Sunnymicki
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The kind of abduction you describe is driven by opportunity, so there's no element of luck or coincidence. Such people strike when they see a likely victim, they don't necessarily go looking.
Plus they don't always use force to get the victim into the car.
On the contrary, luck and coincidence can contribute greatly to a person's opportunity. I believe that the point of the post you responded to is that the window of opportunity would've been so small as to require a large element of luck and coincidence to make an abduction a feasible scenario.
I got curious about the actual odds of this happening, so I tried some google "research." Basically the odds of BT being a victim of stranger abduction are so small as to be out of the realm of realistic conclusion. Here are my big take-aways, with the explanation of how I got there to follow:
BT had a 0.5% chance of a car passing her with a man in it who would commit a sexual assault IF she had stood at the side of the road until 201 cars had driven by that each had only men (or one man) in it. (The odds are MUCH smaller if only a few cars passed her on the roadside.) This statistic DOES NOT factor in abduction, only sexual assault. However:
There is about a 0.00013% chance of an adult woman being abducted by a stranger.
Details: What I found is that there isn't much info at all on adult kidnappings by strangers. Apparently adult kidnapping isn't even separately recorded by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system.
So I extrapolated (in a very unscientific way lol). For persons under the age of 18, one report said that only about 100 cases per year can be classified as stranger abductions (source at end). Lets just pretend that women age 20 and above were abducted at this same rate in 1990 (explanation for why 1990 at the end). 79,816,985 adult women / 100 stranger abductions = 0.00013% chance of an adult woman being abducted by a stranger. Keep in mind, this isn't a real statistic because we are pretending adult women are subject to stranger abductions at the same rate as children are - but that's what we've got.
I'm a dork and wanted to look at it from another angle. This time I used a US DOJ report on sexual assaults from the mid-90's (just what I found quickly when googling).
I did a super rough calculation using this statistic: In 1994, there were an estimated 485,290 (reported and non-reported) assaults on females over the age of 12. (source at end of post)
Using 1990 census figures, there were very approximately 97,571,000 females over the age of 14 in the United States (the age groups broke at 14, not 12 yrs, so this number was the closest I could figure to line up with the above statistic).
97,571,000 women / 485,290 assaults = very approximately one assault for every 201 women.
Just pretending that each victim has a unique offender (this is not actually true), we could generally estimate that one in every 201 men is an offender.
So we could say that BT had a 0.5% chance of a car passing her with a man in it who would commit a sexual assault IF she had stood at the side of the road until 201 cars had driven by that each had only men (or one man) in it. That man who is willing to commit assault then also has to decide that he is willing to abduct Barbara in order to commit assault. And as we saw above, and from the stats below, that is exceedingly unlikely. Look at other statistics on sexual offenses:
- Only one third of assaults took place during daytime hours.
- 60% of assaults took place at the victim's home or a friend's or relative's home.
- In 3 out of 4 assaults, the offender was not a stranger
Given all that, we know that the odds are that it would take significantly more than 201 men-only cars before one came along with an offender who wanted to assault Barbara. But lets just go with it. And say half the cars are men-only, so 400 cars need to go by to find our offender. Per sroads post, on a "busy" day, he saw a car approximately every few minutes. Lets say one car every two minutes. That means that Barbara might have needed to be exposed to 800 minutes, or over 13 HOURS of being visible at the side of the road before an offender who wanted to sexually assault her came along.
That all said, it seems that the only realistic abduction scenario is one in which BT (or RT? but that is a kind of wild scenario) knew her abductor and the abductor knew where and when to find her.
Sources:
Data on child stranger abductions: Missing Persons Statistics and Facts
1990 Census data: https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-12.pdf (table 1)
Data on sexual offenses: https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF (this report has stats from the mid-90's, which is why I used 1990 census data for calculations)
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