According to the US Department of Justice, over 2,000 children are reported missing every day. And while most of them don't stay missing for that long, it's a terrifying experience for any parent or guardian to go through. For the past quarter century, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit established by Congress, has acted as a resource for people who have lost a child. One of cool things the Center does is age progression — the creation of computer rendered images that show what a child might look like now. We saw this most recently with the horrible case of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped in 1991 by a sick criminal who kept her captive and raped her for 18 years. Last week, People Magazine revealed the first real photo of Dugard at her current age, and it was strikingly similar to the age progressed photo that the NCMEC had created.
The NCMEC has a 97% recovery rate of all missing children reported to it, with over 900 safely returned children whose age progressed photos were advertised on TV and on milk cartons. So how do they do it? Turns out there's a small team of retired forensic detectives using Photoshop and fine art skills to re-imagine what these children might look like as they grow older.
Joseph Carson was abducted by his non-custodial dad as a toddler and was missing for about five years when a customer at an auto parts store saw that a PSA showing his age progressed image was strikingly similar to a kid who just happened to be in the store at that exact time.
Glen Miller, NCMEC:
I supervise the forensic imaging unit here at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I'm a retired police forensic artist — I've been here since 1992. As a detective in the police force, I often created composites from witness memories of bank robbers and rapists. Here at the Center, the emphasis is on aging faces of long-term missing children. It's different than working from memory, but there isn't a software available that automatically ages photos.When a child goes missing, we usually get a photo with the report. As time goes on, though, the photo becomes less and less valuable, especially if the child was very young when he went missing. That's where age progression comes in. To come up with the best possible progressed image, we begin with a photo of the child and of the biological parent &mdash the father if it's a little boy, the mother at if it's a girl — at the age that the child would now be.
My colleague Joe Mullins worked on the most recent image of Jaycee. He had to study 11-year old Jaycee's face closely, and become familiar with all her unique features — the eyes, the eyelids, the shape of the nose. 80% of likeness is recognizable in the eyes. We're constantly dealing with the subtleties of aging. What makes someone appear 15 and not 29? He battled that while holding onto the unique facial qualities that set Jaycee apart.
When Jonathan Ortiz was just two years old, his mom ran off with him to Guadalajara Mexico, after attempting to kill his dad by feeding him a milkshake laced with pesticide. She was arrested and extradited back to the US eight years later, but Jonathan wasn't with her. Here, you can see that the age progressed image of 10-year old Jonathan (middle) created from a photo of him as a one-year old is quite similar to the actual photo taken (far left) when he was found — especially around the mouth.
We use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to manipulate the photos. We stretch the face to approximate growth, blend it with parental photos, and put a hairstyle on each child. The clothes are transformed to be more appropriate for that age. We use powerful Macs with lots of memory and speed, and drawing tablets instead of mouses. With this technology, we can complete one age progression in about three hours.When we look at the child's face and family photos, we pretty much know what we're going to do with it right away. We try to do an age progression every two years until age 18, and then every five years after that. We continue to age progress children unless we're specifically told not to or until the child is located. Last quarter, we produced 131 age progressions. I enjoy seeing the transformation as I manipulate the photos.
We build faces in virtual environments for people to recognize, but the only way we really know we're successful is by having results. We can compliment each other on how great an age progressed image is, but the public is the true test of success. To say we love feedback is an understatement. We crave it. It encourages parents of long term missing kids that there's hope, and that's one of the most important things about what we do. We're giving people their identity back.
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A 97% Recovery rate!? That's great, but it goes against every statistic I've ever heard about the likelihood of a safe recovery after X number of hours missing.
"NCMEC has a 97% recovery rate of all missing children reported to it, with over 900 safely returned children whose age progressed photos were advertised on TV and on milk cartons."
But I'd heard that the vast majority of these missing children turn out to have been snatched by the divorced parent who doesn't have legal custody, and that the recovery rate is high because the police generally know exactly who the kidnapper is.
