Remember the Missing Children craze from several years ago? Pictures of missing kids on all the milk cartons. Posters full of missing kid’s faces on the wall in MacDonalds stores. Even local newscasts featured regular segments on lost and missing children.
Was this just a passing fancy? A fad? A way for corporate organizations to pretend they were doing something good?
Or was the Missing Children rage a rousing success, with all those poor kids found and returned to their homes?
www.missingkids.org - plenty to go around, unfortunatly.
OOOPS! Typo in the title (where / were). But that’s a good question too.
Hit submit too fast. From their FAQ:
According to NISMART 2, there are nearly 800,000 children reported missing each year (more than 2,000 per day). 58,200 children are abducted by nonfamily members. 115 children are the victims of the most serious, most long-term abductions (stereotypical kidnappings), of which 56% are recovered alive, 40% are killed. 203,900 children are the victims of family abductions.
Concern for missing children first emerged as a popular subject for public hand-wringing in the 1980s, and reached a kind of crescendo with the network broadcast of Adam, a made-for-TV dramatization of the abduction and murder of a small boy from a store in Florida. Daniel J. Travanti played the boy’s father, an advertising executive named John Walsh, who has since gone on to a career in TV broadcasting as the host of America’s Most Wanted, etc.
During the course of the film it is stated that one million children disappear in America each year. In St. Louis, at least, the film was followed by a “McGruff the Crime Dog” spot from the Ad Council in which in which it was said that 20,000 children disappeared in the U. S. every year–that is, that there were only 2% as many missing children each year as the film had claimed. This was followed by a spot for the local 10:00 news, in which there was to be a report on the “two million” American children who go missing every year.
A year or two later the National PTA issued a report on the phenomenon of missing children. It concluded that after one weeded out children who were reported missing because they were a half hour late in getting home from school, children who were living with their noncustodial parent, older adolescents who had run away from home, and similar exceptions to the conventional image of “missing children”, there had been, in the previous calendar year, 64 cases of children apparently abducted by strangers in the United States.
Sixty-four children is a lot of children. Having such a thing happen to even one child is a terrible thing.
It is also pretty horrible, however, how advocacy groups and the mass media make such broad, weird misstatements with statistics. There is an insulting suggestion here that the American people won’t care about a problem unless it is of astronomical, epidemic proportions. In the same way we’ve been told numerous times that one quarter of women in American colleges are bulemic, and that one quarter of them are raped.
During the same week I heard on the news on the radio that one out of ten American children is molested, and that one out of four American children is an incest victim. For both of these statistics to be true, that would mean that 15% of American children are subjected to incest, but are not considered to be molested.
There is also a suggestion that the American people will believe any bogus assertion so long as it is made with numbers. Unfortunately, for a portion of the population this is undoubtedly true, for otherwise these numbers would never be propagated. It is, of course, possible that some of the people distributing these numbers are genuinely deluded.
Two million children disappearing each year? Populations haven’t dwindled like that since the Black Plague. People wouldn’t have to be told about a problem like this if, as is suggested, it is universal; people throughout the country could see that children were vanishing every year from their local schools.
One still sees the missing children photos, although not as frequently as before.
Part of this may have to do with the limited attention span of a large part of the American public; a problem, no matter how grave, loses its luster after a time. Hence, perhaps, our habitual inability to truly address issues ranging from dependence on foreign oil to racial division.
Part of the decline in interest may come from the slow, bitter, realization many people had that they had been deceived about the magnitude of the problem.
Finally, part of it may be explained by the boom-and-bust nature of any business fad. A universal rule in the United States is that no matter how dire or disgusting a situation is, there are always people who find a way to cash in. When it first became common for pictures of missing children to be distributed on the sides of milk cartons, etc., at least one company providing such images sued in an attempt to shut down nonprofit organizations which distributed such pictures for free. It claimed that such a selfless effort to aid missing and exploited children was unfair competition.