Should older children be dropped off at the mall alone?

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Nancy McBride
National Safety Director, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
www.missingkids.com  
1-800-THE-LOST

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) mission is to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation; help find missing children; and assist victims of child abduction and sexual exploitation, their families, and the professionals who serve them.

NCMEC was established in 1984 as a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization to provide services nationwide for families and professionals in the prevention of abducted, endangered, and sexually exploited children. Pursuant to its mission and its congressional mandates (see 42 U.S.C. §§ 5771 et seq.; 42 U.S.C. § 11606; 22 C.F.R. § 94.6),

The NCMEC serves as a clearinghouse of information about missing and exploited children, operates a CyberTipline that the public may use to report Internet-related child sexual exploitation, provides technical assistance to individuals and law-enforcement agencies in the prevention, investigation, prosecution, and treatment of cases involving missing and exploited children, assists the U.S. Department of State in certain cases of international child abduction in accordance with the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, offers training programs to law-enforcement and social-service professionals, distributes photographs and descriptions of missing children worldwide, coordinates child-protection efforts with the private sector, networks with nonprofit service providers and state clearinghouses about missing-persons cases and provides information about effective state legislation to help ensure the protection of children.

Should older children be dropped off at the mall alone?

In this video series, Nancy McBride, the National Safety Director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children answers questions regarding personal child safety on topics ranging from the Internet, School safety, Holiday safety, and information about child identification. The Q&A provides helpful tips and tools for parents and guardians to help keep their children safer.

This expert: 93,368 views

This series: 5,966 views

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Transcripts

Host: Should older children be dropped off at the mall alone?

Nancy McBride: Older children should really not be dropped off at the mall alone because we know perpetrators look for access and opportunity to go into look for places where kids are. We actually did a new segment on this very issue. We know it is easy to trick younger kids but what about the older kids and we sent a person into a mall setting who had a clipboard claiming to be from MTV and he approached even groups of teenage girls and teenage boys, he approached some of them alone, he approached some of them together and he said Hey, I really want to make you a star we are doing a program, you have got the right look, come with me and we will get a release for your parents to find , and invariably the kids went because a lot of kids are enticed with that whole promise of stardom. So, we want to make sure the kids understand, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true and the same rules apply in a mall setting as they do at any other setting of your life. Do not talk to people you do not know, do not go with them anywhere and do not fall for their tricks.

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