Wait, so they use a picture of the same-gendered parent? But what about when the kid has mostly the DNA of the opposite-gendered parent?
I'm thinking of my own family--I look more like my father, and my brother looks more like my mother to the point that pictures of both of them at 4 years old are the SAME CHILD.
(With due respect to both of them though, now that my brother's an adult a lot of the similarities have faded. But my brother still doesn't look like my father.)
Their Photoshop skills are amazing! I'm boggled by how much the concept rendering (for lack of a better term) looks like her.
Hi,
I take issue with the opening line of your post. I believe it perpetuates a misunderstanding about abductions that interferes with our ability as parents to balance safety with the reasonable freedom we generally seek to instill in our children.
I have 2 kids, 6 and 2, and a common conversation between my wife and I (and between our friends) has often considered this question: is the world more dangerous now for kids than it was when we were kids? I don't have a good answer for it, but I've recently been tending towards a belief that because of the profligation of the 24 hour news cycle, and our availability to it, we simply see more acts of violence to kids and therefore perceive the world as less safe. That said - I'm still a freak-show about safety. My first grader doesn't walk to school, and I likely won't let her next year either - although i walked to school starting in first grade.
I thought this article in the New York Times of identifying some of the ways in which our perception is off. A good snippet:
"Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&hpw
And even while there may be more abductions by of our children by people the children know, there are likely warning signs that we can use to guide our behavior in those cases(a messy divorce, a history of abuse, etc.)
I keep coming back to the 115 number. 115 kids abducted a year, and I keep my girl from enjoying a good walk to school (and all the fulfillment that entails) because I am scared a car will stip and lure her into it. By that logic, I should also not allow her to play on the playground, since XXX number of kids suffer serious injury every year.
As I said, I have many disparate thoughts on this, and would like to hear the other parent's view on this. Even with a number as low as 115, I'm still not buying that lottery ticket.
LB has a good point here. back in the pre-DNA-days the identification of a child being fathered by a certain man was more successfull, when the child lacked the mothers features.
i think what is missing in the article is that when composing a picture, e.g. in facial reconstruction from skulls, you want to focus on the priminent features. notice how the teeth of dugard and the black kid are shown in the reconstruction whilst in the mexican boy they arent.
in his case the reconstruction focuses on the lip area and the angle clearly shows that his ears are rather "flappy" (sorry, dont remember the english expression for that).
same goes for the chin in the black kid.
ageing techniques from a known child of course have the advantage of know soft tissue features such as nose tips, lips and ears over skull based reconstructions.
those reconstructions are never "brave" enough to depict ears very angled as such features might lead to false-negative results (not the droid we are looking for, look at those ears!)
I'm going to second MisterEppy's comments. Interestingly Boing Boing has more than once highlighted the "Free Range Kids" movement which exists primarily to fight such misleading and falsely provocative statements as were made in the opening sentences.
@Mistereppy, in the FRK book the author highlights a comment from a reader in terms of the classic retort "well how you would feel if your kid was once of those who was kidnapped" which is "how would you feel if your kid was killed in a car crash"? Would you punish yourself because you let them in a car? Well, car accidents kill way more children than kidnappings, etc.... (I realize I've paraphrased this badly, but so it goes when hastily posting in-between things)
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All that said, let's not go too nuts on Lisa. :) The rest of the posting is really fascinating and brings to light some really interesting work.
I also take issue with the first line of the post. Kids do not go missing all the time. Kids hardly ever go missing. I have two kids myself, and yes, I worry about their safety, but let's be reasonable. If we don't give them some opportunities to prove to themselves that they can handle the world on their own, what's that teaching them for later in life?
What Mister Eppy said. "Children go missing all the time" is one of those statements that's true in the same sense as "people are killed by objects dropped out of airplanes all the time." It happens, but not very darn often. Meanwhile, while we have not reorganized our society to address the threat of objects falling from airplanes, we have indeed gone bug-eyed crazy trying to "protect" our children from the nearly-entirely-imaginary threat of abduction, to the point of raising an entire generation of kids who aren't allowed to be normal kids.
