You're Wrong About - Stranger Danger

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

How inflated statistics, cultural anxieties and moral crusaders turned a tiny number of missing children into a decade-long political project. Digressions include 1870s parenting, “E.T.” and the lack of parks in Los Angeles. Both co-hosts secretly believe that the popularity of TV movies in the 1980s explains all of America’s social problems. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I think in Oregon we didn't care about missing children. It's a more libertarian state. Those kids were on their own. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we tell you about all the stuff you were afraid of as a teenager and why the grown-ups were indeed wrong for telling you to fear it and perhaps also even about other things. Never trust grown-ups. Number one. Trust no one. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for The New Republic and The Believer in Buzzfeed. And today we're talking about Stranger Danger which has been a mutual obsession of ours separately and now it's finally two great tastes that taste great together. Yeah and it's something that we've touched on a lot

in other episodes. Touched on ding ding ding. Oh right. I'm gonna keep doing that all episode. I'm sorry. We need just an actual bell but whatever. So we're sort of tag-teaming this episode in that Sarah has been reading up on the origins of this concept and kind of how we got to the idea of Stranger Danger and then I looked into what it looked like when it was playing out in the 80s. When you asked me how far back I had gone I said 1874 and you kind of laughed and then realized I was serious. So before we get into all this I was gonna ask what is the most shocking fact you found? I think the most shocking thing to me were the estimates of missing and murdered children that were publicized during the periods that we're looking at because the numbers are

just such that if you stopped and thought about it for 30 seconds you would be like wait a minute this is weird. Yeah. So a 1985 LA Times article starting the kind of to turn the wheel toward debunking says various groups of awareness at as many as 1.5 million children disappear each year and I compared that to the child population of the United States in the 80s. Every year of the 80s it's 63 or 62 million kids so if that's the population of all children 1.5 million children disappearing each year is that's 2.4% of the population which means that if you went to an elementary school that had 200 children in it four of them by the end of every year would have vanished. Oh my god every year. Right so then also by the end of the 80s presumably we've lost 15

million children across the United States. Both of us have spent all week reading how badly inflated these numbers are so it's okay to laugh at this because the spoiler of this episode is that these are not the real numbers. My most shocking statistic is I came across a survey from 1987 where they were asking people about their various fears and worries related to stranger danger and 37% of the respondents said there was a 50-50 chance of their child being abducted. What? Because like people felt about their child going to elementary school in a middle American suburb the way that like the wife of the attorney general of Columbia felt when Escobar was in charge of the country. Every morning you're just like well I don't know you know maybe he'll

come home maybe he won't. You're like today's gonna be the day so where should we start Sarah I'm I don't get going until 1981 so where should we trace this all back to? So let's go back in time 107 years so pedal backwards on your bike until it turns into a penny farthing. The story starts in 1873 and then there's a case that goes into 1874 but basically in the York City in this sort of substrate of houses of refuge there's a little girl named Mary Ellen McCormick who like many children has been taken in adopted by people who are legally her parents but don't really see her as their child they see her as someone to do chores and household work for them and also just abuse her whip her and leave significant injuries don't let her go out into the street don't speak

to her don't let her socialize with anyone like significant physical as well as psychological abuse and so there's a caseworker from the Department of Public Charities and Corrections who's alerted to this by a neighbor of the family and goes to visit her name's Eda Wheeler and is horrified by this but also recognizes that there's no legal recourse available to her because child protection laws don't exist it's not illegal to abuse a child holy shit it's accepted at this time in American courts that a parent owns a child and has complete authority over them and whatever they decide to do that's their choice that's what they get to do and like you know if you murder your child there will likely be repercussions but if you're just physically abusing your child or if

there's psychological abuse there's no legal recognition of that it's not illegal right because the child is kind of your property right it's like your worker your object you can do whatever you want it's between you and your parents basically yeah and so instead of prosecuting it as child abuse it's prosecuted as animal abuse no way yeah what like animal cruelty yeah wow because she's a mammal okay sure yeah and so this is taken to court in April of 1874 it becomes this you know it's it's a calculated publicity grab as well the social worker and the ASPCA representative who work on this want to bring attention to the fact that there aren't child abuse laws but so this becomes the focal the focal point of a lot of attention it's covered

the New York Times in an article called Inhuman Treatment of a Little Waste nice and it inspires child abuse legislation it inspires a new approach to protecting children that is more focused on actually attempting to protect the child so what happens with the trial is she she's removed from her parents and she's she's adopted but her new parents were even worse late 1800s stories always end badly no she's adopted by the caseworker oh yeah that's a lovely story yeah and it's the last one you'll hear this whole episode so savor the flavor all right so this essentially is a discovery of child abuse but it's still not seen as something that can pervade middle america it takes a while for these things to really sink in and then as you talked about in our shaken babies episode

in what is it 1961 a paper is published on what's called at the time the battered child syndrome 62 62 i love that paper which is that if you batter a child they will get injured it is bad for them apparently it's bad for them they don't like it news and essentially the claim that the battered child syndrome paper puts forth is that maybe you know if a baby comes to the er with 30 broken bones it is probable that some of the time their primary caregivers inflicted that injury on purpose every once in a while yes which is not a radical claim to make but so what happens after 1962 so these dudes discover child abuse yeah as we periodically do yes we see these periods these fluctuations about who is it who's molesting children who would molest a child which is

something that we have some vague awareness of you know at various times but it's our impressions of how serious it is change dramatically huh in the progressive era so like the turn of the sanctuary to about 1920 we're like it's evil we take it very seriously and we pass a lot of quite wacky laws that are meant to stop moral rot and sexuality partly also because people are hysterical about venereal disease during world war one the troops will get syphilis they will be busy you know get going syphilis crazy while they're supposed to be sitting in a trench killing teenagers who happen to be born in a different country from them so there's like a sort of a crackdown on sex that also includes some like anti pervert anti sexual psychopath laws then people

kind of move on in the 30s and let go of it again until 1936 when albert fish who's a sexually sadistic murderer of children is caught and this is a big trial that gets a lot of attention that marks the start of another period of sexual deviant sexual targeting of children is evil for these people are predators and we have to get rid of them and then in the 60s up until the 70s people again just stop caring for a little while and the feeling in the 60s is that sexually abusing a child is something that people do out of a sense of weakness and sexual inadequacy it's something that people aren't likely to reoffend at and especially if it's a relative right especially if it's your uncle if it's it's your the kid's grandpa you're like you know

