Missing and Exploited Children: Background, Policies, and Issues

Date: 19 Jun 2007

Author: Congressional Research Service

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Beginning in the late 1970s, highly-publicized cases of children abducted, sexually abused, and often murdered prompted policymakers and child advocates to declare a missing children problem. At that time, about one and a half million children were reported missing annually. A more recent count, in 1999, estimated that approximately 1.3 million children went missing from their caretakers that year due to a family or non-family abduction, running away or being forced to leave home, becoming lost or injured, or for benign reasons, such as a miscommunication about schedules. About half of all missing children ran away or were forced to leave home, and nearly all missing children were returned to their homes. The number of children who are sexually exploited — defined broadly to include a continuum of abuse, from child pornography to commercial sexual exploitation — is unknown. Verified incidents of child sexual exploitation that were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) from 1998 to 2006 exceeded 180,000.

Recognizing the need for greater federal coordination of local and state efforts to recover missing and exploited children, Congress created the Missing and Exploited Children’s (MEC) program in 1984 under the Missing Children’s Assistance Act (P.L. 98-473, Title IV of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974). The act directed the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to establish both a toll-free number to report missing children and a national resource center for missing and exploited children; coordinate public and private missing and exploited children’s programs; and provide training and technical assistance to recover missing children. Since 1984, NCMEC has served as the national resource center and has carried out many the objectives of the act in collaboration with OJJDP.

The MEC program was last reauthorized by the Runaway, Homeless, and Missing Children Protection Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-96). In addition to funding NCMEC, the program currently supports the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force program to assist state and local law enforcement cyber units investigate online child sexual exploitation; technical assistance for the AMBER Alert System, which coordinates local and regional efforts to broadcast bulletins in the most serious child abduction cases; and training, through NCMEC’s Jimmy Ryce Law Enforcement Training Center, for law enforcement and prosecutors. For FY2007, Congress appropriated $47.4 million for the MEC program.

Authorization of appropriations for the MEC program is scheduled to expire at the end of FY2008. On May 24, 2007, Representative Lampson introduced Protecting Our Children First Act (H.R. 2517) to reauthorize the program. Issues that may be relevant to any reauthorization efforts include an Administration proposal to consolidate the program with juvenile justice programs under a discretionary block grant; the creation of the National Emergency Child Missing Locator Center at NCMEC; and the potential need for more comprehensive data on missing and sexually exploited children. This report will be updated as relevant legislative and funding activities occur.