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National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

The Heart of What We Do

Tavern Direct is a philanthropic venture founded with a commitment to supporting the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's® (NCMEC) efforts to provide education about how to keep every child safer. But to do this in a big way, we need your help. Learn more about NCMEC, and read letters from Ernie Allen, President and Chief Executive Officer of NCMEC, and Louis Bivona, Managing Partner of Tavern Direct & Founding Member of NCMEC, below. NCMEC
Letter from Ernie Allen
Letter from Louis Bivona

Help Us Help Millions of Children

At Tavern Direct we are committed to helping NCMEC. Through the sales of our products, we will donate funds for outreach programs that educate children on safety and prevention of abduction and sexual exploitation. Our goal is to reach sales of $50 million. To reach our goal, we need your help. When you buy on TavernDirect.com, we donate 50 cents for every product you buy. Help us help-buy Tavern Direct products and share our story with your friends. Help us help with these products

NetSmartz Training Keeps Children Safe Online and Off

NetSmartz is NCMEC's research-based child safety education program which promotes children's awareness of safety issues and self-confidence in online and real world situations, by:

• supporting community education efforts
• enhancing children’s ability to recognize Internet dangers
• encouraging children to report victimization to a trusted adult
• increasing communication between adults and children regarding online safety
• helping children understand that they should discuss with a trusted adult any people they "meet" on the Internet

NetSmartz Training: Proven to Protect Children

A study by the University of New Hampshire showed that students who received NetSmartz training experienced a heightened awareness of victimization risks and helped them make safer choices both on and offline. In fact, NetSmartz is such a credible program that many State Departments of Education and Attorneys General have mandated and implemented NetSmartz training—with numbers growing every day.

Why do we need to educate our children?

The sexual victimization of children is overwhelming. 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys will be sexually victimized before adulthood. 800,000 children under-18 years old are missing each year, with an average of 2,000 children reported missing each day. Of these, 115 children are the victims of "stereotypical" kidnapping, which are cases that involve someone the child does not know, or knows only slightly. But another 56,700 of cases involve children who actually know their victimizer, many times a family member or friend.

Research has found that children who participate in school-based victimization prevention programs not only demonstrate greater knowledge about sexual abuse but also are more likely to protect themselves when threatened or victimized. (Finkelhor & Dzuiba-Leatherman, 1995).