Child Safety Champion

Child Abduction: It Affects Everyone!

When a child is abducted, the entire community is affected.  Every parent becomes aware of just how vulnerable they are to having it happen to their family.  Just this past weekend, a little 5yr old girl in California  named Samantha was abducted and later found dead in the mountains.  Here are comments from neighbors as reported in the "New York Times" on the community affect after Samantha’s body was found:

Wonder Who's Child is on those Pictures?

Today in our small hometown, Tyler, TX (pop. ~100,000) two different men pleaded guilty to possession of child pornographic pictures.  One had over 750 pictures.  The majority of the children were under 12 years old. I wonder who's children are on those pictures?

Find Sexual Offenders in Your Neighborhood

National Alert Registry is a site that helps you locate registered sexual offenders in your neighborhood. It is a free website with nation-wide coverage.  It also provides alerts via email/text message when a registered predator moves into your area.  I recommend everyone with children signup for this service.

Just a word of caution.  Remember these are the Registered offenders.  Only 1 in 4 (25%) obey the law and are registered.  That means 3 out of 4 or 75% are not being tracked. Also, remember a lot of child predators have not been caught.  On average, if caught they have already committed another eight(8) crimes.

We Start Today - With a Purpose

This is the start of a new, but exciting endeavor for me.  My purpose is quite simple:  To raise awareness of various strategies that can be utilized to better protect our children.

On this blog, I hope to encourage discussion of how we can do a better job protecting our children especially concerning child abuse and child abductions.  It seems that what we are doing is not working at all. It just seems that everyday we hear about another child being abused or hurt and we all feel very sorry and thank God that it did not happen to our family.  Then we go about our business and stick our head in the sand.

My local paper just noted it's top story for 2007.  Do you have a guess what it is?