This has been hugely discussed on Boing Boing, so cool though the photo-manipulation technique is, it's very disappointing to see the "children go missing all the time" nonsense being promulgated here.
Interesting! I wasn't aware of the 115 kids/yr statistic—that's in the US?
I'm not a parent, but I'm an older sister, with an age difference of twelve years.
I honestly think it's totally reasonable to restrict a first-grader's freedoms (to a certain point; how far is this school?) but I think the most important thing is to teach. If she's ready to understand lessons of caution and alertness, to learn to scream or use a whistle if someone tries something untoward, then she's ready to walk to school by herself.
We all think walking to school imparts some kind of knowledge or essential lesson, but it doesn't if the kid isn't alert and receptive to that wisdom. Talk to her, and figure it out. If you can make the time, I like the idea of walking together and getting to know the route together -- people who also walk at the same time, normal events, etc. -- before graduating onto a solo walk. That way, it's also a learning experience in that you can point out things to pay attention to, and what to notice if something might not "feel right."
The 115 number represents abductions by strangers. Of course, a far greater number (about 5000) are abducted by family members in custody battles and the like.
> Children go missing all the time.
And they are usually "recovered" a few minutes later when you call their name and they come back and say 'WHAT?'.
According to Mr. Eppy's statistic from the New York Times, 115 children go missing in the entire country in a year.
According to the article, 97% of THOSE are recovered.
That means 3 or 4 children go missing and are not recovered in the entire country every year.
Three or four. To get some perspective, an average of 170 people die every year from swallowing a toothpick (according to Michael Largo author of 'Final Exits').
It is irrational to suppress your child's independence for fear of abduction, yet allow the toothpick menace and millions of other extremely unlikely menaces to go unguarded.
I think it is rational to ignore any dangers this unlikely.
For spreading irrational fear, I sentence you to read at least 2 articles on Lenore Skenazy's blog 'Free Range Kids' ( http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/ )
Danger to children is not either/or. Yes, there are relatively few abductions. Yes, being hurt or killed in a car accident is more likely. But children don't have to be in a car to be hurt by a car.
We live 3.5 blocks from school, in an neighborhood filled with numerous schools (public, private and parochial). I've been hit by a hit & run driver in the pedestrian crossing in front of one of those schools, and one of my children was hit at the same time. I've been hit in that same ped crossing another time, alone, coming home from dropping them off.
I'm not worried about some stranger abducting my kids. I'm worried about some stranger running into them and driving off. Which I've seen happen, right in front of me. Letting them walk alone, especially the younger ones who are shorter than the average parked car, IS dangerous.
Don't kid yourselves that the only danger to "free range" children is the remote possibility of being abducted.
@Shane: good point on the coolness of rest of the post. Didn't mean to distract from that "wonderful thing"
@Lisa Katayama: RTFM! :-P Jk... that's in the U.S, and only those that are abducted by strangers.
@Simonbarsinister: I would not conflate those two numbers. More likely 97% of the total number are recovered, and we don't have line of sight into where the subcategory of 'those snatched by creeps we don't know' would go.
On a personal note: is that the Simon who led the Bar Sinisters in NYC back in the day and used to play out at the 'gale and other wonderful places?
I fear something awful coming from somethingawful
115 is the number of stranger abductions (the kind we freak out about the most), but there are 58,200 abductions by non-strangers who are not family members and an additional 203,900 family member abductions. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's statistics (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/Statistics.pdf). And those only account for the abductions which are classified. The Center says that 797,500 children went missing in one year, or 2,185 a day in the US. Not all of those are abductions and some may be quickly resolved, but I think those numbers make the claim "Children go missing all the time." a reasonable one.
