According to the U.S. Department of Justice…
…A child goes missing in the United States every 40 seconds.
Today, May 25th, is National Missing Children’s Day. For 27 years, each administration has honored this annual reminder to the nation to renew efforts to reunite missing children with their families and make child protection a national priority.
Remembering children today, AmberAlert.com continues their efforts to help keep children and families safe through safeguarding, response and prevention. To ensure the safety of children and families, they developed the most advanced information dissemination portal to issue AMBER? Alerts–helping to potentially reduce response times from hours to minutes when it matters most.
Perhaps one of the most notorious missing children cases, 6-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared from a Florida shopping mall in 1981. His parents, John and Revé Walsh, immediately turned to law-enforcement agencies to help find their son. To their disappointment, there was no coordinated effort among law enforcement to search for Adam on a state or national level, and no organization to help them in their desperation.
An article from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sums up the situation saying, “The tragedies of these children and others exposed a fundamental flaw. There was no coordinated effort between federal, state, and local law enforcement; no national response system in place; and no central resource to help searching families. When it came to handling missing-children cases, the United States was a nation of 50 states often acting like 50 separate countries.”
In 1979, 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from a New York street corner on his way to school. His story captivated the nation. His photo, taken by his father, a professional photographer, was circulated nationwide and appeared in media across the nation and around the world, causing Etan became the poster-child for the new movement.
Because of Adam, Etan and numerous other children, President Ronald Regan proclaimed May 25 National Missing Children?s Day in 1983.
National Missing
Children?s Day is a reminder to all parents and guardians of the need for high-quality photographs of their children for use in case of an emergency. For this end, AmberAlert.com went a step further to create My Child ID and corresponding software for parents to use as a proactive tool to securely store, encrypt, and organize vital child medical and identification data in cases of medical emergencies and missing children cases.
You can help by looking at photographs of missing children and reporting any information to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s toll-free Hotline: 1-800-THE-LOST.
