Comments | little_details: police procedure following a victim of kidnapping being found

adaptation in little_details

police procedure following a victim of kidnapping being found

Dec 13, 2012 02:50

Location: Anytown, USA, circa 2010
Searched: tags (various law enforcement, missing persons tags), Google (various arrangements of 'how to take a kidnapping victim's statement' & 'procedure after rescuing kidnapping victims')
Character: 16-year-old boy
Situation: My character was kidnapped from his hometown and taken to a city a few hours away (say ( Read more... )

~missing persons, usa: government: law enforcement (misc)

Comments 6

beesandbrews December 13 2012, 21:49:17 UTC

While I think that teachers are required now to report suspected abuse, how it's handled would depend on jurisdiction. Also, unless there's a compelling reason like a serious injury, the reporter would go through Social Services first, unless the town is too small to have an office. You might want to narrow your parameters from Anytown, USA to Anytown, Pick a State, and then look at the procedure for reporting suspected abuse.

ETA: If the teacher got the kid to admit he'd been kidnapped, then that would change the game completely. Then it's straight up a criminal matter. Social Services would still get involved until they could get ahold of the real parents and reunite the family, (so the kid would have some place to stay that wasn't jail until that could happen.)

aliskye December 14 2012, 01:46:16 UTC

You might consider looking up the kidnapping cases of Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Lee Dugard and Steven Stayner.

arcadeforest December 14 2012, 04:17:59 UTC

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hawklady December 14 2012, 06:45:17 UTC

A teacher could get into some serious trouble taking a kid out of school and down to the police building just-like-that. Districts generally have pretty stiff policies on interaction, reporting, etc ( ... )

gajiroad December 16 2012, 01:38:38 UTC

This ended up being too long so I split it into two ( ... )

gajiroad December 16 2012, 01:38:47 UTC

In the case where they believe there is a kidnapping situation or child abuse, it's most likely the kid would be put on a 72 hour health and welfare hold. In that case, he would be transported to a city-contracted facility that is specifically there for officers to bring kids in need/danger. During that 72 hours, no one can take him away, not even the middle-aged couple, or they shouldn't be able to. During that time, other things may be going on in the background-- if the city PD is large enough to have a Child Abuse unit (or even if not) there might be an investigator in the PD assigned the case to look into what is happening ( ... )