ANSWERS: 4
  • The grossest ones. Sex and shit like that of course. Most people have a fascination for the bad crap.
  • From what I have read on the subject, All of the most high profile cases are strikingly similar in one major aspect. For the most part, the victim is a beautiful white blonde girl. When, if ever, has an African-American of Hispanic girl or boy garnered such national interest for going missing?
  • "So many"? How many? Actually, abduction is, thankfully , a very rare crime - when measured against the tens of millions of un-abducted children. As to which the media choose: what else is in the news? August is renowned as the "silly season" - everybody on holiday, so little real news. So an abduction, old or new, will get all the headlines. But wait till the political season starts again, and abductions will slide down the list.
  • 1. Despite the hype, most "stranger abductions" are quite rare. And despite Hollywood movies that show kidnap for ransom to be a thrilling crime, those are even more rare in the US. (Unfortunately, those are pretty thriving businesses in other parts of the world, notably Mexico and Colombia.) 2. Most of the "missing" are runaways, and most runaways aren't on their first trip away from home. That is, as runaways are returned to their families, either because they give up and return on their own or because they are found by police or friends and return, they work on their technique to get away and stay away, if that's their real intent. 3. By far the majority of "abducted" children are taken by family members during the parental breakup. I would bet that relatively few resources are expended on tracking the suspected guilty parent in those cases, probably because the FBI would be involved in cases where interstate movement was suspected or known, and my sense of this is that the FBI doesn't consider parental abduction to be a high-priority crime unless it can be shown that the child is at definite risk of abuse. As for what the media go for, that's the same as always: sex, fame, money, power, and scandal. Joe and Mary from down the street breaking up, and Mary taking the kids and not telling Joe where is not big news, outside of the town where it happened. Unless Joe is related to a prominent politician, a movie star, a multi-millionaire, or involved in a sex ring that's exposed at the same time.

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