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Comment by alxp | Hacker News Reader

Also: How many children were kidnapped by a non-custodial parent who grabbed them by picking them up from school?

Your point does not change the numbers in question. "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers." A non-custodial parent would not be a stranger.

No, but it does put the number in perspective. The amount of kidnappings by non-custodial parents is in the 100000's a year.

I have no idea whether non-custodial parents are primarily to blame -- these stats cited by ABC News just say family members or parents.

"203,900 kids were abducted in 1999 by family members or parents. Approximately, 58,200 were 'non-family' abductions — only 115 were defined as the frightening kidnappings by strangers." -- http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91365&page=1

Unless almost all of the family cases are non-custodial parents, your claim of hundreds of thousands seems a bit exaggerated. Some of these must be custodial parents, uncles, grandparents, siblings, and so on.

I think 'non-family' means acquaintances, minus the 115 cases of abduction by a stranger.

One non-profit that works in this space estimates that 78% of the "family member or parent" abductions are due to a non-custodial parent. That would put the total around 159k, which puts the parent poster in the right order of magnitude.

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm

Citation needed.

BTW, in addition to wikipedia's contribution to society of a free encyclopedia, I think this phrase is a great contribution. As Gerry Sussman says, "once you can name a spirit, you have power over it."

Citation not needed, because this is a conversation, not an encyclopedia article, and he gave a rough order of magnitude estimate which happens to be reasonably correct.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-cost-of...

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm

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