Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

In the early 1980s, following the disappearances and murders of Etan Patz in New York City, Adam Walsh in South Florida, and two dozen children in Atlanta, a national missing-children panic ignited. Congress passed a federal Missing Children’s Act, and milk cartons were plastered with photographs of missing children. News media pegged the number of abductions at between 20,000 and 50,000 a year, with estimates up to the hundreds of thousands. I had just become a writer for the national affairs section of Time, and one day I did some simple arithmetic concerning the missing-children problem. If the low-end figure was true, if twenty thousand American children really were abducted by strangers each year, it meant that in New York City alone a dozen children would be disappearing every week. I found it improbable. I called half a dozen urban police departments around the country and asked each one how many cases it had had in the previous year of children taken by strangers. One here, none there, a couple in the next place. By extrapolation, it seemed clear that the correct national number was possibly in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands, let alone tens of thousands. My editor at Time, however, declined to let me go forward with such a wildly skeptical story. A couple of years later some Denver Post reporters established that the vast majority of missing children were actually runaways or involved in parental custody disputes, and that the standard statistics were...