On CNN International this afternoon with Fionnula Sweeney discussing media coverage of the Madeleine McCann abduction story.

In all the coverage, there’s very little attempt to look at the research on this kind of unusual event – and yes, the word ‘murder’ is appropriate here. Last year the Office of the Attorney General in Washington State updated their comprehensive review of child abduction murders across the United States, adding 175 new cases. Here’s what they found:

With more killers identified, we find that the relationships between them and their victims change from strangers to an almost equal likelihood of being friends/acquaintances.

The probability of the killer’s name coming up during the first week of the investigation decreases. Another significant change is the increase of the use of pornography by killers as a trigger. This should not be surprising, given the overwhelming sexual motivation of killers in these cases.

Victims continue to be females slightly over 11 years of age, leading normal lives and living with normal families – typical low-risk victims. The initial contact between the victim and killer is still within ¼ mile of the victim’s residence.

The killers remain around 27 years old and are predominately unmarried, with half of them living either alone or with their parents. Half of them are unemployed, and those who are employed work in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. More than half of these cases are initially reported to a law enforcement agency as a “missing child.”

Fast action is necessary since there is typically over a two-hour delay in making the initial missing child report, and the vast majority of the abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction.

The original report’s key findings?

• In 74% of the cases, the child murder victim was female and the average age was 11 years old.
• In 44% of the cases, the victims and killers were strangers, but in 42% of the cases, the victims and killers were friends or acquaintances.
• Only about 14% of the cases involved parents or intimates killing the child.
• Almost two-thirds of the killers have prior arrests for violent crimes, with slightly more than half of those prior crimes committed against children.
• The primary motive for the child abduction killer is sexual assault.
• In nearly 60% of the cases, more than two hours passed between the time someone realized the child was missing and the time police were notified.
• In 76% of the cases, the child was dead within three hours of the abduction – and in 88.5% of the cases the child was dead within 24 hours.

For further reading, this paper [PDF] – Child Abduction Murder: An Analysis of the Effect of Time and Distance from The Journal of Forensic Science.

It’s grim stuff, but it is informative. And you won’t have heard much about it for the past couple of weeks.