he had a long and successful career at GM we've talked to him about it he's not going to do it again if we don't make a big deal about it and if we never talk about it again the kids won't remember this is also something that parents are saying at this time no way yeah it's believed that if kids aren't told that what happened to them was bad they won't figure it out i love that that generation just thinks that not talking about it is a solution to every problem every problem if you come back from war don't talk about it if you've got homosexual urges don't talk about it that was like the penicillin of that generation the dominant belief in american society is that child sexual abuse is not that bad it hardly ever happens if it does happen it's not intrinsically

traumatic it's not something that it's worth tearing the family apart over and what's also important to remember is that in the 60s and 70s if people are using the phrase sexual abuse they often aren't referring to things that are happening inside the family because the phrase people use for that is incest oh okay and the way that they treat quote father daughter incest in the 60s and early 70s is often to try and keep the family together offer the dad a deal where he's not going to do any prison time he's not going to be taken away from the family he's going to go through therapy they're going to minimize the conflict and the trauma and keep everyone together wow so we start paying attention to child abuse again in the 70s and start talking

about child abuse within the family as a culture really for the first time and there's an article in miss magazine in april 1977 which i've read other like annotated bibliographies this is described as one of the first ever mainstream feature articles maybe the first on child sexual abuse perpetrated by family members april 1977 unbelievable what were what were freelancers pitching back then i don't know macrame houseplant holders this is the the same time that saturday tonight fever is coming out like it's just crazy to me that there are all of these things that you would assume that any functioning society would be aware of yeah forever and they're more recent than you know the first episode of laverne and surely also in the spring of 1977 there's a big

groundswell of mass media reporting on child pornography oh good always just very moderate temperate coverage who can blame poor old middle america you know within a few weeks you go from never hearing people talking about child sexual abuse and sesquic family abuse and suddenly it's all anyone on tv is talking about yeah and it also becomes this ratings bonanza people are pushed to find more and more extreme stories and so their estimates like 25 000 teenage boys in la county alone are part of a gay pedophile sex and pornography ring right they're gonna need like buses to get them all there and back like that's the kind of thing that people would notice and guess who one of the sources of that particular statistic is oh no how to big year in 1977 is it

gonna be anita bryant it's gonna be anita bryant does anything is everything terrible come back to anita bryant a lot of terrible stuff comes back you should can you tell us about who anita bryant is well i mean she's just one of these wasn't she with moral majority at the time or focus on the family i don't know what her affiliation with was when she started with the save the children crusade but she was one of the bellwethers that showed people like fall well who led moral majority that you could actually have a big political victory based on homophobia you just go out and do that and this is the kind of the start of groups like the moral majority and evangelical churches and groups capturing american politics and so the first save the children campaign

is in the spring of 1977 also to repeal civil rights legislation in miami in june of 1977 and then she takes that show on the road it's sort of like a business model it's like bubble tea like everyone saw what she did and was like you can just whip up all this bullshit and everyone will do what you want them to and lose their minds even though you're just essentially this random person right so it's the spring of 1977 middle america has just heard about child sexual abuse perpetrated by family members and about child pornography for the first time man i really hope there's no high-profile news events that bring that debate into the forefront of american life i don't know do you think there could be some strangely my story begins in 1979 which i'm sure

you came across this as well that 79 was a big year for kids getting abducted and this news story just crashing onto front pages so in 1979 we have the revelations that john Wayne gasey killed 33 people kids mostly yeah young men we have the 28 atlanta school children murders that's from 1979 to 1981 and then we've got the first milk carton child mm-hmm i'm sure you came across this kid to aton pats who's six years old and he's living in soho on print street with his parents i think it's important with aton with these other kids is that this phenomenon does get super blown out of proportion but the actual stories at the heart of it are like really fucking sad i mean this is the the fundamental stories that brought this to the nation's attention as stories they became totems

but the actual stories themselves are just awful because why it's that much more horrible that these are then someone then turns around and makes political hay out of these things exactly but the actual story behind this one is on friday may 25th 1979 there's a kid named aton pats who walks to school and he convinces his parents his parents are like you're only six you're not ready to walk to school yet and he convinces them he's like no no i've seen other kids do this i swear to god i can do this it's not gonna be a problem and he just never comes home and so his parents start getting worried pretty fast they call the cops and what happens is over the next days and weeks it becomes a much more high-profile hunt and so one of the things that's kind of

inspiring about this is that all of the neighbors started knocking on doors and canvassing the neighborhoods and you know doing those walks when they hold hands and they kind of sweep grassy areas they're doing this in central park i bet there were also some self-satisfied new york media pieces with people being like people say new yorkers don't care about their neighbors but here in lower manhattan that's a subtext of every story that takes place in new york of people congratulating themselves for living there so yes so later on there's an essay this really beautiful essay that gets written for the new york times where this woman is talking about how when she was a girl they all went looking for aton so we lacquered ourselves to the evening

news pride open windows called across to neighbors stories bounced around like kids in a moonwalk someone saw aton in the lumber store on the subway people saw him like light trails everywhere they turned we slept to bloodhounds and loudspeakers has anyone seen this little boy he is three foot four inches tall was carrying a cloth bag with imprints of elephants i feared slowly passing cars and the solitude of my bedroom at school we learned about stranger danger and what we really have here is the first high-profile case of people getting scared and people not wanting to let their kids go out and in some of these articles from the time you find parents saying in this weekend they're basically like i don't let my kids out anymore i mean all it takes is one of these cases

to completely change everybody's behavior overnight and then if this could happen to someone else's kid this could happen to anyone's kid and it could happen to your kid exactly and so there's this weird epilogue to the story where it turns out the girl that was walking aton to school her boyfriend is a convicted child molester and he's already in jail for other stuff and he eventually confesses to molesting someone on the day that aton disappeared but he changes his story and it's a white kid and then it's a black kid and it's an older kid and it's a younger kid he also says that he let the kid go he insists on that so that kind of trails off and then another couple years later another person confesses to the crime this dude who was 18 at the time and

