Kidnappings in Cleveland

I was just reading through the news about the kidnappings in Cleveland and came across an article that mainly focused on three key areas to keep kidnappings like this from happening in the future. In the article What Cleveland Kidnappings can Teach Parents Jack Levine points out the first key idea which is that once a child goes missing, parents should immediately get in touch with the police and treat the child as an abducted victim. This is especially important for missing teenage girls because most youngsters abducted for sexual purposes are dead or imprisoned within a couple of hours. Although this approach would be costly and we would make lots of mistakes, we would also save lives. Levine also points out that dangerous sex offenders who are released from prison have to register with law enforcement, and their photos and addresses are frequently made available to the public. The real problem here is that 150,000 sex offenders never register. The last point Levine makes in his article is that pressure from the public to solve the “crime of the week” minimize the attention paid to “cold cases.” Levine writes, “It becomes all too easy to assume that the kidnapping victim has been murdered because that is the statistical reality.”

Jack Levine starts off his article with a quote from Michelle Obama. When she spoke to Americans about the kidnapping she described it as “a parent’s worst nightmare.” I think Levine started off his article with this quote to get the reader thinking about how horrendous the Cleveland case really was. Levine uses different craft moves to make the reader agree that we should have faster responses when a teenage girl goes missing. For example, Levine begins the “Missing Children” section with a statistic: 800,000 children go missing every year. Of those 800,000 children, most of them are runaways or have been kidnapped by a parent during a child custody battle. Lastly, Levine ends his article on a positive note saying, “In either case, even a single kidnapping that results in freedom for its victims gives hope to the families of abducted children everywhere that their loved ones, too, could someday be coming home.” Ending the article in this way helps the reader look at what happened through a positive lens instead of focusing on just the suffering and pain of the victims of a kidnapping.

When I first heard about the kidnappings in Cleveland I was almost traumatized and I realized that I had forgotten about the horrors of this world and the cruel, selfish, sociopathic people living in it. Just the fact that anyone could ever do what Ariel Castro was accused of doing made me begin to lose faith in humanity. This article, however, put my lens into perspective as I started to gain back a sense of hope for the families of abducted children that they could someday be coming home.