Missing Children and handling the media

As a parent, nothing is more unnerving  than reading about a case of child abduction. The problem is these stories are so emotionally disturbing, so vivid and on such an close and important theme that the usual human biases when handling media stories kick in to maximum effect. For all the vague awareness of actual improbabilities, there's always a voice that says, "yes, unlikely, but what if", which is very hard to counter.One problem is this 'vague awareness', and the media itself is often to blame in this, For example, this Guardian article highlights that 2,185 children are reported missing in the US every day. This sounds horrific, until one realises that given the sensitivity of the topic, many a scared mother rings the police when little johnny isn't home on time, even though he's probably just thoughtlessly gone round to little billy's house without telling her. At least (and to the article's credit, and a great advantage of reading online) the source of this statisic (the US National Centre for missing children) is provided by hyperlink, and while still not good (since not zero), the actual statistics for number and type of abductions are :


The U.S. Department of Justice reports

• 797,500 children (younger than 18) were reported missing in a one-year period of time studied resulting in an average of 2,185 children being reported missing each day.
• 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions.
• 58,200 children were the victims of non-family abductions.
• 115 children were the victims of “stereotypical” kidnapping. (These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently.)

This would indicate only 32% of the reported missing are actual abductions (still ~700 a day), but most importantly only 115, or 0.01% are 'real' kidnappings (though the description is not perfectly clear here).
Looking at the demographics for the US it seems there are ~74.7 million children under 18 in the US, so 115 per year of this is ~1 in 650,000,  or between 1 and 2 in a million.  Of course this means still several children in every city, and each individual case is a horrific tragedy if it really comes to the worst, but it has to be remembered that there are many many horrible events at this order or probability (even focused on Children - for example more than 1 in 6000 children under 15 in the US have cancer , making it 10 times more likely than abduction). The point is not to fear these things, but to fear the appropriately to the likelihood, since if we really considered what could happen we would be paralyzed by fear. So while horrible to read about such stories as Etan Patz or Madeline McCann, we can at least be comforted by the fact that they make the news because they are news, something out of the ordinary. It's a scary world, but (most of the time) the odds are with us.