Violence against children

Gordon Stewart Northcott (November 9, 1906 – October 2, 1930) was a Canadian serial killer, child rapist, and child abductor.

The murder of Marcy Renee Conrad (February 5, 1967 - November 3, 1981) was perpetrated by Anthony Jacques Broussard, a 16-year-old American high school student. Conrad's death gained national attention due to the age of her killer, forcing a re-evaluation of California statutes regarding juvenile sentencing for violent crimes. The case triggered widespread media coverage, as a stark example of social disaffection among suburban youth.

Amy Renee Mihaljevic  (i)  (December 11, 1978 – October 27, 1989) was a ten-year-old American elementary school student who was kidnapped and murdered in the U.S. state of Ohio in 1989. Her murder case raised national attention. The story of her unsolved kidnapping and murder was one of the first cases presented by John Walsh on the television show, America's Most Wanted during its first year. To date, her killer has not been found, yet the case remains active; new information in 2007 and 2013 has increased hopes of resolving the case.

The murder of Sylvia Likens was a child murder that occurred in Indianapolis, Indiana in October 1965. Likens, aged 16, was held captive and subjected to increasing levels of child abuse and torture—committed over a period of almost three months—by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, many of Baniszewski's children, and several other neighborhood children, before ultimately succumbing to her injuries on October 26.

Etan Kalil Patz (October 9, 1972 – May 25, 1979) was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.

Eric M. Smith (born January 22, 1980) is an American criminal who is incarcerated for the murder of four-year-old Derrick Robie (born October 2, 1988) on August 2, 1993 in Steuben County, New York. Smith was convicted of second-degree murder in 1994 and sentenced to the maximum term then available for juvenile murderers: a minimum of nine years to life in prison.

Samantha Bree Runnion (July 26, 1996 – July 15, 2002) was a five-year-old girl abducted from outside her home in Stanton, California, and murdered.

Jessica Marie Lunsford (October 6, 1995 – February 27, 2005) was a nine-year-old American girl who was abducted from her home in Homosassa, Florida in the early morning of February 24, 2005. Believed held captive over the weekend, she was raped and later murdered by 46-year-old John Couey, a convicted sex offender who lived nearby. The media covered the investigation and trial of her killer extensively. On August 24, 2007, a judge in Inverness, Florida sentenced Couey, to death for kidnapping, sexual battery, and first degree murder.

Andrea Pia Kennedy Yates (born July 2, 1964) is a former resident of Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time with very severe postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. She was represented by Houston criminal defense attorney George Parnham. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney in Harris County, asked for the death penalty in her 2002 trial. Her case placed the M'Naghten Rules with the Irresistible Impulse Test, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. She was convicted of capital murder. After the guilty verdict, but before sentencing, the State abandoned its request for the death penalty in light of false testimony by one of its expert psychiatric witnesses. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal.

James Patrick Bulger (16 March 1990 – 12 February 1993) was a 2-year-old boy from Kirkby, Merseyside, England, who was abducted, tortured and killed by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, on Friday, 12 February 1993. Bulger was led away from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle as his mother had taken her eyes off him momentarily. His mutilated body was found on a railway line 2.5 miles (4 km) away in Walton, Liverpool, two days after his abduction. Thompson and Venables were charged on 20 February 1993 with Bulger's abduction and murder.