Child Abduction: The Social Media Response and Lost Kidz

Stephen Fern, creator of the FREE app Lost Kidz has an important message for you this morning, please give him five minutes of your time

Whilst our prayers for the safe return of April becoming increasingly desperate, the horrors of the events in Wales will haunt a generation, affecting the very freedoms that our children need in order to play, grow and learn. Our instant reaction to these thankfully rare stories is to exert ever stricter controls over our children’s freedom; the freedom they need to play, grow and learn. But no amount of statistical analysis will change the way we respond to a child abduction – our natural instinct to protect overwhelms our logical thought processes that tell us that, statistically at least, our children live in no greater danger than us, our parents or even our grandparents.

It is called the Catastrophe effect – where the catastrophic nature of being on the wrong end of the statistics affects our behaviour in irrational ways – much the same process which means that we still trot off to buy our national lottery tickets despite the overwhelming odds against us winning ‘the big one’.

Despite the many comments seen in social media sites over the last 48 hours suggesting we live in a sick society, my belief in the overwhelming goodness in society is re-enforced when you see the reaction of the public. The entire town turns up to help in the search, people driving hundreds of miles to lend a hand, tens of thousands of people across the UK posting messages to Facebook and Twitter – all trying to ‘do something to help’. It re-affirms the feeling from last summer’s riots when the good people in every community came out on to the streets with their brushes and joined together as a community to help the clean up.

Sadly, the Social Media response in these cases worldwide rarely has a direct impact on the outcome itself. The arrest of a 46 year old yesterday was down to good old fashioned detective work and the hunt for missing April will be undertaken now by specialist teams – but that does not diminish the fact that the community reaction MAY have made a difference and at least it allows us to stand up and be counted -to show the world that our society is not completely broken – there are millions of people out there willing to help when asked, and many more willing to step up to the plate in our hour of need.

It was only a week ago that BritMums allowed me to share the Lost Kidz vision with your community. An Amber Alert system for parents around the country where we can call upon the people within our community to help immediately when something like this happens – one click on a smartphone and everyone can immediately take action; everyone within a few miles alerted to the fact that a child has been taken and we are looking for a van in, or leaving the area…and this matters, because in 75% of child abduction cases where the child is not returned safe and well, the child is murdered within the first 3 hours. In this situation, every second counts. April was reported missing at 7.30pm and the first social media tweet was sent out at 10.30. The vast majority of the social and public media response started the following morning. Not too little – but too late.

Within BritMums we have a community of bloggers who can access a 12 million strong community of parents around the UK and simply by downloading the FREE Lost Kidz App, we can be a part of the Lost Kidz ‘Amber Alert’ community across the country. In fact, with your help, perhaps by writing about it and sharing your thoughts today, we can create a network of caring parents that will immediately have an impact on the safety of our children. If this ever happens again, we may even help to save a child’s life.

Stephen Fern was frightened a few years back when he thought he had lost his child FOREVER. That fright was turned into a positive research for a solution and Lost Kidz app was born, Stephen can be found tweeting at @breakfastfor8 you can find more information on the Lost Kidz website and a Like on the Facebook page will keep you up to date on the app.

What are your thought on child abduction and recent events? If you have written about it, add your post to the linky below.

About Marianne Weekes

BLOGS AT: Mari's World; TWITTER: @maris_world. Mother of four and nana to three, Marianne Weekes has spent half her life in the UK and the other half in Italy. Blogging since Jan 2010, she finds it hard to drag herself away from her laptop and writes about food, travel and lifestyle. Always on the lookout for the next thing which takes her down many surprising lanes.

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