More Resources Conference President's Remarks

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige today participated in the White House Conference on Missing, Exploited and Runaway Children. Secretary Paige moderated a panel discussion focusing on preventing the victimization of children.

"Any child could be at risk of being victimized. It's a problem that crosses all incomes, all races and all zip codes," Secretary Paige said. "A thread that runs through all of the panelists' experiences is the important role education plays in prevention and intervention - educating our children about how to be safe from strangers and educating ourselves about how to better connect with our kids as they grow."

Paige also said that adults have to become more involved in their children's lives.

"We adults need to do a better job—at home and at school—of listening to kids and staying deeply involved in their lives, so they will reach out and ask for help if they need it or let us know when someone they know needs help," Paige said.

He was joined by Susan Breault, executive director of The Paul & Lisa Program, Inc., who discussed the commercial exploitation of youth and young adults, the systems responses to the issue and the methods needed to protect children from these types of violence and exploitation; Kenneth Wooden, founder of Child Lures, Ltd., who discussed the techniques that child sexual predators use to exploit children; and James Kelly, chief of police for the Palm Beach County School District in Florida, who discussed how school resource officers can be utilized on school grounds to educate and prevent students from being abducted.

President Bush hosted the first-ever conference to promote public awareness of the need to improve children's safety and to generate recommendations and best practices from experts in the field.  More than 600 people from across America came to the conference, including parents of victim children; law enforcement officials; federal, state and local leaders; citizen experts; and other leaders involved in the cause of missing, exploited and runaway children.

According to the Department of Justice, almost 800,000 children are reported as missing to law enforcement agencies each year, while another 500,000 children go missing without being reported to authorities.  In addition to Secretary Paige's panel, the White House Conference on Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children focused on a wide range of topics related to children's safety, including child abduction; runaway and homeless youth; international child abduction; sex trafficking of children; child pornography; Internet safety; and corporate and community involvement.

Child Abduction:  Each year, more than 58,000 U.S. children are abducted by non-family members, often in connection with another crime.  More than 200,000 children are abducted by family members who are seeking to interfere with a parent's custodial or visitation rights.  Although the vast majority of children (at least 98 percent) return from abductions, too many children do not.  While there are only around 100 reported cases each year of the most dangerous type of abduction—stranger kidnapping—fully 40 percent of these children are murdered.

Runaways: There are approximately 1.3 million young Americans on the street every day as a result of running away and/or homelessness.  One in seven children between the ages of 10 and 18 will run away.  Some will return within a few days, while others remain on the streets and never return.  Assaults, illness or suicide will take the lives of 5,000 runaway youth each year.  The National Runaway Switchboard (1-800-621-4000), funded in part through the Department of Health and Human Services, handles more than 100,000 phone calls each year.

Cyber Predators:  Nearly 30 million children and youth go online to research homework assignments and to learn about the world they live in. Research by the University of New Hampshire found that one in five children between the ages of 10 and 17 received a sexual solicitation over the Internet in the last year. One in 33 received an aggressive solicitation—a solicitor who asked to meet them somewhere, called them on the telephone or sent them regular mail, money or gifts.

President Bush's Commitment to Increasing Children's Safety

For FY 2003, President Bush has proposed a 26 percent increase in funding for the Missing and Exploited Children's Program, which provides training for state and local enforcement on handling missing child cases.  The president's budget request would almost double funding for the Department of Justice's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICACTF) program.

In August, the president also announced the release of a new guidebook, Parent's Guide to Child Safety.  The guidebook is designed to help parents take specific steps to improve the safety of their children, and it includes information that children of all ages can understand.  The guidebook reflects the work of experts on child safety from the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

The guidebook is available online in English and in Spanish at www.missingkids.com or at www.ed.gov/parents/academic/involve/safety/index.html.

The Department of Education sent a copy of the English and Spanish versions to every public and private school and all main public libraries in the country, reaching over 110,000 schools and more than 6,000 libraries.  In the two weeks following the mailing, the Department of Education took orders for more than one million additional copies of the English version and nearly 200,000 copies of the Spanish version.

For more information on the president's initiatives, please visit www.whitehouse.gov.

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