The Congressional Black Caucus is asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to devote federal resources to help find at least 22 young black and Latino girls who have gone missing in the last three months.
Derrica Wilson of the Black and Missing Foundation says black and Latino girls deserve the same nationwide attention as Elizabeth Smart. She made national headlines in 2002 when she went missing in Utah in 2002. She was found several months later.
“We can name the Chandra Levys, the Elizabeth Smarts, the Jaycee Dugards, the Natalie Holloways,” says Wilson. “But people don’t know names like Pamela Butler or Unique Harris or Relisha Rudd, just to name a few.”
There are more than a dozen that have gone missing in the D.C. area in the last three months.
Statistics from the city show approximately 500 children have gone missing since the beginning of the year, Fox News reported. A police spokesman said many children leave voluntarily and are located quickly.
One ongoing problem is that minority children are often classified as “runaways,” which means an Amber Alert is not activated, Wilson tells OneNewsNow.
Wilson is calling on media outlets and law enforcement to take reports of missing kids from minority neighborhoods seriously from the very beginning, then build campaigns around them to bring them home.
Among the young girls missing in the D.C. area is 13-year-old Aniya McNeil and 15-year-old Jaqueline Lassey.
“We can’t go nowhere by ourselves,” one young girl told local media. “We can’t do nothing because we have to keep worrying about somebody trying to take us.”
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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.
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