Endangered Innocents: Missing Children and the New Right

My paper will examine the emergence of “missing children” as a formidable social problem in the United States during the 1980s. The missing children scare shaped and was shaped by the broader fears that catalyzed the rise of modern conservatism. A spate of high-profile cases in the late 1970s and early 1980s thrust the issue onto the national stage, and within a few short years, an entire infrastructure appeared in response to the putative crisis. Parents, politicians, child welfare advocates, and television personalities worked to raise awareness about missing young people through legislation, media coverage, and the establishment of local, regional, and national organizations. Yet in the meteoric ascent of this social problem, many Americans lost sight of just how rarely children went “missing” and instead let their anxieties about race, crime, sex, gender, and social change kindle their fears about lost, abducted, or murdered youths. During the early to mid-eighties, the notion of “missing children” suddenly materialized as an aggregated social problem rather than a local or personal one. Activists, elected officials, and journalists seized the issue and helped confirm in the public imagination the threats that ostensibly confronted the American child, family, and nation. Many Americans believed this “epidemic” to be symptomatic of a nation coming apart at the seams, and they thus turned to the ascendant conservative movement and specifically the “politics of family” in an attempt to rectify not only the missing children problem, but also the chaos that supposedly caused it. The missing children phenomenon thus encapsulates the anxieties about social change that have defined American society since the end of World War II, and it illustrates the twinned significance of childhood and fear in the national political imaginary.