Programming disrupted, please stand by

I forgot my power cord at my boyfriend’s. I’ve only got an hour and a half of battery power left on the laptop, so updates will have to wait until the cord is returned to me, which will hopefully be tomorrow.

A good idea

The author of the following letter sent this to me and I decided to post this on my blog because I think it’s an excellent idea:

To Whom it May Concern:

This is an idea I have for finding women and children who are believed to have been kidnapped and sold into the human trafficking / sex slave market of third world and other countries, including this one.

My name is Anna Maria. I am a 29-year-old woman. I am a born United States Citizen, and I currently live in Altamonte Springs, Florida. As a concerned US citizen, my heart goes out to the many families who have loved ones that have been kidnapped and are believed to have been sold into the human trafficking / sex slave markets, and I am writing out of a sincere desire to help.

I believe it may be possible to locate these victims by using the internet (particularly, search engine optimization) to specifically target potential, current, or past customers of the people holding these victims captive with information about each individual victim and each family’s individual search. This may be done by building separate websites providing full information on each victim individually, but optimizing the websites as if they were the same type of sex/adult friend finder/escort service/brothel/etc website that these customers would be searching for.

The websites would need to be optimized for any, and all, search terms that these customers would type into Google, or any search engine, in order to find the websites that provide these services in the locations they are looking for. The websites should be optimized and built in each of the likely languages that would be used when searching. For example: if it is possible that a victim may be held in a place where people may speak Spanish, English, as well as Portuguese, and if the potential customers would be persons who speak one or all of these languages, then that victim’s websites should be completely optimized in all three languages, for all of the differing search terms that someone would type in their own language.

In order to entice the potential customers to ‘click,’ the websites need to have URLs appropriate for what these customers would be looking for—example: www.best-brothels-in-south-america.com, or www.gorgeous-escorts-for-your-vacation.com, or www.exotic-girls-of-ecuador.net, etc.

The websites should also contain pictures of what the victim may look like now, with as many variations as possible in hair style and color, in facial expression, and in clothing, accessories, and makeup. Pictures or drawings of every single distinctive feature, such as tattoos, body piercings, and birth marks should appear as well. I believe that pictures speak louder, and faster, than words, and while full descriptions are important and should be provided, pictures and quick, easy-to-read bold statements must be prominent. This is especially important when considering that these customers would likely stumble onto these websites, and only remain for a matter of seconds or minutes.

I am a small business owner who has found search engine optimization to be key in targeting my own potential customers. I learned much of what I know about search engine optimization from another small business friend of mine, and from, believe it or not, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent. It took me a year to finally digest the information and use it effectively, but once I learned to do this correctly, it has been very successful.

I know a lot about building websites, and search engine optimization, however, I am not a specialist. There are definitely people who are experts at web development and search engine optimization, however, not all web developers know how to optimize a website for search engines. If each individual family of these victims is able to employ a specialist in search engine optimization, I strongly encourage them to do so in order to best build, and optimize the sort of website I have mentioned in this letter. If they are not able to employ a specialist, and if they want to try to tackle this on their own, I encourage them to read Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, and any other search engine optimization book out on the market today for help and ideas.

This is a complicated process—especially for persons who are not used to thinking in terms of web development and optimizing pages for key words, but if the right people are targeted with the right keywords and phrases, the persons who actually have contact with the victims of kidnapping and human trafficking would very likely stumble onto these pages.

Usually, families of missing persons only build webpages that are targeted at the regular, law abiding, concerned US citizen—example: www.amybradley.net. This is a great site for providing information to people who know Amy Bradley, or for anyone who may have seen the Dr. Phil special which aired a few years ago and might be interested in reading up on her situation, but this website will in no way reach the people who could actually do anything about it! This site is not in any way optimized for reaching the would-be customers of various brothels in third world countries. Those customers are not going to type “Amy Bradley” or “Find Amy Bradley” into www.Google.com. They are going to type search phrases in their own languages that will help them to find the type of brothel or escort service they are looking for in their location, and whatever it is they type into Google, it will definitely NOT be “Find Amy Bradley.”

If possible, please forward this information to any families who have loved ones that have been kidnapped and lost to this industry.

Thank you very much, and best wishes to the grieving families of these victims.