working at a bodega around the corner from aton confesses to luring him into the bodega with sodas and then murdering him in the basement and storing his body in some sort of trunk but they never find the body and this guy has a personality disorder and he's made up a bunch of other weird stuff and his daughter says he has delusions all the time and so they did actually convict this guy after a mistrial so that was just last year actually but all of that is epilogue so all we know in 1979 is that this poor kid disappeared the country is in panic there's a nationwide search and that kind of puts the issue on to the national agenda but what really sets it on fire is adam wash so in 1981 adam wash disappears and i'm gonna spend a bit more time on this because

the details are bananas and we have to go to florida now so let's go to florida yes adam wash is six years old his dad john wash who we now know from hosting america's most wanted for 700 years john wash is just a normal hotel developer he's developing a large hotel property on the bahamas so he moves him in his family he's from new york but he moves him in his family down to hollywood florida which is a suburb before lauderdale so he's like a prosperous guy with a young kid and everything going the way it's supposed to yes so july 27th of 1981 his wife revay and adam go to a sears and they're walking around revay is shopping for lamps adam sees a couple kids playing a tarry and he's like hey mom do you mind while you're shopping i'm just gonna

hang out with these kids and watch them play a tarry so it's two white kids and two black kids and so i listened to a podcast a really interesting podcast series about this case that went into a lot of the details and this story was being told by adam wash's brother so six years after he disappeared john and revay had another kid and he's now the head of the national center for missing and exploited children so he's telling the story and you know how whenever anyone is telling a story and they mentioned the race of the people in it you're instantly like that had better be relevant really fast right so telling the story of what happened at the sears and so it's two white kids and two black kids revay goes off to shop for lamps adam stays with the kids the kids start fighting

so the white kids and the black kids start yelling at each other about whose turn it is to play and how long they're taking and then a security guard comes up god and there's also other weird details too in that the security guard that comes over had had an abortion the day before which is again like a weird detail to put into this story like how did we find this out and at what point did it become relevant that's so weird that we know that what she says later is that she didn't get any sleep the night before and she was like totally fragile she's emotionally fragile i'm honestly shocked as hell that the moral majority didn't pick up this as an anti-abortion argument because if you have an abortion you'll be so consumed by grief that a child would be abducted on your watch

that's the thing i mean you get really whenever you hear details like this in stories you get really suspicious like why the fuck you mentioned that she had an abortion the day before but according to the brother of adam wash she just like had asked for time off and they didn't give it to her and she was just like not there that day okay so this is really about you know workers rights yes but so she sees this altercation between these kids and she just assumes that adam is with the white kids oh because it's kind of like the white kids versus the black kids so she's just like all you white kids get out of here all you black kids go to like this other exit or whatever she just wants to separate the kids she just wants to stop a rumble so what happens is adam gets sent off with

these white kids but then the white kids are like we don't we don't know who this kid is they're they're much older than they're like 10 or 11 oh so they're jerks and so this is kind of all we know is that the white kids are like well you're not with us and they just sort of wander out of the store you know how big box stores have like these random exits right they aren't like the front so what we think happened is he just ended up outside of kind of like some random exit outside of the store wow but nobody knows that at the time yeah so poor rave his mom comes back she doesn't find him the other boys are gone nobody's at the Atari thing she wanders around after about an hour she calls the cops and like most of these stories what this really is is a story of much more

like police incompetence ding ding ding ding another of our themes yes so what happens is there's a two-week period where the police assume that he's hitchhiked away to disney world because that's what six-year-olds are known for doing so what's weird is the cops at the time in a way do the right thing in that rave is like a stranger must have taken my child my child has been abducted and the cops are like well that's really statistically not likely and it's probably the parents it's probably the people in his life which is statistically speaking totally true right that's the entire thing that we're going to be trying to convince everyone of this whole time yes yeah so the cops statistically speaking were acting correctly but in this particular case they were acting

appallingly incorrectly so yeah three days before this happens there was a girl this 11-year-old girl who is at a k-mart and some guy came up to her and was like asking her a bunch of questions and then kind of tried to like snatch her and like put her in his cart this guy that was like clearly mentally ill and so this girl was super rattled and so she and her parents called the cops this is what a k-mart like a hundred meters 200 meters away they call the cops they give a description of this guy three days later the cops in adam's case they don't even look into it they're like fake kids k-marts what it like they don't look into that lead at all putting aside the fact that you can be wrong even if you're arguing for the thing that's way more statistically likely like

those are holes you can't help falling into the cops should generally just try harder than they seem to there's also a lot of leads at the time of guys in vans like this might be where the guys in vans thing comes from because of course as soon as this makes it to the news everybody who is at that shopping mall of course is like i saw this suspicious thing i saw that suspicious thing so all these stories start coming in about this guy in a van driving around slowly i saw this other guy in a pickup truck so there's all these leads coming in and a tipster calls in about a black guy in a van and the cop hopefully is like is this relevant to the story so the cops are basically like no fuck all that we're interested in the people in this kid's life so they get very interested

in the fact that john walsh has a friend of his a childhood friend sleeping on his couch at the time so they get real interested in this guy they bring him in for questioning they give him a poly they sit him down give him a polygraph test in the polygraph he admits that he's having sex with revay what yes so it's not clear if he and revay were having an affair at the time or if it was over at that point the cops kind of can't decide poor revay your child disappears and then the police are like well we found out that you had an affair with your husband's friend obviously the cops are like eureka right they're like we've got this sketchy dude sleeping on his couch we've got the wife is maybe sleeping with this guy so then the theory that they start pursuing is that revay

wasn't shopping for lamps she was having an affair so she left the store to have an affair what if revay can have affairs and buy lamps simultaneously it also just like doesn't really change the facts of the case well and it also feels like they're applying the logic of like oh these people were doing something that is considered immoral yes so like this is deviant behavior and child murder is also deviant behavior my favorite detail from this is the fact that this guy that was sleeping on their couch not only does he have an alibi right so his alibi was he was at work he was he was running a jet ski rental agency at the time so he was at work not only was he at work though during the time when adam walsh disappeared he was filming a commercial so he was on camera

