Ashleigh Moore
From The Rittenhouse Review
She was last seen on April 18 at her home on Weiner Dr. in Savannah.
She is very near-sighted and normally wears glasses, without which she cannot see.
She has been missing for more than a week.
Never heard of her?
Didn't catch the three-alarm blast on CNN about her?
Missed the "Amber Alert" on this one?
I guess what bothers me the most about this isn't that young Ms. Moore disappearance didn't make the news, it's that I wouldn't look for to do so.
I looked up the statistics at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
How many missing children are there?
Answer: The best national estimates for the number of missing children are from incidence studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice?s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Two such studies have been completed, the first National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART 1) was released in 1990 and the second, known as NISMART 2, was released in October of 2002.
According to NISMART 2, every year there are 58,200 children are abducted by nonfamily members. That's a fraction shy of 160 per day. 115 children are serious kidnap victims per year. That's roughly one every third day.
You think America went crazy over duct tape. Think of what would happen if every three days another kidnapping was broadcast.
America does like its horror shows, though, so some of this will be broadcast. Which, and when, is a marketing decision. Has the market had its fill of this for the moment? Is the victim someone our target market will identify with or feel protective of? Are the spokesmen media-savvy enough to put on a good show? Under these conditions, the balance tips to the Jon-Binet types before racial justice even arises as a concept.
posted by Prometheus 6 at 5/1/2003 10:02:30 PM |