Sincerely,
Anna Maria

© Anna Maria 2009 | This letter is posted here with permission by the author. For permission to write about this idea, or to reproduce this letter in part, or in full, please write for permission to Anna Maria here.

How are age-progressions made?

BBC News has posted this interesting article about how people make age-progressions for missing kids. Of course they’re focusing on Madeleine McCann.

Headlines

This article is headlined “Search Goes On For Missing Belleville Prostitute.” The prostitute in question is 47-year-old Janet Tillman, a mentally handicapped Illinois woman who’s been missing for two years. There are, as of this writing, 45 comments to the article, and a lot of people are upset about the headline referring to Janet as a prostitute. She is or was, in fact, a prostitute, but some of the commenters feel the headline demeans her and makes her sound like trash not worth looking for or whatever.

Perhaps the person who wrote the headline didn’t mean anything of the kind. Prostitution was Janet’s occupation. Would anyone complain about “Search Goes On For Missing Belleville Teacher” or “Lawyer” or even “Sewage Worker”? Nonetheless, it is a bit of a foot-in-mouth thing to do. Prostitution is, rightly or wrongly, a highly stigmatized profession.

I recall being similarly troubled by a headline I saw several years ago: something like “DNA Links Mexicans to Murder.” The Mexicans in question were three specific men, born in Mexico, suspected of committing a murder in Maryland. I remember thinking: Did they have to say “Mexicans”? What about just saying “men” or “suspects” or something similarly neutral? Would they have still used a headline referring to nationality if those men had been Slovenian or Zimbabwean or Japanese? I think it’s similar to the prostitution issue — racism against Hispanics is quite prevalent in this country (my boyfriend is of Mexican descent so I see it firsthand), whereas Americans don’t tend to form negative opinions about people from countries like Slovenia. Indeed, most Americans don’t know where Slovenia is. (It’s in the Balkans, by the way.) Just the same way “prostitute” is a bad thing to call someone but “school teacher” is not.

Feel free to reflect and discuss.

Florida ranks third in number of missing children

According to this article, Florida has has the third-highest number of missing kids, behind only California and Texas. It also has the third-largest number of registered sex offenders, at a little over 50,000.

I’m not sure how much this actually means, though. Wikipedia says Florida is the fourth most populated state, behind California, Texas and New York, so it would stand to reason that they’d have more missing kids and more sex offenders. (No word on where New York ranks in the number of missing children.) Another thought: a significant number of missing children are teen runaways. It seems like there would be more teen runaways from warmer states (again, Florida and Texas, and southern California too) because they could sleep rough without fear of inclement weather.

I’d like to see how many missing kids per capita there are. The article does say that while Florida has almost the largest number of sex offenders, they’re actually ranked at number thirteen for sex offenders per 100,000 people. They have 281 sex offenders per 100,000; the nationwide average is 223.

Very sad article about runaways

The New York Times has done a very good article about teen runaways and why they run and why they stay away and how they survive. It’s really sad — especially the statistic on page 3 that 75% of runaways are never even reported missing, either because the parents don’t want them around or because they’re afraid to get the police involved.

I read an excellent book by Todd Strasser, Can’t Get There from Here, about a group of teen runaways and throwaways living on the streets of a major American city — New York, I think. They ranged in age from 12 to 22. They lived lives a lot like what’s described in the newspaper article.

I think maybe if a runaway is from a good home and they don’t come back, maybe it’s because they’re ashamed. They might not want to go home after having done things like sell drugs or sell themselves to survive. They might be afraid their parents will be mad at them and will reject them.

China’s missing children

There’s a fairly huge child trafficking problem in China right now. Little kids are getting kidnapped left and right. Authorities believe the children are taken by childless adults wanting a child of their own, by son-less households wanting a male heir, or by kidnappers hoping to use the children for labor or sell them for adoption abroad. The magnitude of the problem cannot be underestimated. According to this article:

There are 30,000 to 60,000 children reported missing every year in China, according to the ministry. But people like Tang, who are involved in the search for these kids, say the number is closer to 200,000.

Many, if not most cases are not formally listed because local police are unwilling or unable to investigate crimes that usually involve crossing provincial borders. As well, many of the parents think police might be complicit in the kidnappings. It is a lucrative business that can net about $4,000 for each boy sold and about $1,000 per girl.

