Instagram users will begin seeing AMBER alerts for missing children in their area, the company announced Wednesday.
The feature is rolling out first in the U.S. and 24 other countries, with plans to expand the feature to more countries going forward.
The alerts will include details about the child, such as a photo, description, location of the abduction and any other available information that can be provided, Facebook’s director of trust and safety Emily Vacher said in a blog post.
Users will also be able to share the alert with friends to further spread word of the missing child.
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According to a release from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a three-week operation in west Texas dubbed “Operation Lost Souls” has led to the recovery of 70 missing children as well as sex trafficking victims. The investigation was conducted by the Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) and ran from the end of April through mid-May in El Paso, Midland, and Ector.
The missing children, many of them who were identified as runaways, ranged in age from 10 to 17 years old. Some of the children found were also victims of sex trafficking and physical and sexual abuse, according to ICE. Most of the children were recovered from west Texas, but others were found in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as well as Colorado and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
DPS Maj. Matthew Mull said: “At the Department of Public Safety, teamwork is one of our core values. We are grateful for all of our law enforcement partners who participated in this operation and who work around the clock every day to protect our communities, including our youth.” The agencies also provided victim services and counseling to the children rescued and their families.
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When something happens that will get wide coverage, my first and most important suggestion is that you don’t delay telling your children about what’s happened: It’s much better for the child if you’re the one who tells her. You don’t want her to hear from some other child, a television news report, or the headlines on the front page of the New York Post. You want to be able to convey the facts, however painful, and set the emotional tone.
As a parent, you can’t protect you children from grief, but you can help them express their feelings, comfort them, help them feel safer, and teach them how to deal with fear. By allowing and encouraging them to express their feelings, you can help them build healthy coping skills that will serve them well in the future, and confidence that they can overcome adversity.
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He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.
But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he allegedly killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.
Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”
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The school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is the latest horrifying act of violence in our country.
This senseless loss of life will be difficult for adults to process on their own while trying to support children and young people. Our students want and need to talk about what they see, remember, and are feeling now; they need the guidance and safety of adults in their lives to be able to navigate their own emotions and trauma in a healthy, safe, and productive way. Adults need to be able to acknowledge and address their own emotional responses in order to best support young people.
The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) tips for parents and educators to talk with children about violence suggests adults:
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Two key senators said the decision by the Justice Department not to prosecute FBI agents who did not act on reports of abuse by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was “infuriating.”
“FBI agents who knew of Larry Nassar’s abuse, did nothing, and then lied about it will face no legal consequences for their actions,” Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Jerry Moran said in a news release. “Dozens of athletes would have been spared unimaginable abuse if these agents had just done their jobs.”
Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Moran, a Republican from Kansas, spent years investigating the pattern of abusive behavior in Olympic and amateur sports. That was headlined by Nassar, who was a team doctor for both the national gymnastics program and Michigan State University.
An Arkansas federal judge sentenced former reality TV star Josh Duggar to more than 12 years in federal prison on Wednesday, according to court documents.
