This post was originally published on April 14th 2014 at http://www.atlascorps.org/blog/?p=4426
In the last 3 month in Washington DC, I
have received four AMBER Alerts on my phone. For a while the AMBER Alert
made me wonder of all possible doubts about my phone being infected by a
virus. This thought lingered since the time I received this anonymous,
continuously vibrating message on my phone which popped up on the phone
screen from nowhere and disappeared after a while. In fact, it was
strange to know that some of my colleagues at work were surprised too on
a day we received it together. Initially, for a couple of minutes at
work, I misunderstood this abbreviated term as a virus alert on my phone
till this curiosity led me to do a quick web search over the mystery
behind it. Nothing could have left me more amazed about what I figured
out in the next 5 to 10 minutes. I was quite impressed to know about the
organized technical and practical response set by the United States
Department of Justice. Through all these 7 to 8 years of experience in
the Indian Non-profit sector and devising strategies for and working
with Task Forces on finding missing, trafficked and exploited children I
never saw such an example and far-sightedness of technology.
The US Department of Justices’ AMBER
Alert Program is a voluntary partnership between the law-enforcement
agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the widest
reachable wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most
serious child-abduction cases. It started back in 1996 in Dallas – Fort
Worth. It is a nation wide system which is now active in all 50 states,
the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The
AMBER Alert system has also been adopted in the Canadian provinces and
continues to expand into the Mexican border states.
The primary goal of an AMBER Alert is to
instantly stimulate the entire community to assist in the search for and
the safe recovery of the child who has gone missing. In case citizens
or commoners have queries and clues they asked to direct calls to the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) who are
managing the secondary distribution of AMBER Alerts.
I worked with the famous Childline
network in India on more than 100 cases of missing and trafficked
children and women across India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Childline
is an India based network which ensures a integrated child protection
response. The Childline’s 1098 service is India first toll free tele
helpline launched back in 1996 for street children. The same year when AMBER Alert was launched. Similarly in Europe, the European Child Alert Automated System (ECAAS) was started in 2007 with the support of the European Commission to start the ‘Child Abduction Alert’. This is an
automated system for child alerts that will enable law enforcement in
the partner countries to quickly notify the public when a child goes
missing and ask for their assistance. Equally significant, the partner
countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Portugal will be able to
communicate with their partners to launch the alert in cases where there
is information that the child has been taken to another country.
In China, which is a home to a centuries
old scourge of buying and selling of children, abduction appears to be
less lethal but no less painful. There seems to no system in place to
find missing, abducted children, parent with a very less amount of help
by police are forced to find their children on their own. More than
60,000 children are estimated to go missing each year. Children from
China are less expensive to buy for adoption than South Korea. These
children are mostly abducted and put up for adoption. A lack of
coordinated child alert systems in these countries makes it harder for
parents to track their children for years. United Kingdom uses the Child Rescue Alert System
(CRA) which started in 2007 based on the AMBER Alert system. The CRA is
managed by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.
Back in 2012, the abduction of April Jones triggered the first nationwide Child Rescue Alert ever used in the UK as investigators started weighing up the risk to the child in the hours after her disappearance.
Child Alert systems such the AMBER have
proven to be beneficial for a well coordinated response in saving lives
of many innocent children. In my experience of tracking, rescuing and
reintegrating missing children in India, i can validate this with a firm
belief that there is a high amount of coordinated intelligence,
presence of mind and a proactive community and inter-agency response
needed to make it happen, keeping in mind all legal and sociological
grounds to protect a child.
