better by keeping a notebook. Hell, a pencil and the back of an envelope would do in a pinch. No need to walk around with a tin of paint or faffing about threading awkward cable ties on lampposts.

Disagree totally.
Rare as hen's teeth unless you read the "peadoooo" (sic) alert groups on FB etc, in which case there's a perv in a van sat outside every school.
Awareness should be raised and shouted from the rooftops about the abuse of children that goes on within the extended family. Because that's where something like 92% of abuse cases come from.
It's not Dave in his van you need to worry about. It's Grandad or Uncle Steve.

I think its truly rare. Yes it's a danger. That film last year of that young girl who was nearly taken but 2 young women intervened. Its not impossible but I was more worried about them getting knocked over than anything else.

I should think abductions are rare, but they would be a lot more common if parents weren't already careful. Most people don't let their very young children out on their own. It's good to be vigilant about these things.

I think it’s always been this way...there’s actually more publicity about them these days. My own mother was abducted twice as a child. Once a woman walked away with her in her pram...her brothers were playing football and luckily realised before the woman left the park. Second time a man took her hand and led her down an alley...some other children alerted her mother who came running out of the house and chased after him. Both times she was okay luckily, but that was back in the forties.

Disagree. More than we think? No. I'm aware there are some. We have had incidents, school announces, police comment. This is good. Fine.

But then ensues hysteria. The levels of anxiety is frightening amongst mums. I see high levels of anxiety generally on MN. I don't know why, it's a worrying trend. Totally OTT.

@Lemonelderflower

The thing is, had social media existed in 1995 it is just possible Sophie hook could have been saved. IIRC Levi Bellfield also attempted to abduct a girl before Millie.

I know it isn’t a given but I do wish people wouldn’t be quite so dismissive.

A successful abduction (what a phrase) results in a child being subjected to untold terror and pain. It isn’t something to be flippant and hee haw aren’t people stupid about.

The trouble is that scaring children and parents unnecessarily isn't consequence free either - a lot of people have a 'better safe than sorry' thing about it but actually given current levels of anxiety in children there's every reason to think that we are harming them with our own anxieties. There's a lot of research showing that people's perception of crime massively exceeds actual crime in most areas, and that it really does have negative consequences for mental health.

@lightand

I live rurally and I used to let the kids go on their bikes all over the place within a 5 mile radius, after they were aged about 10, occasionally with friends. Nothing ever happened. One day however, I decided to go and meet them about 3 miles away. I was shocked. I had naively thought they would be ok because there was always at least 2 of them on their bikes together. Plus thought, wrongly, that there were just enough cars around to "keep them safe". But there wasnt. I realised that they could have got abducted quite easily and no one would probably have seen anything at all. After that, if they wanted to go off, I used to follow in the car at a distance.

A five mile radius is huge on rural roads 😕

Never mind abduction, they could have been run down easily on a country road with no one to help them for miles around.

@OhRene

They are rare.

Unsubstantiated Facebook viral posts about it happening are not. One person mentions a van slowed down near their kid and suddenly a whole post about an attempted abduction in XXX area has been created by someone else and is shared thousands of times as a fact. Over and over they're shared, many originally posted years earlier and shared in Scotland when it happened in Clapham!
And when it is local, suddenly random men and their vans are photographed and posted "XX van seen trawling through XX streets! Keep your eyes peeled folks!"

Same goes for dog abduction planning. Painted fences and cable ties on lampposts. People went nuts lately panicking about the cable ties on the village lampposts. Not one person thinking, "Yeah, that'll be from the old paper posters about the Women's Institute coffee morning last month..."

People marking houses that have dogs could be done much better by keeping a notebook. Hell, a pencil and the back of an envelope would do in a pinch. No need to walk around with a tin of paint or faffing about threading awkward cable ties on lampposts.

Oh god, this one drives me mad. Endless Facebook hysteria about chalk markings around us (that were clearly preparation for works on the drain). I don't know why people who themselves are communicating using Facebook on their mobile phones imagine that criminals still communicate through chalk marks like it's the 1950s?! I think dog nappers probably have WhatsApp too!

I agree actual instances of subduction from the street are rare. Our impression is it happens everyday. This is fuelled by almost a 'excited' tone that travels around local social media pages where a child has reported that "he saw a man sat in car with no children for 15 mins outside the school" (and any variations of this).

I have no doubt that there are peadophiles and perverts around waiting for their chance, but these are relatives, friends of friends parents, people who feel trustworthy like at church groups, sports clubs, schools etc. That's why safe guarding is such a hot topic and we should never ever keep our eye off the ball.

I am cynical about all these supposed attempted abductions in "naice" areas (or indeed not so nice).

We get them in our area too "white van seen lurking near school". Well the driver might have been eating lunch and maybe his parking space near the school was the only one he could find at the time.

Any driver who calls out to a child is tone deaf though. You never do that (and don't stop to ask directions either - get a map out).

However I may be wrong - I see meglet had a similar viewpoint to me about these incidents being Facebook nonsense and then found out a local incident wasn't. It's difficult to know, all you can do is make sure your kids know the rules and don't go up to cars or vans and stay in groups and busy areas as much as possible.

To keep back on the pavement and maybe these days to get the phone out to help with any "question I have always been anti-social and if someone asked me anything I just used to ignore/run away. Not that it happened very often but it's better to teach your children to be rude. They don't owe anything to people they don't know - and as I said above, it's tone-deaf for anyone to approach a child to ask a question.

Endless Facebook hysteria about chalk markings around us

we get that too - and flour markings (for local hash running groups)

For the avoidance of doubt, I just mean tell your kids to be rude if someone approaches them in a van/car when they are walking along on their own. Not generally rude!

But as an example, my mum is very open and friendly and a guy tapped on her window in a car park. She wound down the window and he promptly put his hand in and stole her bag. It wouldn't have happened to me because I would have asked him what he wanted and not opened the window (fortunately in her case, there were witnesses and the police got him - and the handbag minus cash - back).