If anyone wants an excellent programming project... I noticed a while back that there is no Facebook app to display photos of missing children... since many of these missing children will eventually get Facebook accounts, to me it seems like a no brainer.
@Eppy re: Simon and the Bar Sinisters: Nope, not the same. Although I do enjoy their punk rendition of Holtz's "The Planets"
@Anonymous: By "free-range" I don't mean throw all caution to the wind. I teach my kids proper safety and respect for dangerous things and places. I allow even encourage them to be as independent as is safe, but no more than that. My 4 year old isn't allowed to walk by the side of the road because he might dart out. My 7 year old, however is allowed to walk a mile to the library because he has demonstrated to me that he takes the proper precautions at intersections, stops and looks before driveways, etc.
LB
Whether or not you look like one parent more than another, you have approximately 50% of each parent's genes. You will not have "mostly the DNA" of either of your parents - that's not how meiosis works.
Fine, fine, but that doesn't address the part of when one parent's traits dominate over the other, which is what I meant.
I have to chime in about the LACK of kidnappings. Violent crime has actually DECREASED but we the public who lap up the infotainment are led to BELIEVE it is INCREASING. This benefits many industries, believe it or not. We drive our kids to school rather than have them walk, thus supporting oil companies and car manufacturers. We contract out the locking up of our citizens, with silly "3 strikes" laws passed because the American public is kept in FEAR. Thus, FOR PROFIT PRISON COMPANIES BENEFIT from our hysteria. We lock up more of our citizens per capita than the rest of the industrialized world, and the majority of the offenses are NON-VIOLENT And, sadly enough, American citizens in former industrial towns benefit from the building of these prisons, because they bring much needed jobs to their community. (I'm not knocking those people, if you have no money to relocate, and have a choice between poverty and a paying wage at a prison what would you choose?)
The news media is no longer news. It is entertainment, and is run by corporations whose bottom line is the $. They want increased viewers to get increased ad revenue and their stock to increase and increased payouts to shareholders. They broadcast the grisly story of a murder of a white child in a small town on the West Coast to people in the East Coast, make the story compelling and repeat the line "it could happen in anyone's backyard." Mass hysteria ensues, and they've got us right where they want us.
Sources? My BS at UC Berkeley, with the class "Carceral Geographies" being THE most eye opening and further research on these issues b/c I'm also a mommy of 2 now :-). Also my husband's rants about this very subject to anyone who will listen. (Major in Criminal Law BA and practicing Attorney, thus MAJOR BS tee hee!) Had to say it!
An AMAZING read that will scare the daylights out of you (in a good way, in terms of how much we're manipulated) is Joel Dyer's "The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime."
In regards to the work they do, I'll take their clearly skilled photoshopping that contributes to society over Ralph Lauren Bobbleheads anyday! ;-)
Just making a note here for the record that the opening line in this blog post was edited by the author, after initial publication, for clarity and tone. We're sorting through the standard of whether to use strikeouts or not in cases like this, but since some of the early comments in this thread reference language that is no longer in the opening sentence, I'm making this little comment here. Nothing sinister, just an author's attempt to express herself in the clearest, strongest words.
I would think the other 3% were taken by strangers. I read somewhere that in reality, most kidnappings in the US are by parents with a small minority by strangers. Of course, it is horrible to be that 3% and so we're all become over cautious with good reason. What if you are THAT one.
I'd have to say in that case that photographs would probably show the dominance of features, and also family members would probably testify to this and this taken into consideration during the process. If people do grow out of these close similarities then I expect you'd just end up with a less accurate representation with not much you could do about it.
I am surprised at their recovery rate given that the age progressed faces look nothing like the pictures of the recovered victims.
Of those >2000/day, though, how many are suspected to have been abducted by helium balloon flying saucers? THESE are the things we need to look out for, nowadays. Abductions by helium balloon flying saucers have gone through the roof lately. I know, because they've been getting a lot of media coverage.