Jessica Bies

The News Journal

Most families know the first 24 hours following a child abduction are the most important — but do they know how to prepare themselves for an actual kidnapping?

The Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children and the Boys & Girls Clubs are Delaware are working to ensure the answer is "yes."

Later this month they will partner with Smyrna School District to help put together 2,500 child ID kits, an important tool for law enforcement when searching for missing children, said Patty Dailey Lewis, executive director of the Beau Biden Foundation.

The kits contain information typically found in an Amber Alert or missing person's bulletin, she said. While many parents may have that information on file, every minute spent looking for it after an abduction is a minute that could have been spent on the search for their missing child.

"Parents, understandably, begin to panic if their children go missing," Lewis said. "They may forget small details or medical conditions."

Though the odds of their children being abducted is slight, Lewis highly encourages all parents to put together an ID kit for that reason. She's personally been involved in several abduction cases and previously served as director of the Delaware Department of Justice's Family Division, which Biden helped to create, and can think of instances of parents not having fingerprints on file, which could be a huge detriment to a case.

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Having accurate information on file can also help avoid further traumatization — like having to look at photos of a dead child in order to establish that it is not yours.

"I think child ID kits are important for every child to have," Lewis said. "When I worked with Beau (Biden) and in the (Family Division), we had quite a few cases of children getting abducted. We've had some really horrific ones here in Delaware."

The kits contain a current, high-resolution picture of the child (to be updated every six months), personal information, medical information and fingerprints. During "I love the Smyrna School District Day" on Feb. 25, the foundation will have a booth where they can type up the information, take pictures and print the kits immediately.

They even have a tape measure, Lewis said.

Children's personal information will not be shared and will be immediately deleted from the foundation's system.

Joshua Alcorn, chief engagement officer for the Biden foundation, said the group has held these events before, in conjunction with the Boys & Girls Club, which keeps a copy of the records on hand just in case a child is abducted while their parents are at work or in a meeting.

The Boy's & Girls Club's goal is to create 15,000 of the kits for youth across the state so that parents have the necessary information at their fingerprints should their children go missing, Alcorn said. Each kit contains three copies of the critical data, one large and two wallet-sized.

“The Boys and Girls Clubs thought enough ahead to say, 'Let me have one of these,'" Lewis said, adding that "part of this is awareness and saying this is really critical in an abduction."

How many children get abducted?

In 2016 the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children assisted law enforcement and families with more than 20,500 cases of missing children. Ninety percent were endangered runaways; 6 percent were abducted by a family member; 1 percent was lost, injured or otherwise missing; 1 percent were abducted by a non-family member; and 2 percent were aged 18 to 20.

Of the more than 18,500 endangered runaways reported to NCMEC in 2016, one in six were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Of those, 86 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing.

The center's site currently lists 11 children who went missing from Delaware. Their names can be found at http://www.missingkids.com/Search/DE.

Source: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

The Beau Biden Foundation

The Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children was created to honor Beau Biden’s life work: ensuring children are free from the threat of abuse. Beau Biden dedicated his life to the protection of children through initiatives such as Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children® which trains adults to spot the signs of child sexual abuse and on the importance of immediately reporting abuse to authorities. The Joseph R. Biden III Child Protection Act, signed into law in August 2015, built upon Beau’s legacy by requiring entities such as summer camps, private schools, and other youth-serving programs to obtain fingerprint-based national criminal background checks on employees, volunteers and contractors.

Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.