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Following the unprecedented media frenzy over Madeleine McCann, a whole host of enterprises now target concerned parents with computerised products and services for the protection of their children. Heading the list is a new company called BladeRunner, whose publicity website features a blond infant, about three years old, staring balefully at the camera and dressed in a GPS Tracker Jacket.

It is a gaze we have seen endlessly echoed in recent months. The advertised garment keeps tabs on its wearer to within four metres anywhere in the world and it costs £250, plus £80 if you want the knife-proof Kevlar lining. There's also a satellite tracking charge of £10 a month.

Next up is ToddlerTag from Connect Software, whose bizarre slogan on its website reads: "This happen to you... Don't let." These specialists in RFID tagging offer "intelligent safety clothing" in the form of hats, bibs, dungarees and T-shirts, all designed to alert a carer if the infant toddles out of range, as well as "nursery management software" at a modest fee of £495 upwards. Among the many others in the frame is Loc8tor Plus, whose nifty homing tags are effective up to a range of 600 feet and cost a mere £100.

Fear factor

My unease about all such products is the suspicion that certain manufacturers are cashing in on parental fear and paranoia without providing verifiable statistics on what the actual dangers are. My fear is that parents, babysitters and child-carers will

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abrogate their own responsibility for looking after kids and hand it over to electronic devices. None of these devices can offer any real protection, and if they become detached from their wearers they can give a dangerous false sense of security that all is well when it is not.

Sprint has launched FamilyWatchdog Mobile, which allows parents to check out maps showing where registered sex offenders live and work, as well as download mugshots and conviction details. Concerned parents can also sign up to receive text alerts when an offender moves into their neighbourhood, although so far only territories in the US are covered. Sprint also uses the GPS capability of children's handsets to track them at a cost of less than a fiver a month.

Again, my unease is over a sales pitch that assumes the danger to children comes from strangers, monsters and registered sex offenders, when the sad reality is that it is a member of their own family who is most likely to inflict abuse, and there can be no hardware or software at any price that can prevent this.

Missing link

The excellent website at www.missingkids.co.uk is the most informative source in the land, and it combines data from the National Missing Persons Bureau, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children and UK regional police forces. If you accept the definition of a child as a person under the age of 16 and run a database search for the past 12 months, at the time of writing there were 19 children listed as missing. Of these, four went on the run from social services or the police, three absconded after domestic problems, three were abducted by a parent, one disappeared from a Scout jamboree and one went missing while on holiday abroad. There are seven others who cannot be found and they are all 14- and 15-year-olds, not infants.

These are the real statistics, and although each one is an individual tragedy, they bear no relationship to the panic situation that some manufacturers would have us believe.