Protecting children in today's world

Every day, the Sheriff's Office investigates crimes committed against children. The jail houses are full of many people who have been convicted or are being charged with crimes that make you wonder how a human being could do some of the things they do.

After the recent child abduction and death of Hailey Owens from Springfield, the Sheriff's Office has received several phone calls from parents and organizations asking for the Sheriff's Office to provide training and education to children about being alone in public.

For many years, the education for children when it comes to being alone in public was geared towards strangers. You may have heard the slogan "stranger danger." These were basic safety guidelines and tips taught to children. There are many benefits to this training that includes teaching children who to turn to for help if they become lost, and some of the warning signs that a child can understand and look for.

It is sad enough that we even have to teach small children how to be careful in a world where some people prey upon them. An even more disturbing fact is that many crimes we investigate are by people who knew the child, people the child had would have had no reason to be suspicious of.

Nelson Mandela said, "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."

Children learn from life what we, the parents, friends, teachers, and the rest of society teach them. They are born with an innocence and trust that can never be returned once it is taken away.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than 2.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation have been made to the cyber tipline between 1998 and December 2013.

Not long ago I was talking to an investigator from a law enforcement agency in Kansas who told me that he had just been transferred to the child abuse investigations unit and would work there for a while before transferring again.

He said they were beginning to move people after a while because of the effect it had on investigators who continuously had to deal with people that would commit such crimes and see what someone was capable of doing to a child.

Next month we are sending three investigators to another class for child abuse investigations. This will be the third training class in the field that investigators have attended over the last year.

It is heartbreaking that we have to be prepared to investigate something as unthinkable as these types of crimes, but if it does happen, we want to be prepared to do everything we can to find the person responsible and bring them to justice.

The Sheriff's Office will have someone available to speak to children about the warning signs of child abduction and other crimes against children. For more information on this service please contact the Vernon County Sheriff's Office at 417-283-4400.