Ernie Allen

Ernie Allen is an attorney who served as the President & CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) for 23 years until June 2012.

The following is a critical discussion of Ernie Allen's role as co-founder of the NCMEC, it's ingenuity and impact on public awareness and policy regarding missing children. Published in Boychat, quoted in full.

Architects of Oppression: Ernie Allen + the NCMEC

I've bitten off a big chunk here, and I've had to be a bit hasty with the research and writing. Unlike Comstock and Hoover, I can't draw upon my recollections of a well-written book that nicely summarizes the subject. Indeed, there is very little critical writing on this particular subject, and most of what there is comes from a perspective lacking in understanding or recognition of sexual politics (see the last section on "critics"). But I think I've got most of the main points in here.

Meet Ernie Allen

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD

SENATE

Sept. 15, 2004

TRIBUTE TO ERNIE ALLEN OF KENTUCKY -- by Mitch McConnell

Mr. McCONNELL: Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to a friend of over 40 years-a fellow Kentuckian who has had a national impact. It is an honor and a privilege to congratulate my good friend, Ernie Allen, on winning the Henry Clay Distinguished Kentuckian Award from the Kentucky Society of Washington. Ernie's work as President and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children makes him a most worthy recipient. As I mentioned, I've known Ernie for over 40 years, dating back to our days at Manual High School in Louisville. On the same day I won election as president of the high school, Ernie was elected president of the junior high school. We both went on to attend the University of Louisville, and were fraternity brothers.

Knowing Ernie so well, I can assure you that his dedication to rescuing missing children runs deep. Over twenty years ago, when I was the Jefferson County Judge-Executive, Ernie was the Director of the Louisville/Jefferson County Crime Commission. That Commission was the first of its kind to bring police officers and social workers together on behalf of kids. Just one innovation Ernie came up with back then was to make a fingerprint card for as many Kentucky kids as possible, and send that card home to the child's parents to hang on to in the awful event their child ever went missing. A young man on my staff today still has his card, two decades later.

Ernie's work in Kentucky established him as a national leader for his cause as early as 1981. At that time, no nationwide organization existed to share and distribute information on missing children. If a child was abducted and taken over a State line, or even a county line, the chances that law enforcement in the new jurisdiction had all the information necessary to save that child were small. Ernie led the effort to lobby Congress to establish laws so that police could talk to each other across boundaries about missing kids. His work and patience bore fruit in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as a public-private partnership.

Under Ernie's leadership, the Center has created the CyberTipline, an online reporting service that former Vice President Al Gore has called "the 911 for the Internet." They created the AMBER Alert System, notifying citizens statewide when a child has been kidnapped. They've worked on over 98,000 cases, and have been involved in the successful recovery of over 83,000 kids. Last year they had an astonishing success rate of 95 percent.

Ernie Allen describes the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in a podcast of the FBI:

In 1984, we proposed the creation of a kind of national resource center; a place that would tie together, create a national response to these kinds of cases [cases like the highly sensationalized Adam Walsh case]. My vision, candidly, was that it should be a wing of the FBI, and it was the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who said if this going to work it needs to be a private organization working in partnership with government. So on June 13, 1984, the president of the United States officially announced the opening of a new national center for missing and exploited children.

1984: Orwell Saw it Coming, but Not Quite Like This!

The Spring of 1984 would prove to be a pivotal period in the dedication of national resources toward "protecting children." The hyper-sensational movie "Adam" about the Adam Walsh case was televised for a second time on NBC in April, and in May his father John Walsh went on a "media blitz" armed with an array of vastly inflated false statistics about the multi-headed problem of "missing children." In June, the NCMEC was created by an act of Congress (with a budget of 10 million dollars - back when you could buy a nice house for $50,000), publicized by Ronald Reagan in a special White House signing ceremony. But the Reagan administration was in such a hurry to get it going that they provided 1.5 million in startup funds through the federal Office of Juvenile Justice even before the law was passed. What did all this money buy? Well, for one thing, Reagan requested that John Walsh be hired by the Center as a special consultant -- simultaneously giving Walsh a tap off the federal trough and credibility as a media spokesperson on the issue -- thereby funding his 1984 media blitz and laying the groundwork for his illustrious career.

The NCMEC would go on to play a key role in the chapter of national and international history which followed its founding. The agency helped make "missing children" a household term, and a governmental priority. They are the ones who partnered with private advertising agency Advo to send millions of direct-mail flyers of missing children into every home, encouraging people to call their 1-800 tip line. Similar campaigns were waged on milk cartons and pizza boxes, and later through public service announcements on TV. The effect on the popular culture was profound.