during but like essentially the entire day that adam walsh disappeared this guy's not only at work he's on camera filming a commercial so it's quite clear that whatever happened he is not the one that took adam even if he's the mastermind and he orchestrated it somehow they still don't know who actually took the trial and yet this is something they pursue they also pursue this weird lead that because john walsh had a couple casinos in the Bahamas they also think that it's like a mob hit well mobsters are known for quietly killing family members without making any explicit threats or demands i guess so this is the two weeks after the boy disappears this is what they spend their time doing basically and meanwhile what's really interesting about this period too is that this

is one of the first disappearances to become national news we really only started giving a shit about children like really recently huh one of the things that that comes up in this a lot is that john walsh is really good and i don't think in a cynical way but he's really good at keeping media attention on this case so he's holding press conferences almost every day he gives out offers of rewards he's going on tv all the time to talk about his son he's trying to make it this bigger issue about all the other children that go missing and he's also talking about police incompetence right he's talking about so there's there's no central database there's no agency that you can report these disappearances to he's talking about how the police aren't really working

all that hard he's really bringing it immediately to this higher level of it's not just about my child it's about everybody else's child too and so he goes on good morning america it's one of the first victims of a crime like this to go on good morning america and do this very earnest very heartbreaking like legit like he's a real person like a real heartbreaking interview about his son and the disappearance and everything that's going on but so the day that he goes on good morning america they find adam's head in a drainage ditch off the florida turnpike it's awful oh god 130 miles north of hollywood florida how long after the disappearance was that two weeks and to this day they've never they've never found the rest of his body oh god eventually the trail leads investigators somehow

one of these tips about i think he was a shoplifter or just a shady dude in the mall leads them to this guy audis tool who almost immediately confesses to the crime this is so weird he says that he wanted to adopt adam he says that he wanted a child to raise so that was why that was what was going through his head he has an IQ of 70 he's not all there really so what he says is he takes adam from the store he puts him into his 1971 catalac gets him in there promising him toys and candy which is i think another place that that myth comes from of you know luring you into a van with candy yeah gets him into the car so then almost immediately it seems like his plan of raising adam doesn't really work out that this kid obviously is extremely upset he hits the kid a bunch of times

that matches the forensic evidence because the skull that they find adam's head has a broken nose or like a like contusions on his nose or something like that like they can tell that he's been hit in the face they can also tell that he was unconscious at the time that he was decapitated well that's really in context extremely good news that is like one of the few saving graces in this entire miserable case and then tool says that he had choked adam unconscious before he decapitated him with a machete so these are things that sort of aren't in the news reports at the time and that he's able to corroborate but then what's weird tool ends up confessing to 50 murders right in like a bunch of different states and he knew this guy Henry Lee Lucas who confessed to like

600 murders and it seems like just kind of something he did on a whim to me what makes the Otis tool confession just strike me on a gut level as credible is that it's like it's just a stupid crime of opportunity there is no he's kind of this leather face sort of a person in that story like he just got in over his head and then he freaked out and beat the child and then disposed the body and that makes so much more sense than just whatever evil malevolent force that is very hard to actually picture picture in human form is supposedly lurking in all these stranger dangerous stories right that makes that makes sense to me is what could have actually happened so he confesses in this detailed way for some reason he has Adam's clothing wrong so that's

something that doesn't make sense yeah a couple months later so he has sold the Cadillac by now the cops go to a used car dealership get the Cadillac and then start combing through it for any evidence of Adam right any blood any hair any whatever this is before DNA is very good but they have some sort of rudimentary ways of figuring out if Adam was in the car they don't find anything so all they have is the confession of tool but no actual other evidence weirdly this poor girl who is almost abducted at the Kmart she sees a photo of tool in newspaper and she's like yep that's the guy she says she remembers the gap between his teeth but so the weirdest thing the last like little nugget of police incompetence is that the cops comb the car and they don't really

find anything and they're like okay and they give it back to the used car dealership really there's like all right peace out even if you don't think it could possibly yield any other evidence even if you think forensic science is going to stay forever the way it was in 1981 like don't you want a kind of a neat car to prove someone to buy the police auction like use your head so basically he recants his confession tool then a couple years later he confesses again his niece says oh he confessed to me but then he recants that confession and then he dies in 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver there's no real climax to the story it just sort of trails off later on something like when is it a couple years after he dies the police department sort of officially

closes the case and says that tool did it that's all later so again what america knows in 1981 is the missing boy the crusading father and this horrible detail about the head and so one thing that comes up in a lot of the academic literature on this is how quickly this idea of stranger danger solidified in america that they say it was really three years it was like 1981 to 1984 before 1981 every kid in america was like out playing out in the creek staying out late whatever by 1984 it was locked down because why all of those et kids are right on the cusp like they can still ride their bikes around yeah right after 1981 there's a huge closing of the ranks around this as an issue that the entire culture decides this is the biggest thing the detail i cannot get over so nbc makes

a tv movie in 1983 called adam which is about the adam walsh story so at the end of the broadcast they flash the pictures and the names of 57 missing kids then this is insane they rebroadcast it in 1984 1985 and after them ronald reagan the president delivers an address where he reads out the names of 60 missing children people forget how big of a deal tv movies used to be i know it's like this is what the the main thing i've learned doing this show tv movies were the shit civil adam yeah my dad lives in a downtown hotel maybe not as paradigm shifting as those but i mean you imagine what a big deal it is for like you to do an entertainment thing and the fucking president yeah gives an address afterwards that's huge yeah there's three networks at the

time whatever is on one channel is gonna capture a significant minority of american viewers unless it's something really boring yeah like bowling there's also i think there's also a discovery that this is great ratings too yeah this thing of a missing child that it's something you can milk for content for like weeks right of still no break in the case have you seen him it's always these like all american kids it's these terrible stories which i do think people kind of love to wallow in you know like she was riding her bike and this pickup truck came by like people people love these stories of kind of stolen innocence right yeah i started looking up the prevalence like how much people believed in this at the time it's like unbelievable i mean so by 87

