The last moral panic centered on widespread physical dangers to America’s children began in the early 1980s. Several high-profile and disturbing stories became media spectacles, including the 1981 murder (and then beheading) of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who was abducted from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida. The Adam Walsh story was made into a TV movie that aired on NBC in October 1983, the same year that the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz was fictionalized in the theatrically released movie Without a Trace.
Adam’s father, John Walsh, who later spent more than two decades as the host of America’s Most Wanted, claimed that 50,000 children were abducted “for reasons of foul play” in the United States every year. He warned a Senate subcommittee in 1983: “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.” In response, Congress passed two laws—establishing a nationwide hotline and creating the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The panic prompted the building of shopping-mall kiosks where parents could fingerprint or videotape their children to make them easier for police to identify. According to the sociologist David Altheide, it also led to the advertising of dental-identification implants for people who did not yet have their permanent teeth, as well as the creation of a cottage industry of missing-child insurance to cover the cost of private detectives in the event of an abduction. As a 1986 story in The Atlantic recounted, the nonprofit National Child Safety Council printed photos of missing children on 3 billion milk cartons; a person would have had to be paying close attention to notice that all the photos were of the same 106 faces. (The photos also appeared on grocery bags, Coca-Cola bottles, thruway toll tickets, and pizza boxes.) “Ordinary citizens may have encountered explicit reminders of missing children more often than for any other social problem,” the sociologist Joel Best wrote in 1987.
The fear of stranger abduction was partly a product of the cultural environment at the time. “Family values” political rhetoric drove paranoia about the drug trade, pornography, and crime. Second-wave feminism had encouraged more women to enter the workforce, though not without societal pressure to feel guilt and anxiety about leaving their children at home alone, or in the care of strangers. The divorce rate was rising, and custody battles were becoming more common, leading to the complicated legal situation of “family abduction,” or “child snatching.”
Yet there was still a backstop, a way for the panic to end. The Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1985 story laboriously debunking the statistics that had caused such widespread alarm. The actual number of children kidnapped by strangers, according to FBI documentation, turned out to be 67 in 1983, up from 49 in 1982. A two-part PBS special explained the statistics and addressed the role that made-for-TV movies and media coverage had played in stoking the fire; a study conducted in 1987 by Altheide and the crime analyst Noah Fritz found that three-quarters of viewers who had previously considered “missing children” a serious problem changed their minds immediately after watching it. With the arrival of better information, the missing-children panic faded.
But decades later, fears have flared again. “You know how they used to have the kids on the milk cartons way back in the day?” Jaesie Hansen, a Utah-based mother of four who sells Operation Underground Railroad and #SaveOurChildren decals on Etsy, asked me in July. “That wouldn’t even be a possibility now, because there’s so many kids. There’s not enough milk cartons to put them on.”
— The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic
