Today is National Missing Children’s Day, first proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 as an annual reminder to make child protection a national priority. That year the nation was still in shock from two highly publicized missing children cases – Etan Patz, who disappeared on his way to school in 1979, and Adam Walsh, whose 1981 disappearance from a Florida shopping mall prompted his father to create and host the television show, America’s Most Wanted.
Over the years, a number of methods have been used to search for missing children and hunt down their assailants.
Here are a just a few – some new, some old:
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children makes missing children reports available via RSS news feeds. Parents can receive an alert whenever a new child is added to their caseload, or they can subscribe by state to get notified when a missing child from the chosen state is posted to their database.
AMBER Alerts can now be sent to your wireless phone, thanks to a recent partnership between The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and nine major wireless carriers. A free subscription allows wireless users to receive alerts for up to 5 zip codes.
Decidedly more low tech, but surprisingly effective are the Have You Seen Me? cards that come with your morning mail. The cards are celebrating their 20th anniversary and now reach the mailboxes of more than 100 million American households each week. They are responsible for recovering 137 children, or 1 out of every 6 depicted.
