Could Sarah, Milly, Holly and Jessica be just the start of Britain's

Children do not simply vanish. Just strolling, arms linked, through a sunny car park on a Sunday afternoon isn't supposed to mean that - zap, bam - two girls are gone.

But where once children's abductions were a matter of kidnapping and ransom - divorces gone wrong; epic custody battles spanning continents - and usually formed the centre of a media blitz feeding an interested public, it now seems that matters in Britain are taking a darker turn.

Recent events such as the sinister snatchings of Milly Dowler and Sarah Payne, the latest involving Cambridgeshire 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, mean that instead of pricking a nation's interest, new tales of disappearances are sinking the collective heart.

"Great Britain is finally catching up with what started happening in the US 20 years ago, and in France and Belgium five years ago," said Paula Fass, author of Kidnapped: Child Abduction In America. "Britain is lagging 20 or 25 years behind the US in this issue."

Fass is referring to the eerie wave of unexplained child snatchings that blanketed the US during the 1980s - a phenomenon largely absent from the UK. Hundreds of children disappeared from their homes, neighbourhood streets or schoolyards, most of them taken by sexual predators who molested, and in rare cases, murdered them.

Britain's chilling new reality first revealed itself to Fass in a London Underground station in March this year, as she found her gaze drawn to an unusual poster depicting the smiling face of a young girl who had gone missing.

"It was the first time I'd ever seen that in London," said Fass, who is also a history lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. "It reminded me of the time I was in Paris four years ago and was struck by a series of posters of little girls there. What it said to me was: 'It's happening in Britain too.'"

Compared to the US, where the Department of Justice estimates 58,200 children were abducted by people unknown to them in 1999, the reported number of cases in Britain are still relatively low.

But according to the numbers, reported cases of child abduction have risen steadily throughout the last decade. England and Wales experienced a 7% increase this year. The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have also experienced small increases, although Scotland's numbers have remained relatively stagnant in the past five years with no significant increases. This past year 40 children were abducted by non-family members in Scotland, the lowest recorded in five years.

But at face value the numbers can't tell very much. It is practically impossible to decipher if they measure credible threats to public safety because nobody has done analysis that would determine if the data reflects an increase in crime, or merely an increase in public awareness that leads to better reporting.

The numbers also represent a combination of two entirely different breeds of kidnapping. The first being custody disputes, where a child is taken, usually temporarily, by a parent, and the other where the child is taken by a person he or she does not know for reasons cloaked in the macabre.

"There's certainly a worrisome trend," said an official at the National Criminal Intelligence Service who asked not to be named. "You have to ask the question: 'Why is that happening?'"

But, the "why" of it often generates more questions than it answers. First, one has to wonder if the snatchings are motivated in copycat style, where the kidnapper - a sociopath - wants to live out fantasies based on gruesome stories he or she has read about in the press, seen on television or watched in the cinema.

Then, one must wonder if the internet has created a safe haven for predators, giving them easy and anonymous entrance into the bedrooms of children who simply don't realise the dangers of not being able to see the person with whom they are happily exchanging personal information, or even arranging to meet.

There's also the question of globalisation, and whether, as the world becomes more alike through the reach of media, advertising and technology, crime follows the same flow.

Edinburgh forensic psychologist Ian Stephen has his own theories. While he worries that the media crazes that often follow child abduction stories do motivate copycats, he is more concerned with the unprecedented emergence of a modern-day bogeyman from the shadows - the rise of the paedophile.

"Certainly my impression is there is a heavy increase and a greater number of paedophiles around," Stephen said. "And there's an increase in the activity of paedophiles. You can protect your children, but you can't keep them under rule all the time. And there's a stage where they are going to want to think for themselves."

Children, said Stephen, must be educated on the dangers, but not made terrified of them, as in "don't talk to strangers" because nowadays the "stranger" could be the next door neighbour, a friend of a friend or someone passing through town looking for directions.

Fass expects Britain's record-keeping system on abductions will need to improve, as future stories submerge themselves in public consciousness. The US only founded its Centre For Missing And Exploited Children in the late 1980s, years after hundreds of its children had disappeared.

And she expects the problem to be compounded as children are increasingly used as sexual objects throughout the world, marketing gimmicks for everything from bubble-gum, pop music to designer jeans.

Even this summer, as a rash of particularly gruesome kidnappings spread throughout the US, the mainstream media received major backlash for focusing its publicity spinning on the "beautiful" children, said Fass.

"Western cultures are becoming more and more alike in patterns of sexuality," she added. "Younger and younger children are being paraded around and our imaginations go wild."

The children a nation grieves for On the last moment he saw her, Sarah Payne's elder brother Lee watched his sister glide between high rows of corn stalks, as she jaunted through the field where the children had been playing hide-and-seek.

Her body, he later told police, grew smaller and smaller as the distance between them widened. And he lost sight of her too soon, when her small blonde head disappeared between a gap in the hedge and the narrow country lane that was supposed to guide her home.

An entire nation held its breath - and its children close - when Sarah, eight, never came home. When her face held the gaze of every newspaper for weeks, when her parents, their faces gaunt and eyes rimmed in tears, pleaded on national television for their "princess" to come home, a nation commiserated, and felt its heart collapse when police finally found Sarah's naked body discarded in a field.

Two years later, her name - and the law that is her legacy - is the archetype, the household name, for child-snatching everywhere. Sarah Payne became everyone's child, her story that mesmerised a nation was also memorized by it. And if she went missing, got sucked away out of a cornfield by a convicted paedophile named Roy Whiting, it meant evil could touch more children.

Last March in Surrey, Amanda "Milly" Dowler capped the headlines when she vanished on her way home from school.

For all the wrong reasons, the 13-year-old's name linked up with Sarah Payne's as an iconoclastic media symbol, a cliche of vanished children - Dowler is monikered by the tabloids as "the schoolgirl who never came home". Anyone who reads a newspaper can pick her face out in a crowd. Sadly, Dowler's disappearance adds a new, ghostly element to the genre as her body - alive or dead - has not been found.

Such evil is not new to our time. In 1970 a man walking his dog found the bodies of 12-year-old Gary Hanlon, left, and Susan Blatchford, 11, covered in twigs on the fringes of Epping Forest. They vanished in March 1970 after leaving their homes in Enfield, north London, to go for a walk.

The playmates, their disappearance and their murder became known as the "Babes in the Wood".

The Babes in the Wood mystery sent powerful shivers through Britain for 30 years. Three decades of wondering, 4300 house searches and 14,000 police interviews yielded no positive suspects. A confession came in May 2000 when Ronald Jebson, 62, in prison for murdering an eight-year-old girl, wanted to clear his conscience. He told a prison officer he molested and murdered Gary and Susan. His trial revealed a "wicked and perverted man"- according to the judge - with a history of child abuse. Jebson was first jailed in 1968 for indecently assaulting a six-year-old girl. Six years later, he was sentenced to life for the rape and strangling of Rosemary Papper, eight.

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