Every day, the images haunt Mari Lang, a Schaumburg mother of three.
From the photographs of missing children on milk cartons to the fingerprinting booths at shopping centers and the notes that come home with her children from school: “Officer Friendly will meet with the children tommorow to discuss safety.”
Lang had felt pretty secure in her suburban world until a child was abducted this summer from a nearby shopping center.
“I always knew it could happen, but when it did, it really hit home,” Lang says, recalling the afternoon she learned a 5-year-old girl had been abducted while shopping with her father. The girl was found eight hours later.
“The fact that something so horrible happened so close to my home at a place where I go so often with my kids,” Lang says, “has become a horrible shadow hanging over me.”
Lang doesn’t like what she has to do now. She’d much rather send her kids-Gina, 5; Drew, 12, and Sean, 16-into the neighborhood to play freely with their pals. Instead, she warns them about strangers, gangs, drugs and “people who steal kids from shopping malls.”
Says Lang: “I don’t want to instill panic in my children, but what do you do when you know it can happen, that it did happen, right here?”
Lang’s dilemma is similar to that faced by parents, educators and law enforcement officials everywhere, as the number of child abductions continues to increase along with an increased awareness about the potential dangers confronting children in the 1990s.
“It’s a different world today than it was 15 or 20 years ago,” says Ginny Markell, chairwoman for the health and welfare committee of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, a Chicago-based organization.
“The world (is) a darker place; there are more abductions of children and acts of violence,” Markell adds. “And there’s also a better reporting system, a tracking system of these instances. Years ago, if you saw someone approaching kids on a playground, you immediately thought `friendly neighbor.’ Today you think `drug dealer, kidnapper, child molester.”‘
Certainly, child abduction is not something that happens every day in every city across America. But every year, more than 2 million children are reported to law enforcement authorities as missing. What’s also shocking about the crime is that it often is committed by the non-custodial parent in a divorce battle. There were an estimated 340,000 such cases in 1990, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Moreover, with the high number of divorces, often with prolonged court battles for custody, child abduction is a growing problem and one that schools and day-care centers are now forced to deal with, according to John Rabun. Rabun is vice president and chief operating officer for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Arlington, Va., which in 1984 began tracking incidents of child abduction and is a national clearinghouse.
Experts agree that this increased victimization of children can be traced to several factors.
“Our whole societal environment is a lot more hostile today,” says Dr. Muriel Wolf, a Washington, D.C., physician and spokeswoman for the Elk Grove Village-based American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Stress, drugs, they’ve caused people to have less internal controls. They’ve helped dissolve some of our conventions in society. This increases the evils such as violence, child abuse and abductions. The family isn’t the foundation it used to be, with half of all families splitting up. The potential for bad things to happen to all people, children included, is just there more now.”
Another factor heightening this potential risk for children is the disappearance of an informal community network of at-home parents and the protection they brought, experts agree.
“The rise of two-parent working families has meant an end to the support network of moms who kept their eyes and ears open for all the kids in the neighborhood,” says Alan Hirsch, clinical director for Evanston-based The Capable Kid family counseling centers. “Children are now forced to contend with a lot of the potential dangers on their own.”
To that end, children are given more safety instructions; security at hospitals, day-care centers, schools, park districts and public entertainment centers has been tightened.
The saftey messages go far beyond, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” according to Pete Christenson, Officer Friendly for the Schaumburg police department, who works in schools helping kids develop good safety habits.
Child abuse prevention, safety skills, child molestation (good vs. bad touches), incest, gangs … these sensitive subjects are part of the safety concerns. And they’re popping up everywhere, from the television’s popular cartoon character Inspector Gadget to fingerprint and photo identity cards for children.
At Acarath Montessori Center in Schaumburg, as in many private schools in the northwest suburbs, preschoolers have been fingerprinted and had their pictures taken for identification cards. In addition, the school has a strict policy about who can-and can’t-pick up a student from school.
“Our school is unique in that we take field trips at least once a week to large public places like Brookfield Zoo,” says owner Judi Budinger. “If a child were to get lost there, we’d have an immediate description to hand to authorities.
“We also have a number of divorce-related situations, where certain people are not allowed to pick up the children from school. Years ago, it was no big deal for someone to show up and the child would say, `This is Grandma,’ and leave with that person. Not anymore.”
The situation is much the same at GreenTree Childcare Center at the McHenry Corporate Center in McHenry, where parents use a keypad to gain entry to the center.
“Four years ago, we didn’t even have this,” says Maureen Gardner, the center’s director. “But society has changed, and being extremely careful about who is picking up children is now a major concern.”
Children playing at the Discovery Zone FunCenters in Arlington Heights and Vernon Hills can be tagged with chunky plastic devices, if parents request it, that cause security alarms positioned by the exit to blare if children leave the center. Closed-circuit television cameras also are used throughout the facility so children can be monitored, according to franchise owner Albert J. Till.
“We’ve never had anything happen,” says Till, father of three grown children. “But today’s parents appreciate the fact that you’ve taken an extra effort to keep their children safe.”
There are, however, dangers to over-emphasizing all this safety.
Just ask Drew Lang, a 7th grader at Eisenhower Junior High School in Schaumburg. “We’ve always got someone at school telling us to keep away from drug dealers or strangers. And I can see what they are saying, but I just don’t really think it’s that bad. And I don’t really think it would happen here.”