The NCMEC Shell Game

The "problem" of "missing children" was an ingenious new construct. It included a range of vastly disparate phenomenon under one umbrella term. This allowed a huge amount of room to manipulate statistics and anecdotes to describe a problem of vast proportions and terribly heart-wrenching and enraging. The vast proportions were obtained by including runaway/thrownaway teens in the figures. Various sources credit runaways/throwaways (plus mistaken cases of family miscommunication) as anywhere from 80% to 99% of the total cases of "missing children." The heartwrenching and enraging part comes from cases of children who are abducted and murdered, often involving some kind of sexual aspect. These amount to a few dozen each year, in a nation of 300 million people. In between these two extremes there is a middle group of cases which are basically custodial disputes between parents. These account for somewhere between 1% to 20% of the total missing children cases. Clear and accurate numbers are hard to come by, since the child-saving agencies rely on as much obfuscation as possible and the federal government takes care not to deflate their rhetoric. The Uniform Crime Reports of the Department of Justice, accessible online and in many libraries, do not include kidnapping in their statistics on crime in the US. Presumably this is because, in the context of the other types of crime tracked by the Uniform Crime Reports, the numbers for kidnapping would seem vanishingly small. The numbers that are available come from the NCIC database used by law enforcement.

It is worth noting that over time, mistaken cases came to be a major phenomenon -- and are actually included in the "alarming" statistics (typically 800,000 to 850,000 per year) that the NCMEC cites of children "reported missing." This little detail is buried in the final paragraph of a DOJ study co-authored by David Finkelhor titled "Runaway/Thrownaway Children: National Estimates and Characteristics"

Runaways/thrownaways constitute the largest component of children reported missing to authorities. They make up almost half (45 percent) of all children reported missing and greatly dwarf the numbers who are reported missing because of family or nonfamily abduction or who are lost or injured. (The other large segment of children reported missing—sometimes confused with runaways/thrownaways—are the 43 percent who are reported missing for benign reasons, such as miscommunications between family members about who was to be where at what time.)

The founders of the NCMEC took their ingenuity one step further by adding "exploited" to the mix. Do they mean teens who are paid token wages to slop grease at McDonalds -- exploited for profit like any other natural resource? No. Do they mean children bombarded with advertising on Saturday morning TV, much of it for life-shortening sugar-filled poisons marketed as food? No. These ubiquitous forms of exploitation are of no concern. What is this "exploitation?" It consists solely of one thing: Sex. In effect, the agency is the National Center on Runaways (and Thrownaways), Parental Abductions, and the Sexual Experiences of Minors.

The NCMEC drew upon the numbers of runaway teens and parental abductions to get figures like "850,000 cases per year," to justify large amounts of federal spending on the problem. Then they funneled the money into a range of programs whose purpose was to "raise awareness" about "child sexual abuse." These programs, in turn, helped develop a range of inflated statistics to describe sexual abuse as a huge national problem requiring even more resources.

Defining National Priorities

An interesting thing about these three topics. The phenomenon of "runaway" children and teens -- who leave their parents without permission -- is by far the largest, affecting the greatest number of people. It has by far the most serious health implications for children and teens. The problem of so-called parental abductions is also large. But the NCMEC seems to devote no resources to preventing these things from happening. They publicize the names of children in both groups and provide some assistance "to law enforcement" and the family to help locate the missing child. And they take credit when the children are reunited with their families or custodial parent. For children and teens who have left or been thrown out by their families, the NCMEC website offers nothing but a couple of links to other organizations. "Not my problem," they seem to say to kids who find their families unbearable. There seems to be no systematic effort by the NCMEC to analyze the reasons why children leave their families or to ameliorate these causes in any way. And the same is true for "parental abductions." Indeed, the problem of runaways/thrownaways, which contributes something like 90% of their statistics for both "missing" and "recovered" "children," is almost unmentioned by the NCMEC in their promotional materials.

On the other hand, the agency devotes a tremendous amount of resources to publicizing dangers to children from outside the family home. Their main focus seems to be on the imminent dangers of sexual experiences of every imaginable variety, for both children and teens -- but with a decided emphasis on sexual experiences that occur outside the family setting.

They also direct a great deal of attention to the rare problem of child abduction, through their "Child ID" program which encourages families to keep fingerprints, dental x-rays and DNA samples of their children. Statistically, your time would be four times better spent installing lightning rods (about 400 people are struck by lightning each year, compared to about 100 stranger abductions of children). Of course, the Child ID can also be relevant in the investigation of a parental abduction or a runaway -- but imagine the mindset it would take to approach it from either of those perspectives. (Johnny, let's get you fingerprinted, so I can have you brought back if you try to escape).