68 percent of americans consider it a national crisis missing children like you said the numbers that start bouncing around at this time are completely fucking insane so adam walsh gets kidnapped in july of 81 we have our first congressional hearing in october of 1981 about missing children yeah one of the things they talk about in the moral panic literature is it moral panic has to take on new forms so it starts out as a media phenomenon but then once the government starts legislating about it then it legitimizes it as a crisis right so it begins as these stories that you hear then it kind of gets laundered through the media then it shows up in congress and there's footage from these hearings there's laws being passed the first law that gets passed

is 1982 what lies that it's the federal missing children's act basically i mean john walsh is correct in pointing out that at the time there's no national database he points out that you know if your car gets stolen you've reported the serial number to somewhere and then it's kind of in this like central database for all the stolen cars in america there's nothing like that for children and everything is completely local a lot of local police departments have waiting periods right so your kid has to be missing for 24 hours before you can report it has to be missing for 72 hours before you can report it he says well that wouldn't have helped adam right because he would have been long gone by that time so he's pointing out that and you know to some extent that's true that there

isn't like there's no toll-free number that you can call one thing that he wants congress to do and this is what he comes and testifies to that he wants all of this to be streamlined and for the government to actually make it a priority there's no agency that does this either so he also calls for the creation of the national center for missing and exploited children which is still around isn't it amazing how much social change can happen if it plays on a substrate of persistent anxieties and a white guy with money and influence spearheads the whole thing like you can really get things done if you have those two factors in place and also a huge factor in this was that the data there was essentially no data i mean this is another thing that john wash points

out as a problem there's no data on how many children there are so these bullshit numbers go bouncing around so the opening statement to the first congressional hearing about missing children in 1981 this is a representative named paul simon his opening statement is the figures you get will vary but let's take the most conservative estimate and that's that 50 000 young people disappear every year because of stranger kidnappings that's the most conservative figure you'll get anywhere there's about 4 000 to 8 000 children each year who are found dead and probably a majority have experienced some type of sexual exploitation that's not true that's not even remotely true i mean it's like an order of magnitude off you can just stand before congress and you say things and they

just become true because you say them at that moment yeah there's one there's a pamphlet called to save a child distributed by a chicago television station this is how it starts nearly two million children in this country disappear from their homes each year many end up raped forced into prostitution and pornography many are never heard from again so we've now got two million which as you mentioned is what one thirtieth of the entire population every year yeah you know it's it's a sci-fi limited series type situation yeah and one of the things that's really that's really interesting is that anytime somebody questions the numbers they get don't you care about the children mm-hmm in there's another professional hearing in 1986 where one of the

senators says like these numbers don't seem very correct and so the national center for missing and exploited children the president of the organization says i don't think anything has surprised me more than this preoccupation with numbers and the only a few only this only that there are little helpless citizens of this country being held hostage scared to death totally unable to take care of themselves being held hostage by terrorists what is it with the only wow they threw terrorists in the mix that's inspired so john walsh also this apparently this has become famous among scholars for exaggerated congressional testimony i want to go to happy hour with four scholars of exaggerated congressional testimony because that would be a really good time lots of

the articles are like the now infamous john walsh congressional testimony i'm like oh i want to read like why is this infamous but i could never find the article that actually originates this but one of the things that comes up is that the definition of missing child that they're using at the time is a child that is missing for any period of time so a child that is missing for 10 minutes you call the cops and then he wanders home that counts as a missing child so people are pointing out that like you're conflating the most extreme version of missing child with the least extreme version of like you're you're lumping all of this together into one term missing child and you've got raped kids and you got kids that disappear for 10 minutes the grocery store and then come back somebody

starts questioning john walsh about this in one of these later congressional hearings and he does the same thing he goes if it was your daughter and you were waiting for her and she didn't come home for four hours and after that time she came home with bloody underpants and she had been raped was she a missing child damn well she was interesting and perhaps not coincidentally the intense fear that adults fear about the revelation that child sexual abuse exists and the rates of quote incest at the time that flame is really fanned by the fact that we have the same thing happening with statistics where there will be a survey about you know was there any kind of behavior in the home between you and a family member that made you uncomfortable like did your dad touch you lingering

me ever in a way that felt weird and if someone answers yes then take that yes answer as meaning the same thing as saying yes to the question of did a family member rape you at any time so they're saying sexual abuse rates within the family are as high as 50 right yes you take the most loosely defined version of the term and then you apply the most extreme version of it to the entire category and i feel like the thing about hysteria because there's no way to react to that news but with hysteria is that it burns itself out and you see you know we have these cycles where america starts and stops paying attention to child sexual abuse based on factors including the industrial revolution and world war one what i think happened in the late 70s is that we began

for really the first time as a society to see that incest sexual abuse within the family abuse perpetrated by parents by good solid middle americans that the call was coming from inside of the house that this was something we really needed to deal with and instead we started projecting it on to the evil shadowy figure in the van with the candy and that was all we talked about and we seized on the statistically non-representative but horrifying cases yeah these panics i feel like they probably often come at times when we're being shown things about ourselves and about sort of the heart of america and how it's dangerous and how their systemic problems there that we need to deal with we really need to tell ourselves that the biggest threat to us as a society is

actually something from outside of it right yeah that has a lot to do with why we directed our fears in this direction the fact that ronald reagan was president when this caught fire is not a coincidence yeah and this became a huge rallying cry for the right and a huge thing that pulled the country in a conservative direction and a way to deny gay rights because gay people are child molesters in early 80s america and so if you want an excuse to not let gay men be teachers you can focus on your fear for your child and not on the fact that you're endorsing a position that has no statistical support and is pointlessly homophobic yeah jerry fallwell shows up in a lot of the cases of stranger danger he found something called the child protection task force in 1985 so they

start selling kits to families like a child protection safety kit what kind of a profit are they realizing on these items i wonder one of the articles i came across was all about all of the opportunism that came along with stranger danger and one of the things that the christian right did was in all the promotional materials for things like child protection safety kit they said you can keep your children from becoming the slaves of perverted monsters the narrative that they were peddling in american society and are still to some extent to this day is about the degradation of american society right the moral rot how we're fallen as a society and they're sinful and women are showing their crop tops and when you and i as these panic goes like

