What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: 80 Children Missing in Virginia
Last week, alarming reports began circulating on social media about a sharp increase in missing children in Virginia. Videos and posts claimed that dozens of children had disappeared in the state in just a few days. The posts and videos quickly racked up tens of millions of views across platforms ranging from Instagram to X to Threads.
On August 12, TikToker @tkay7411 reported that 50 children were missing in Virginia. By August 13, the number of missing children had risen to 80. The next day, the number had surpassed 100. And the culprit began to emerge: ” late-night ice cream trucks .”
Many amateur online journalists pointed to the lack of media coverage and the absence of Amber Alerts as evidence that the abductions were happening with the tacit approval of the authorities. When the authorities held a press conference to quash the rumors, the response online was typically that “that’s what they would say if they were trying to hide something.”
Let’s get to the bottom of this mass hysteria and separate fact from fiction.
How many children have gone missing in Virginia in the last week?
This isn’t one of those conspiracy theories that was just made up out of thin air. According to the Center for Missing & Exploited Children , 88 children actually went missing in Virginia between August 3 and August 9. Virginia has the highest number of missing children, according to the CEMEC website. It’s also true that there were no Amber Alerts in Virginia during that period, and no major media outlets reported on any missing children.
But as usual, the truth is boring and doesn’t offer midnight ice cream trucks. Eighty-eight missing children per week is better than the Virginia average of 98 missing children per week, but it’s still extremely misleading. According to the Virginia State Police , Virginia reports more missing children than any other state. Virginia refers all missing child cases to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) within hours of receiving a report.
Then there’s the meaning of the word “missing.” When someone says “missing children,” people usually immediately think of “child kidnapped by a stranger in a van,” but 93 percent of missing children are teenagers who run away from home. And almost all of them quickly return and are found. According to Child Find America, 99 percent of runaways return home. So when a teenager doesn’t return home on a Saturday night and a concerned parent calls the police, NCMEC is notified before they even show up at 6 a.m.
Of the 7% of missing children who were actually abducted , 78% were abducted by a noncustodial parent. Of the remainder, 21% were abducted by other relatives and 27% by acquaintances. Overall, less than 1% of missing child cases involve stranger abductions. According to the FBI, the total number of stranger abductions is about 350 children per year for a nation of 340 million people. That’s not zero, but it’s pretty close.
In Virginia, a state of 8.8 million people, 3,274 children have gone missing since January 25. Of those, 141 (as of Wednesday, August 13, 2025) are still missing, or about 4%. Again, we’d like to see that number be 0%, but it’s closer to 4%.
Bottom line: Almost all of Virginia’s 88 cases involved teenagers who went missing and were either returned home or found. There were no mass child abductions in the state. Not a single case was issued under the Amber Alert program because none of them met the criteria for an Amber Alert (that is, a child was abducted, is in immediate danger, and there is enough information about the child, the abductor, or the vehicle to assist in their safe return). And there were no media reports because there was literally nothing to report—it was a normal week in Virginia.
As for the ice cream trucks, your guess is as good as mine, but it is a truly terrifying story, and telling each other horror stories is the whole point. The idea of losing a child is so terrifying that people have to invent fictional scenarios about government-sanctioned human trafficking rings to cope. Meanwhile, the runaways who actually go missing face more mundane dangers than those supposedly behind the midnight ice cream trucks. But they are real dangers: homelessness, violence, and sexual exploitation.
Panic over the Great Stranger in the 1980s
“Virginia’s 88 Missing Children” is not the first (or fiftieth) case of missing-child panic in the United States. The largest and most high-profile missing-child hysteria in U.S. history erupted in the early 1980s. Beginning with the abduction of Etan Patz in 1979 and the murder of Adam Walsh in 1981, for several years everyone was aware of children being kidnapped by violent psychopaths, whether or not it was actually happening. The initial hysteria about stranger danger spawned such disparate cultural and political phenomena as the Milk Carton Children, the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself, founded in 1984 under the Missing Children’s Assistance Act.
In the 1980s, the statistics were similar: 95 percent of missing children were runaways; almost all of the abductors were relatives of the abducted — and the misinformation was similar. It was widely reported that 1.5 million children went missing in the United States each year, though the actual number of disappearances was closer to 300.
But this modern panic about child abductions isn’t being fueled by the media. In pre-Internet times, it was the media that spread misinformation, not random TikTok jokes, and the media had to be smarter. TikTok jokes can be forgiven because everything is a conspiracy theory if you don’t understand how things work.
What does all this mean?
The panic over missing children is a reflection of the fears of our collective unconscious, not something happening in the real world. In the 1980s, it was fears for children left behind, a broken sense of community, and good old-fashioned homophobia and racism (the “model” then was a young white boy kidnapped by a sexually obsessed molester). Today, it is distrust of government institutions and the social media ecosystem that encourages the most sensational versions of any story. Instead of being lured by ice cream trucks, children are running away for the same reasons they always have: because their homes are unsafe and their families are struggling to survive. As always, the real danger and evil are so mundane that they almost never go viral.