Yes, there seem to be a lot of grey areas here and many crimes of this nature that go unnoticed or unrecorded.
It seems that we don't have a true measure of what really goes on.
As a matter of interest, do you know if we have more information on the strangers entering bedrooms that Kate McCann and Redwood speak of? It would be interesting to see sources. Knowing more about this kind of thing could give us a truer picture.
As for the narrow 'from bed' category, we'll have to check with Anne on this one, but I would imagine that that is really a figuritive way of saying 'from a bedroom' or 'from inside a home' .
No, I don't know any more about these strangers in children's bedrooms.
A few thoughts for the pot...
There don't actually seem to be that many studies on child stranger abduction and even those that I had found (one US and two UK ones) all seem to use slightly different criteria (including the definition of "child" and the definition of abduction). Not all cases of missing children are reported (e.g., throwaway children), and of those in the long-term missing category, there would a grey area in terms of presumed runaways (obviously mainly teens) and those who may have been held against their will.
I had always assumed that the overwhelming majority of child abductions were parental ones. In terms of the "success" rate, that would seem more or less true according to the following study concerning England and Wales: 23% parental, versus 9% stranger (although I wouldn't consider that ratio to be an overwhelming majority). However, the situation seems more nuanced if you consider "attempted" abductions.
Even though only 9% of the total number of cases examined were "successful" stranger abductions (as opposed to 23% of "successful" parental ones), 56% of the total were stranger ones, including 47% "failed" ones.
STRANGER ABDUCTIONS
Of all recorded abductions and attempted abductions, a very small proportion were instances where a child was actually abducted by a stranger. Importantly, children who are abducted will not necessarily be considered missing, or reported as missing.
A 2004 Home Office study (Newiss and Fairbrother, 2004: 1-6) found that, of the 798 police reports of child abduction and attempted child abduction in England and Wales that year:
56 per cent or all reports involved a stranger
47 per cent of all reports were ‘attempted child abductions by a stranger’
9 per cent of all reports were successful child abductions by a stranger (n=68 )
PARENTAL ABDUCTIONS
A 2004 Home Office study (Newiss and Fairbrother, 2004: 1-6) found that, of the 798 police reports of child abduction and attempted child abduction in England and Wales that year, 23 per cent involved abduction by a parent. Not all of these children will be the subject of a missing person report.http://www.missingpeople.org.uk/media-centre/papers/detail.asp?dsid=603