you and i are two of the people who are supposed to want to do these things right like i'm a feminist who has sex on purpose and is unmarried at 30 and you're a homosexual so i just like why would what purpose would a child slave even serve in either of our lives when i think about the the sort of the stranger danger thing in the sense of like there are thousands of people who are desperate to abduct your children it's like i don't have time for a child or to abduct anyone just because i'm sort of vaguely immoral sexually like who is supposed to be doing this i can across a total serabate article that talks about the rise in prevalence of the word predator oh that is serabate i'm really excited to read this between 1979 and 1989 use of the word predator

goes up 900 that sounds about right reconceiving the homosexuals or whoever as predator and children as prey was not a framing that had been used before we didn't think of kids in this way we thought of kids as somebody with agency and we start taking away very quickly the agency from children even give it a relatively old you know a 12 year old kid all of a sudden we get really nervous about a 12 year old kid you know riding the bus by themselves which is something that kids did all the time and kids are pretty smart and they can manage interactions even if it's a negative interaction they can usually handle it but that all of a sudden because there's predators out there we get really worried about kids having really any autonomy there's two other factors that make

this total catnip for the american right another thing is that it also attests to government incompetence there's this really telling anecdote from ronald reagan where he's talking about how this company trailways they have a program called operation home free that allows runaway kids to get a free ride back home on their buses which is like a nice marketing opportunity for them so reagan this is in the mid 80s ron reagan is telling this story to some sort of public event and he says maybe you're wondering how much time passed between jim's phone call and the first child's ride on a trailways bus it took 10 days you know i can't help thinking how long it would have taken how many millions of taxpayer dollars would have been spent if the program had been put together

by a federal agency down with big government let the bus companies solve our problems even john walsh in his congressional testimony says prior to this incident with adam we were great believers in the united states of america but my beliefs in this system have been shaken to the core so he talks about you know a country that can launch a space shuttle that can return to the earth and take off again a country that allocates millions of dollars to save a small fish the snail darter in the tennessee river valley but doesn't have a centralized reporting system or a nationwide search system for missing children that was a nice swing at conservation law from right out of the middle of nowhere that's a thing so it's this it's this time in america where it's like the

political correctness is out of control like everyone's got to wear seatbelts and like we're saving animals and like we've seen over and over again it's something the left clinton everybody else just swallows you know what's great too is that you will never be hard enough on crime for your opponents liking if you're anything other than a rock-ribbed republican because someone somewhere is going to if only accidentally be the recipient of some kind of mercy and then your campaign will not have been enough and you just have to keep being tougher and tougher another thing that i'm secretly convinced is also a huge reason why this was such a big deal companies use this as a huge marketing opportunity so usually in my notes i like put in bold or i

highlight the stuff things that i want to read and this entire section of this article that i found i highlighted the entire section it's like two pages because there's all these examples of the ways that companies took advantage of this so oh my god there's something called chevron cares which is chevron giving not that much money to trash bins that have pictures of missing children on them and say save our children that is truly a staggering amount of caring american airlines does a thing where they will fly kids home for free if they've been abducted or their runaway children quality in does the same thing where they have a hotline in every hotel lobby where you can call the national center for missing and exploited children and they also say

they'll give free hotel rooms to kids that have been kidnapped or missing or runaway or whatever but these companies i think on some level they know how rare these cases actually are well yeah i don't know but american airlines did not give away that many free tickets well in what kind of documentation are you expected to provide i bet if you went to an american airlines ticket counter in 1985 and were like hello i'm a missing child and i would like one ticket to cleveland please they would ask for the police report safeway win dixie and other supermarket chains had missing children's photographs on their grocery bags rental car the rental car company avis has missing children's photographs in rental agreement folders they put in at least eight million customers

folders in kmart when you would get your film developed they would put in a photo of a missing child they did this for 135 million years envelopes of film this was unbelievable raising awareness is fucking a great way to get really good publicity while pretending to care about any social issue yeah you're just raising people's feelings of upsetness like i was thinking about it while i was doing the research this week and just like how often you could replace the word awareness with the word fear totally because fear does feel like a productive activity it's like one of the more caloric emotions you do feel like you're doing something even as you're just sitting there in your living room you know feeling anxious and thinking about how your kids definitely won't

take the bus anymore does this phrase mean anything to you advo asks have you seen me what is that you didn't have those i don't think so oh my god what is that advo is the country's largest direct mailing company it's like who you contract with to like send out coupons to 10 billion americans whatever and i remember these really vividly from growing up that every time you would go to the mailbox and get the junk mail bullshit there would always be a postcard in there called advo asks have you seen me and it would be a picture of some kid and it would be like jenny jones and she disappeared in witch talk kansas blah blah it would have like a little story i think in oregon we didn't care about missing children it's more libertarian state

those kids were on their own i mean when you think about it the marketing is genius right because they're saying advo asks they're immediately associating themselves with a crusading social justice issue right they're like well we're a company that cares about missing kids they say that they were distributing 79 million of these postcards every week which is slightly less than the number of children who go missing every year in america there's also my favorite category of this was insurance companies started selling packages oh no that were like the child abduction package where you could get a private investigator counseling services 50 000 in reward money and 10 000 in travel funds if your kid gets kidnapped thus tempting parents who are already far more

likely to abduct or kill their children to abduct or kill their children it was a great decade for parents who killed their kids because you could really deflect the private sector thing is also sort of a right-wing thing too because of course reagan at the same time and all these other people are saying oh we need private sector solutions there's one thing they love it's when the private sector can step in and do things so this whole idea of volunteerism and the government you know it's not up to the government to save you this idea that it's up to you to protect yourself right i mean it was the perfect thing to give momentum to the country's right word drift based on this you can get really tough on crime you can get tough on perverts you can say oh the government's

ineffective it was just perfect well i have a nice paragraph from moral panic that i want to read about statistics so this is once again from philip jenkins's moral panic and we're talking about actual statistics now that we've heard so much about alleged statistics consider children below the age of 12 the age group of interest to pedophiles which is a nicely delicate way of putting between 1980 and 1994 in the united states 13,600 such individuals were murdered so we're talking about murder statistics about 900 per year of these more than 400 each year were infants under the age of one and were usually killed by their parents even these are a little bit dodgy because as we learned from discussing shaken baby syndrome statistics reflect people who are convicted of