To make the problem even more tragic, a lot of times even if the abducted children are recovered, it’s hard to reunite them with their families. Many of the kids were too young at the time of the abduction to remember their identities, and if they were never officially listed as missing, obviously that just makes it more difficult. There’s a national DNA database parents of missing children can contribute to, but not enough have done so and DNA testing is really expensive. This article says it costs the equivalent of $350 per test in Beijing, although the fee varies depending on what province you’re in. Wikipedia says the per capita income in China is a little less than $6,000 annually. I’m not sure whether the parents pay for the DNA testing or the government does.

The Chinese government has just posted this website with photos of kidnapped children and suspected kidnap victims whom they have recovered and are trying to identify. It’s written in Chinese, so I can’t read it and I doubt many of you viewers can either, but you can see the photos of those adorable kids with eyes that haunt you.

I’m not sure how effective this website will be. It seems like the majority of abducted children were probably stolen from poor families and I’m not sure how much internet access the average Chinese person has. But it can’t hurt, might help.

Photographs in my resolved section

As everyone knows, in my resolved section I put one photo of each located missing person as well as their names and particulars of disappearance and recovery. This is just so people can remember the original case — it seems to be easier to recall the face than the name.

Once in awhile I get emails from people in that section asking me to take their messages off. (In one case, it was the daughter of a missing man who was found dead, who asked me to remove his notice. She didn’t say why.) I always comply with such requests. The last one was in June. This woman, a former runaway, was really ticked off and got all in my face about it (capital letters, etc) threatening to sue me. I removed her photo and reminded her that, as I say on my contact page, all she had to do was ask politely.

I confess that I am occasionally troubled, especially about young runaways. It’s a sad fact that teens occasionally get silly or compromising stuff about them posted online (often they do the posting themselves) and it comes back to haunt them later when they become adults and choose to apply for colleges and jobs. If a potential employer Googled the applicant’s name and discovered from my site that they had run away as a teen and were gone for a considerable length of time, that might kill the job right there no matter how qualified the applicant was. The employer might write him or her off as flaky and unstable or something.

However, my removing all mention of the located individual from my website would not solve this problem, as there usually are a lot of other websites out there with their names and often their pictures too. I Googled a random runaway boy who was found months ago and found him mentioned on six other sites besides mine. I don’t like to contribute to this problem, of course, but I can’t prevent what appears on other sites. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to simply remove resolved cases without any notice at all. Actually, I do this quite a lot, like in cases where I find out a person was found ages ago, sometimes even before I posted their casefile — this happens all too often, as other databases forget to remove their located MPs. But whenever I can I try to post a notice. It’s just easier for the viewer that way.

I suppose I ought to just go on as I have been doing — post notices, and then remove them if the (former) MP asks me to.

On a related note, once in awhile a relative of an MP is upset because I posted an unflattering photo (often a mug shot) of their missing loved one. I just got an email a couple of weeks ago about that. The woman claimed people were saying “unkind things” about her uncle because of his mug shot on my site. Well, I had no other photo. (She has since provided me one.) And I believe in posting as many pictures as possible, so even if I have other pictures I will post mug shots unless someone asks me not to. I reason it this way: if the MP is alive, who knows what he looks like now. Snaps and portraits show him in a relaxed and happy state. But maybe he looks like his mug shot now — strained, stressed, upset. Though I can certainly understand the position of the relatives too.

Positive ID in Boulder Jane Doe case!

Not too long ago I read an reviewed Someone’s Daughter: in Search of Justice for Jane Doe. Well, she’s not called Jane Doe anymore. She was just identified. She’s called Dorothy Gay Howard, and she was 18 years old when she was murdered in 1954. I had heard they had another possible match and was hoping the third time would be the charm.

Dorothy looks like she was a beautiful young woman. That photo is so fifties, with the Marilyn Monroe hairdo and everything. The bust of Jane Doe’s face looks a lot like her, except the hair.

Hats off and stand up for Silvia Pettem, for without her dedication to this case it’s highly likely that Boulder Jane Doe would never have been identified and Dorothy Gay Howard’s family would have been left wondering for the rest of their lives.

Way behind in my correspondence

My apologies to anyone who has emailed me recently and not gotten a response. I’ve been a bad girl lately and have fallen behind in my email-answering. The worst thing is, the longer an email is left unanswered, the less inclined I feel to answer it. *smacks self*