Missing children.

In November 1997, an eight-year-old girl living in Puerto Rico was found to have been abducted by a stranger from her San Diego home nearly seven years earlier, when she was 14 months old.1 Her discovery received much attention in the media, highlighting the facts that abductions by strangers are rare and newsworthy events, and that finding a child who has been missing for so long a time is even more unusual. Over the years, other famous child-kidnapping cases, such as those of the Lindbergh baby in New Jersey in 1932, Adam Walsh in Florida in 1981, and Polly Klaas in California in 1993, each of which ended with the death of the child, have received enormous media attention and have heightened public awareness of the possibility of the abduction of children by strangers.2 In some instances, public policies have been made following particular, highly publicized cases. An example is the passage in 1984 of the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, after the kidnapping and death of Adam Walsh.2