When the unthinkable happens

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Merrill Douglas

By the FBI's count, U.S. police departments reported more than 662,000 lost, runaway or kidnapped children to state and federal authorities during 2005. And according to research published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2006, among young people ages 10 to 17 who go online, approximately one of every seven has received a sexual solicitation of some type over the Internet.

Whether a family is reporting a missing child or improper contact between an adult and child, usually the first point of communication is a public safety call-taker. To make sure that agencies collect all the information they need when a child is in danger, NCMEC has teamed with several other organizations to produce a guide for those telecommunications professionals. The publication, Model Policy and Best-Practice Guide for Call-Takers When Handling Calls Pertaining to Missing and Sexually Exploited Children, came out last summer.

As part of this effort to develop standard procedures for taking reports of missing and sexually exploited children, NCMEC also is expanding its educational programs to reach more public safety telecommunications professionals.

NCMEC's partners in the program are the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), the National Academies of Emergency Dispatch (NAED) and the AMBER Alert Program of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Most public safety answering points (PSAPs) already have policies for handling calls of this type, and when they developed the guide, the partners weren't responding to particular inadequacies, said Michelle Moore, project manager for the initiative at NCMEC in Alexandria, Va. The goal simply was to make sure that call-takers throughout the country gather information in a uniform way, she said. “It's just a guideline, to help people in case they need some assistance.”

“There are 109 public safety answering points in the state of Connecticut alone. So depending on where you are, you could have 109 different ways of handling that call,” said Frank Kiernan, director of emergency communications for Meriden, Conn., and a member of APCO's standards development committee.

“We wanted to ensure that all public safety answering points are using consistent protocols for handling these types of calls,” added Sonya Lopez-Clauson, public information officer with the Greater Harris County, Texas, 911 center, who represented NENA's Public Awareness Committee on the project.

The biggest reason call-takers need a step-by-step guide has to do with the content of the calls themselves, said Bob Smith, director of communications center and 911 services for APCO. “Probably the most high-tension, emotional call types that we take are those calls that involve children as victims,” he said.

Kiernan agreed that taking a call about a possible crime involving a child could be a traumatic experience. “And there are things that can be missed. So having a policy like this, where the dispatcher can open it up and read right off it, you don't miss anything,” he said.

The guide provides lists of questions for taking several different kinds of reports. For missing children, it includes guidelines for reports involving: a child who has been abducted, either by a family member or non-family member; a child who is lost, injured or otherwise missing; and a child who has run away or been “thrown away” — deserted, kicked out of the home or otherwise abandoned by the caretaker.

For cases of possible sexual exploitation, it provides questions for a person reporting: child pornography, child sexual molestation, child victims of prostitution, online enticement of children for sexual acts and a child who may be with an adult companion met on the Internet.

Reports about child pornography or sexual enticement on the Internet pose a special challenge for call-takers because when a crime occurs in cyberspace, it can be hard to establish jurisdiction. “It's something that people know a little bit less about than missing children,” Moore said.