Posting #177 –John Walsh Switched from Missing Children to Sexually Exploited Children after a 1985 Pulitzer Prize Winning Expose, Exposed Him

From the Book: Knowledge as Power
By: Wayne A. Logan
Date: 2009

Chapter 4-Page 89:

In October 1982, President Reagan signed the federal Missing Children Act which required the FBI to gather information on missing Children and later designated May 25, 1983 as national “Missing Children’s Day”.

Meanwhile John Walsh established four Adam Walsh Resource Centers, dedicated to locating missing children, and the Adam Walsh tragedy inspired a network television movie in October 1983, “Adam” which proved hugely popular. Immediately after the movie, NBC aired photos of missing children and informed viewers that fifty thousand children were abducted annually in the U.S. NBC rebroadcast the movie one year later, and Congress allocated $57 million to establish the National Resource Center in Missing Children. In testimony before Congress, John Walsh related that” more than 1.5 million children are reported missing every year” and “we don’t have clues to what happened to over 50,000 of them” In conjunction with widely reported serial killings such as the notorious John Wayne Gacy in suburban Chicago in the late 1970’s, and Wayne Williams in Atlanta in the early 1980s, child homicide added mortal urgency to the public debate.

Congress responded by creating the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which John Walsh an Hotelier was appointed to head. By 1985, over one hundred agencies, with annual combined funding in excess of $15 million, were engaged in the campaign against child abductions, increasing public awareness by such efforts as emblazoning milk cartons and cereal boxes with the faces of missing children. Parents, as they had in the 1930s in the wake of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, responded proactively, by having their children fingerprinted, and some had radio transponders inserted in their children’s teeth.

The child abduction and murder panic however lost steam undercut by claims that abduction rates had been exaggerated. In a 1985 expose that won a Pulitzer Prize, the Denver Post reported that 330,000 NOT 1.5 million, children were reported missing annually, and that most of the children were runaways. Moreover fewer than one thousand children were the victims of homicide, most often at the hands of acquaintances or relatives – not trench-coated strangers. The finding was soon backed by a 1989 study indicating that only 52 to 158 children annually were killed or abducted by strangers and a 1990 U.S. Department of Justice study concluding that in 1988 of the estimated 3,200 to 4,600 nonfamily abductions, only 200 to 300 were “stereotypical kidnappings”; and that from 1976 to 1987, an estimated 43 to 147 stranger abduction homicides occurred annually. Furthermore, missing children fell into five categories, with at least four of the categories containing children who were not “literally missing”. Rather, “their location was known;” the problem was recovering them”. The report further stated that “it was not possible to develop a meaningful and useful global figure for the “number of missing children” and the authors discouraged efforts “to create or use such a global number”.

In the face of this data, focus soon shifted from child abduction and abuse to child sexual victimization. The groundwork for this transition was laid with trials stemming from reported mass child sexual abuse at the McMartin preschool in Southern California (1983) and a day care center in rural Jordan, Minnesota (1984) which received major sustained media attention and prompted congressional hearings. By 1990, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children merged with the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, child sexual molestation had become a major focus of national concern.