Do American kids really go missing every 90 seconds?

“Every 90 seconds” is how often some education campaigns say an American child goes missing.

It’s a matter of definitions and old statistics, but reality doesn’t reflect what the statement calls to mind, as a report by Hannah Moore for BBC News recently demonstrated.

Back in 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice published an estimate of “missing, abducted, runaway or thrown-away” children in the United States. It said that nearly 800,000 children are reported missing each year, which was about one in every 90 American children at the time the number was collected, Moore said.

It’s not clear how that became every 90 seconds, since the math doesn’t add up. But it doesn’t matter, because only 115 of the 795,000 children were actually abducted by strangers or taken 50 miles or more from home, as the image conjures when it says “goes missing.”

“The missing child concept is widely misunderstood,” David Finkelhor, who co-authored the 2002 study, and is director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, told Moore.

Besides that, about half the kids are missing in a “benign” way, he added. In many cases, that means they were not missing at all, but mom or dad temporarily lost track of them.

For others, being missing is less benign. The National Runaway Safeline says that it’s hard to figure out how many kids have run away, but cites figures from Urban Institute that say about 20 percent of kids have run away by age 18 — and half that number have done so at least twice.

Children can begin running between ages 10-14. The youngest runaways face the gravest dangers from living on the streets, according to the National Runaway Safeline.

The number of missing children has been dropping, mirroring other statistics tracking a decrease in virtually all crime categories, including abuse, neglect, homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault and more. According to the Bureau of Justice, crime has been dropping for two decades.