killing their babies may be based on faulty forensic science but you know let's assume it's something closer to that than the 50 000 in contrast strangers accounted for the murders of just six percent of the annual total or about 54 children per year wow but even the strangers were not necessarily sex killers in only three percent of the crimes or 27 cases each year did a sex offense either occur simultaneously with or preceded the murder of a child one fifth of these cases about five victims per year involved the murder of a child by a stranger in a sexual assault about nine more deaths each year were attributed to neighbors or acquaintances examining cases of young people under the age of 18 a recent survey has estimated that about 100

abduction murders annually can be attributed to strangers these figures for sex killings can usefully be said alongside the hundreds of child murders caused each year by physical maltreatment neglect and torture usually at the hands of parents or other family members so five victims per year are murdered by a stranger who also sexually assaults them i came across a 1985 denver post article that won a Pulitzer for looking into the numbers this was in the midst of the stranger danger panic and i'm sure this person was so popular for having conducted this study so they find out that the actual number of stranger abductions is fewer than the number of preschoolers who choke to death on food every year they contrast these estimates

of 1.5 million 2 million 50 000 whatever with the fact that the fbi the previous year had investigated 67 cases yeah there's a huge national effort to get good statistics on this and this is 1990 and they say the stereotypical stranger abductions are somewhere between 43 and 147 per year per year and that's it but then of course what's weird about this and like you always want to say like and no one believed it again but then the beliefs even though these numbers get debunked the actual beliefs behind them the beliefs behind the panic just like don't go anywhere no one like updated their risk matrix to be like oh well i guess you can walk to the grocery store like we just kept the paranoia think about how reluctant people are about updating their operating systems

another thing that's i looked into a lot of the statistics now i mean if you look at them per capita the numbers have not changed since the 1970s what's interesting is in recent years so since the 90s kidnappings have plummeted really and they say the reason is kids have cell phones now and security cameras the same reasons it's hard to be a serial killer yeah there's just like way more surveillance and the kind of brazen shit that autist tool did of like luring a kid into your car like that would be on a security camera the license plate would be on the security camera it speaks to how easy american life was in every way in like the 60s 70s and into the 80s for like a white man who owned a button-up shirt because like here's someone who has a low IQ who has all

kinds of issues with violence and mental illness and still is able to be driving a nice car and can get work you know day labor enough to support himself and continue his dangerous odyssey around america for like a really long time like it was also just a better economy like you could have just no real skills or abilities of any kind and still just get a job i mean odys tool today just infrastructurally would be like in horrible debt for having gotten a band-aid from any our ones so there's two more numbers i want to read you we just covered that like kidnappings there's between 50 and 150 right so among family abductions being abducted by a family member 203 000 good god one of the things that was really under the radar and freelancers

should have been pitching stories about the explosion and divorce was also an explosion in custody battles and so there's lots of this actually happened to this kid that i had a crush on in my high school which is why i remember this that his dad kidnapped him from his mom and his mom went on the today show to try to get him back and one of the neighbors called in and got him back this is all when he was like five years old he doesn't really remember it that still happens a lot is 78 of these cases that's like 150 000 a year the non-custodial parent basically absconds with the child there's also there's 1.5 million children that run away every year that's also a really high number 99 of them return home most of those are at the same week but they also mention

that most of them are fleeing physical or sexual abuse so the actual kind of crisis of missing children if you want to find one seems like kids running away from just really sad households really awful places weirdly that has never like captured the country's attention in the same way yeah so i mean it feels like we're still living in this world to some extent like what did this deflate did it ever decline what happened yeah what it became was a bunch of shit laws there's this really interesting term that i read in another paper that talks about moral panic legislation where you've got really bad definitions of all of your terms it's drafted hastily it has like a really broad scope and it doesn't consider any side effects so it's just

like we need to pass it save the children and then yeah the example of this is what we're still living through now with sex offender registrations that one of these acts that gets passed after this it's called the adam walsh child protection and safety act and so it does this thing where it organized sex offenders into three tiers and says that tier three like the worst sex offenders the bennington college of sex offenders have to update their whereabouts every three months and register for their entire lives and so there's of course been all these studies of what is the effect of sex offender laws and it's the perfect moral panic legislation in that the worst offenders like the the oddest tools of the world what they do is they don't register right because these people

are kind of off the grid they're intending to commit the crime again that's a very good point they're like america is full of mastermind manipulative evil arch maniacs so we're going to make a registry yeah they have to go sign up for it like who could imagine yeah the most hardened offenders wouldn't actually comply with our bureaucratic procedure and like sign up using your aol address and we'll just keep track of you so basically what happens is the worst offenders don't use the registry but then the people that are the least likely to reoffend you know people people get sex offender thingies for like having sex with their 15 year old girlfriend when they are 18 like i mean there are states now where you can be arrested for possessing child pornography

if you're under 18 and you take a naked selfie of yourself yeah another thing that i've read which i didn't know was that sex offenders are actually one of the least likely to reoffend types of criminals the risk the recidivism rate is only 12 percent you've got somebody who's not that likely to reoffend and then it's like oh well now he can't get a house he can't get a job he's a felon anyone who googles him finds his picture if you're a neighbor if you're a community member here's the phrase sex offender and they immediately jump to oh this is a baby raper and strangler because that's how we've been trained to hear the phrase sex offender is american totally that can mean anything yeah there's also because sex offenders in california are not allowed to live

within 2000 feet of a park neighborhoods in la have been making mini parks so that they can't move there so they'll turn like a parking spot into like a cute little grassy area with like cafe chairs on it and be like sorry it's a park i guess sex offenders can't live here i find it so horrifyingly predictable that like if you petition you're like we need green space we need it for the kids so people can have outdoor time and it's healthy and quality of life and everyone's like no and if you're like how about if you can be tough on crime by building a park they're like go on and one of the first articles i ever wrote for my student newspaper was there was a big scandal near my college that some sex offenders had moved in kind of on like one of the routes

