Child Safety Goes Digital

The simplicity of setting up a safety plan was recently witnessed at the first digital M.I.L.K. event conducted at the KTUL (ABC – Tulsa, OK, News Channel 8) Baby Fair on March 24, 2001.  Imagery Concepts provided free software and snapped hundreds of digital photographs with Sony's MVC-FD90 Mavica ® Camera.  Parents were handed a disk with their child's photograph and instructed on procedures to create their Child Safety plan on their home computers. 

For photographs of the first M.I.L.K. event go to www.milk-eway.com/digital . 

Imagery Concepts, LLC, empowers parents by providing a reliable solution for the immediate retrieval of their child's photograph and identification information. It is widely known that pictures are one of the most effective tools in recovering missing persons, and, with the growth of computer technology, the search for missing children has been revolutionized. In the event of an emergency, this vital data can be a quick click away.

Imagery Concepts, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company, is the developer of the Home Organizer ® software. The primary purpose of the software is the storage and retrieval of household documents such as tax records, photographs, and recipes. A recent collaboration of efforts has taken electronic retrieval to a new dimension. The Home Organizer electronic filing cabinet now includes the Child Safety drawer. This drawer gives the general public a method of storing photographs of and identification information about their children in the privacy of their own personal computer.  Should the need arise, parents can instantly print or send the identification information to local law enforcement and NCMEC. By joining efforts, Imagery Concepts and NCMEC complete the circle of communication between parents and law enforcement.

Every hour, every day, every week that a child is missing, the likelihood of their safe recovery decreases. Rapidly distributing a child's picture can be the difference between a fast recovery and a prolonged search.  This joint effort is labeled M.I.L.K. - Managing Information on Lost Kids. 

The Child Safety drawer also contains summaries of the different brochures provided by NCMEC.  Brochures cover issues such as choosing a babysitter, what to do should your child runaway, and how a child can be safer on the Internet. A direct Internet link is available to the complete online brochure library developed by NCMEC. The drawer includes a link to the CyberTipline to help individuals report the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

Parents can easily establish their family's Child Safety plan with the Home Organizer software.  Photographs can be imported from a digital camera,  scanner, or roll of film that has been converted to disk. 

With the help of these technologies and innovative uses of many others, NCMEC has witnessed a remarkable increase in its recovery rate from 66 percent in 1989 to 93 percent today.