The Center for Missing and Exploited Children informs us that Pres. Ronald Reagan established May 25th as National Missing Children’s Day in 1983. The three highly-publicized cases that are highlighted on its website are heart-wrenching reminders that this plague upon our land is long-standing.

Why is this such a difficult problem to solve?

I can suggest some reasons:

Even a modern, prosperous society regards children as the property of their parents rather than the responsibility of their elders. I’m not suggesting the parents of the missing are to blame—not at all. I’m suggesting that the law refuses to acknowledge that not all adults should be permitted to control the lives of children. Can you imagine what the ACLU would say if a police officer stopped a man on the street who was holding a little girl’s hand but didn’t look like her father and then demanded that he prove he was the child’s guardian? And even if an officer did something like this, since children have no identification there would be no way of proving a legitimate relationship between the man and the child. Even I have seen such odd couples in public, feared there was something amiss, and did absolutely nothing. How could I? The law protects even pedophiles from public harassment.

Divorce is rampant. Child custody disputes are the inevitable result of “no-fault” divorce, and the children become nothing but pawns. Many states have specific “father’s rights” laws that permit men to demand visitation, even when there is evidence of prior domestic violence. In other words, a man beats his wife in front of the kids; the wife eventually leaves and gets a “no-fault” divorce; the violent man is still entitled to spend unsupervised time with his kids. Personally, I think we ought to mandate that fault be assigned in every divorce decree where children are involved. Furthermore, all too often we hear of divorced mothers moving in with boyfriends who then sexually abuse her daughters—who then run away and become prostitutes. Another divorce-related problem is the “kidnapping” by family members that often follows a custody dispute. It’s utterly ridiculous to treat such kidnappings in the way stranger kidnappings are treated, but in many states that is also the way the laws are written. Even if a woman claims that her ex-husband is abusive to the children when he has them in his custody, she is a criminal if she takes the children out of the jurisdiction of the family court.

• BTW: Did you know that ex-husbands and fathers who are convicted felons and in prison can have visitation rights to their children—and the children are taken inside the prison to visit these disgusting dads? Is it any wonder that many of these children end up in jail themselves when they grow up? What are these family court judges thinking?

Child pornography is inadequately policed, and prison time for convicted child pornographers is insufficient. The penalty for possession of child pornography should be life imprisonment. This is not a free-speech issue: it is a serious, violent crime that leads to child murder. I realize that the Internet makes policing of child pornography very difficult, but I also know enough about the technology to know that technology exists to track down the physical location of offenders. There is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet.

Pedophilia is spread through society exactly the way a virus is spread: one vector infects dozens of other people who then become vectors themselves. In other words, when a child is exploited he or she can easily grow up to be a child-exploiter. As long as society permits adults to imprison and enslave children in their homes—and then prohibits any would-be rescuer from entering those homes without “probable cause” and a search warrant, some homes will breed future psychopaths. I’m well aware that there is a biological basis for some forms of mental “disorder” such as schizophrenia, but I’m equally convinced there are some problems that derive solely from childhood experiences.

I recently watched “Crimes that Shocked the World” on the cable I.D. channel about Marc Detroux, a Belgian pedophile and child-murderer. His story illustrates each of my points.

• “The law protects even pedophiles from public harassment.” In the Detroux case, there were hints that in fact law enforcement itself was part of a pedophile prostitution ring. And when Detroux’s home was first searched under a warrant, the locksmith who opened the door for the cops said he could hear children’s voices coming from somewhere inside (two girls were actually sealed in an hidden cell at the time), but the cops claimed they couldn’t hear the voices and couldn’t see anything amiss in the closet wall behind which the cell was concealed. Furthermore, a young girl he had victimized told the police what he had done to her, but they refused to believe her—because she was just a girl.
• Divorce, prostitution, and the spread of pedophilia: Detroux was a child of divorce. His mother’s boyfriend appears to have abused him, and as a result Detroux became a male prostitute before he was 19.

It seems to me that the only thing we’ve figured out how to solve in the 26 years since the first Missing Children’s Day is how to prevent professional child-care-givers from abusing children: we figured out how to install surveillance cameras in daycare centers and other places where children are in the care of strangers. Now, at least, we don’t have endless trials of accused pedophiles with tiny witnesses who may or may not remember what happened.

I imagine I’ll receive a slew of angry comments, because it sounds as if I’m blaming parents for all these ills. I am not. I am blaming family law as I understand it (and, of course, I am not a lawyer, so I may be completely wrong).

Western society has twisted 180 degrees from what we once perceived to be a puritanical attitude toward the family. Families no longer consist of a husband and a wife and their children. Marriage is no longer a contract for life. Almost 50% of marriages end in divorce, with about 44% of custodial mothers being divorced or separated and about 56% of custodial fathers being divorced or separated, according to www.DivorceMagazine.com . This source also cites statistics showing a slight reduction in the divorce rate, as well as a slight reduction in the marriage rate.

We insist on keeping children children for longer and longer: gone are the days when a high-school student had a part-time job during the school year, for example. The minimum wage prevents small businesses from hiring unskilled workers for the chump change I used to get babysitting, for instance. And child-labor laws prevent any kid under 14 from working under most circumstances. The high-school drop-out rate is near 50%.

What are all these immature, unskilled, uneducated dropouts doing with their time? Unemployment is sky-rocketing; they can’t be getting jobs. It’s as if the law wants to encourage kids to join gangs, sell drugs, and become prostitutes. Where else are they supposed to get the money for the cell phones, iPods, designer clothes, body-piercings, tattoos, jewelry, sneakers, video games, junk food, and all the other necessities of modern teenage life?

Missing children aren’t the only children we are failing. But they are the ones most urgently in need of help. Isn’t it about time we figured out how to solve this problem?

Why not issue ID cards to children identifying their guardians? Why not issue RFID-chip or GPS enabled dog tags to children? Why not return to “fault” divorce when children are involved and quit this foolish, destructive visitation-rights policy? Why not make child pornography, child prostitution, child sexual abuse, and child murder the equivalent of first-degree murder—mandatory life imprisonment without parole? Why not use Interpol or some other police agency to track down and shut down all child pornography on the Net? Why not keep children in school without exception until they graduate from high school? (Does anybody but me remember when there were “truant officers”?) Since there are no “summer jobs” available these days, why not keep kids in school all year? That way they would at least be out from under the control of abusive parents and other adults for a little more time each day? And why not find a way for children to safely report abuse and then provide alternative homes?