Some parents want the ultimate protection for their kids.
-Jennifer Lubell
We’ve all seen the headlines.
Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Dugard. And Madeleine McCann, who disappeared three years ago while on vacation with her family in Portugal and still hasn’t been found.
Madeleine went missing just a few days before her fourth birthday. My son is going to be four in August.
Alex is my one and only son. My husband and I are not going to have any more children. If I lost him in a crowded mall or amusement park, I doubt that I would ever recover. If I someone abducted him and I didn’t know where to find him, I would probably go insane with grief.
Amid these heartbreaking thoughts, I wonder, how could I protect him? And how far would I go? It makes me wonder if a technology is out there that could track my child like a homing device, a built-in microchip that would enable authorities to locate him.
I know I’m not the only parent who’s contemplated this.
GPS-type child locators already exist on phones and other hand-held devices. “I know Sprint and several cell phone service providers have child locator services. But what if the kid loses the cell phone?” asks Leilani Haywood, the mother of an 8-year-old daughter with Down Syndrome. For that reason, she says, “I’m all for microchipping kids to protect them from the nuts and predators who take advantage of them.”
Other experts think the conversation about microchipping fuels unnecessary hysteria.
“Did you know that there are people who believe that if they let their kids stand on a public sidewalk they are 80% likely to be abducted? That’s nonsense,” says Wendie Howland, a health consultant and registered nurse who practices in Massachusetts.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that nearly 800,000 children go missing each year, although the majority of those cases don’t appear to involve abductions. Of that total figure, about 204,000 children are victims of family abductions, 58,000 are victims of non-family abductions, and just 115 involve “stereotypical” kidnapping, where the crimes involve someone the child does not necessarily know. People should consider the relative unlikelihood of a stereotypical abduction ever taking place, instead of microchipping their children as if they were dogs and cats, Howland says.
In any case, the technology hasn’t developed to the point of widespread use in the United States. PositiveID Corporation in Delray Beach, Fla., once manufactured the VeriChip, an implantable microchip that was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in 2004. The chip used passive radio frequency identification or RFID to identify high-risk patients in a hospital and link to their personal health records in an emergency—but it couldn’t actually track anyone, says Allison Tomek, senior vice president, investor relations with PositiveID.
Tomek says she gets numerous inquiries each week from parents and others worried about kidnappings, wondering if the company will ever manufacture an implantable device to help locate the ones they love.
Experts say the microchipping solution would work only on a large scale, with thousands of sites, like police cars, equipped to detect the devices. In any case, the bottom line, says Anatoly Belilovsky, a pediatrician in New York City, is that unless and until the technology becomes available, parents need to keep their eyes on their children, and educate them about safety. “Technology,” he says, “is not a substitute for a vigilant parent.”
If I had the chance, though, I would microchip my child--but give him the option when he's a teenager of having it removed. As much as I love my son, I would never want to compromise his freedom. Sooner or later, my son is going to leave me. That's a reality all parents have to face.