between my college and the city and i ended up interviewing somebody from the city about you know why have you put kind of halfway housing here and they said look if you draw like a thousand foot circle around the schools a thousand foot circle around the parks a thousand foot circle around tourist destinations there's literally nowhere to live yeah these sex offender registration laws have become so restrictive that it's like you live you either live way out in a rural area where you can't get any services or you are not allowed to live in the city at all and so the city at that time was just like fuck it let's just put them somewhere like there are times when i being an emotionally complex and therefore a fragile person feel like the whole world is against me

when the 7-11 cashier looks at me weird so like imagine everyone literally being against you and imagine if your initial offense had to do as criminal offenses so often do with a lack of resources a lack of support a lack of emotional stability with you know certain desires certain proclivities certain urges and you're trying to not do what your urges are telling you to do but it's easier to be disciplined if you have more resources than if you have fewer and if the world is treating you like a pariah and making it harder for you to get services harder to work harder to have any kind of meaningful connection with a human being then like that's not going to decrease the chances of you re-offending totally i mean that's the thing is you're creating the

situation that you're pretending to be concerned about yeah once again there's also amber alerts famously which do seem to do those work the scholars of that say that they do actually work for the extremely narrow thing that they're used for i mean luckily they're not using them for like every kid like when they pass the law they said specifically it can't be used for family objections right so it's only used i think something like 500 times per year in the whole country and you know they're localized yeah and i've gotten like four or five of them in my whole life yeah but so what what the scholars say about that is that like they're kind of like yes fine they help with with the extremely narrow number of cases that they're applicable to

but they sort of reinforce this idea that this is the type of child abduction that we should be worried about this is the most prevalent thing this is the thing we should all be scared of when you know there's 200 000 abductions of children by their custodial guardians every year there's all these other forms of child abuse that are taking place and this is the one we're concerned about right so it's not necessarily that like we have to get rid of them it's more just like why is this the one thing that we treat like an emergency or guess we need a push alert every day that says the system still has flaws yeah i mean to me the legacy of this is first of all like there's been a number of prosecutions of parents for letting their kids go outside there was a

prosecution of a couple in maryland who let their 10 and six year old go to the park by themselves somebody called the cops which is already ridiculous and then cps came and took their children away and didn't call them these parents are like what the fuck and lose their minds and the kids don't come back for like six more hours the kids have obviously had a bad night the parents have had a bad night and the parents of course are just like why didn't you just call us like a five minute phone call yeah we would have just said like oh it's our kids no big deal no big deal when the cops picked up their kids why didn't the cops just drive them home like we're deeply suspicious not only of kids roaming around by themselves but parents who let their kids

roam around by themselves you know i'm deeply suspicious i know what you're gonna say i mean i know that there are people in america who when they see a cop car when they see a police officer they are like this person is protecting me i am demographically the person who the police are most interested in protecting in many ways and like like if i have to interact with a police officer it's like going to tell a recently divorced dad at a barbecue that someone dinged his car in the parking lot you're just like this could go okay but like it probably won't yeah to me the afterlife of this is our bullshit panic right now over trafficking you know i came across an article about this it says from 2000 to 2002 the state department said 50 000 people were trafficked

into the us each year for forced sex or labor by 2003 the agency reduced this estimate to 18 to 20 000 and then reduced it again to 14 000 to 17 000 in subsequent reports that's a 71 decrease in just five years though officials offered no explanation as to how they arrived at these numbers or what accounted for the drastic change what if it's because america's doing such a good job that they actually declined that much i mean this is the thing is like to me it has all of the structural parameters that stranger danger had in that we've got something that is so broadly defined that it applies to like half the fucking labor force and that's the other thing right where it feels like human trafficking is one of those weasley kind of a topics to where you can say that

and then people especially how you contextualize it people will basically hear you saying sex work and you can conflate those two fears even if you're talking about you know bringing someone to a different country under false pretenses so you can take their passport and not pay them any money to nanny for you right and then i mean it's the same kind of thing that once you start looking into how many cases have actually been investigated it's like less than 2000 a year in the united states of actual trafficking get investigated or prosecuted which of course then everybody says well oh that's because it's under reported that's because we don't care about it but like i don't know man it might just be a moral panic there's also the number i like the most

is the international organization of migration says 300 000 children are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation aren't we all at risk in a way buying and selling children and trafficking like transporting children around sounds like a fucking huge hassle i don't think it's being done on any kind of grand scale like think about what a day at disney world is like with kids i mean it's a thing like not to make light of this but it's like yeah we're just making the same mistake again one of the things that i cannot get over is in the actual statistics for children that end up in prostitution a huge percentage of them comes straight from the foster care system because the foster care system is completely broken like when i volunteered at a homeless

shelter for my millennials article you do intakes of people right you get their like demographic information the first time they sleep there one of the categories on the form is have you been in the foster care system it's so bad it's on the fucking form and it's like all of the people that are decrying like child pornography and sex trafficking and how bad it is i don't hear any of the same people talking about let's have a functioning foster care system i mean if you really want to keep kids from ending up as prostitutes the number one thing you would do is get a functioning foster care system in place well i guess by fixating on the idea of the child above the actual child because i feel like again it's this very useful misdirection if you are

riling up the populace by telling them stories about the at-risk children and the white suburban american children that are in danger and have to be protected from the predators and the super predators and the sex offenders and the whoever else then you could ignore the fact that there are actual children who we have you know government documentation on the imprisonment and detainment of you know it feels like these shadowy fears that we never have any substantiation of but that we want so badly to believe in are often something that we're focusing on so we don't have to look at something that's right behind us and that there's more documentation of than we could ever explain away everyone knows that foster care

essentially means abuse everyone knows that everyone always has known that you know i mean mary ellen mccormick who inspired one of the discoveries of child abuse in american 19 and 1873 was the 1873 version of a foster child yeah it begins and ends with that so what did we learn we learned let your kids roam around let your kids take the bus let your kids play in the yard if you were a child be afraid of your family oh uh maybe i should end with a quote the uh a quote that i wanted to read you it's from one of these crime one of these like crime statistics reports it says uh if a mother is afraid that her child might be abducted her ironclad rule should not be don't talk to strangers it should be don't talk to your father which i think is

pretty fucking harsh but statistically speaking also accurate so don't talk to your dad nobody nobody talk to your dad today i think that's a good it's a generalizable rule the feminist pervert and the homosexual have spoken