Ernie Allen's Global Conquest

Ernie Allen is a master of the Big Lie. It is possible that no single person has had a bigger impact on the events affecting man/boy lovers around the world than him -- although there are plenty of competitors in his field.

Allen co-founded both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Lady" Catherine Meyer, CBE ("Treasurer of the Conservative Party"), founder of the British-American propaganda agency Parents & Abducted Children Together and Bud Cramer (Alabama former prosecutor and Congressman), founder of the American-based National Children's Advocacy Center propaganda franchise chain, cite Ernie Allen as their inspiration and close colleague. Allen is listed as a "patron" of PACT.

The NCMEC even provides resources for assistance to entrepreneurs seeking to follow Ernie Allen's footsteps and get into the "non-profit" child-saving business.

Stoking the Global Witch-Hunt Mentality

PACT plays a unique and active role in helping to shape the policies that better protect vulnerable children. While we cannot quantify the exact number of missing children who have benefited from our work, we believe that long-term PACT will have a significant impact because our focus is on the cause, not the symptom. Few charities in our field employ the same mix of advocacy, action and research. No charity of our size has done more to raise public awareness about missing children or to prompt changes in legislation and practice.

[Note: there is no other reference on their web site to the "causes" of parental abduction or runaway/thrownaway teens or any other social problem.]

I use the term propaganda advisedly. A primary function of all of these agencies is the development of a set of talking points and "official" sounding statistics used by those who advocate, and lobby governments, for the following:

• Harsher punitive measures focused on sex offenses involving minors.

• Greater attention to these offenses.

• Generally high levels of vigilance and surveillance around all aspects of childhood sexual experience.

But most of all, their talking points and statistics are used to direct the public discourse on what is the nature of these experiences -- literally to define the sexual experiences of minors for society.

They communicate their message to the public through a range of advertising and public relations campaigns, including TV and radio appearances, a high profile internet presence, billboards and posters and other more traditional advertising. They develop their message by commissioning "expert" authors such as Kenneth Lanning and David Finkelhor to write scholarly treatises on various manifestations of the sexual experiences of minors, from the appropriate "perspective."(Lanning writes quite openly from a law enforcement perspective. Finkelhor writes from a modified Christian conservative perspective disguised as a sociological/criminological/medical perspective.)

Following the Money

This influential group of organizations are well funded, through a combination of government and corporate sponsorship and through solicited donations. The NCMEC, which is the grandparent organization of the group, was founded with a sizeable commitment of federal funds by the Reagan administration and the US Congress. Among the early congressional champions was Paula Hawkins, a religious conservative Republican senator from Florida who chaired a seminal Senate hearing on the "missing children" problem in 1981. Joining her in the crusade was Claiborne Pell, Democrat from Rhode Island. Other co-sponsors of their bill which led to the founding of the NCMEC were senators Strom Thurmond, Arlen Specter, and Jeremiah Denton.

The National Children's Advocacy Center, founded in 1985 by future (now former) Alabama Blue-Dog-Democrat congressman Bud Cramer in the wake of the founding of the NCMEC, funnels federal money directly into sex-panic promotion.

In addition to government funding, all of these organizations also have private funding and strong support from corporate sponsors and individual donors and volunteers. While government agencies, and especially the Reagan administration, played key roles in the founding and the continued subsidizing of the sex-panic industry, private entrepreneurs have been involved from the start, and many businesses happily sponsor these organizations and their witch-hunts. The Reagan administration advisers working with Ernie Allen took care to make sure the NCMEC was set up as a "public private partnership" - thereby insulating it to some degree from the traditional political bickering over the merits of public versus private involvement in social issues.

Critics

The degree to which the NCMEC is devoted to stoking the flames of sex panic has a pervasive effect on how they handle all the other tasks they set for themselves. This is especially true in the case of runaway/thrownaway teens, for whom the agency is essentially useless (unless somebody's penis pops out of their pants). But it is also true in the case of parental abductions. And unlike runaway/thrownaway cases, cases revolving around custody disputes often involve adults with the time, resources and inclination to make a public stink. Some of these folks have organized and taken their grievances public. Here are a couple of their web sites. I have not dug into them deeply enough to say much about them, except it is apparent that the NCMEC and Ernie Allen have pissed some people off.

See also

• Architects of Oppression - 3 part series covering the time period from roughly the 2nd panic onwards.

• J. Edgar Hoover - 1st article of Architects of Oppression
• Kenneth Lanning - 2nd article of Architects of Oppression

• List of CSA/anti-pedophile proponents
• Moral_panic