Last week, alarming reports began circulating on social media alleging a spike in children going missing in Virginia. Videos and posts claimed dozens of children had disappeared in the commonwealth over only a few days, and the posts and videos reporting it quickly racked up tens of millions of views on everything from Instagram to X to Threads.
On Aug. 12, TikToker @tkay7411 reported that 50 children had gone missing in Virginia. By Aug. 13, the number had risen to 80 children missing. The next day, the number spiked to over 100 children. And a culprit began to emerge: “late night ice cream trucks.”
Many online amateur journalists pointed to the lack of media coverage and the fact that no Amber Alerts had been issued as evidence that the abductions had the tacit approval of authorities. And when those authorities held a press conference to tamp down the rumors, the response online was generally “that’s exactly what they would say if they were trying to cover something up.”
Let’s dig into this mass hysteria in progress and separate the facts from the fiction.
How many children in Virginia have gone missing in the last week?
This is not one of those conspiracy theories that was invented whole cloth. According to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 88 children really were reported missing in Virginia between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9. Virginia has the highest number of missing children listed on the CEMEC’s website. It’s also true that no Amber Alerts were issued in Virginia during that time and no major media reported on the missing kids either.
But, as usual, the truth is boring and offers no midnight ice cream trucks. Eighty-eight children going missing in a week is actually better than Virginia’s average of 98 missing children per week, but that number is still extremely misleading. According to Virginia’s state police, Virginia reports more children missing than other states. Virginia forwards every missing child case to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids (NCMEC) website within a couple hours of the reports being received.
There’s also the meaning of the word “missing.” When someone says “missing children,” people tend to jump to “a child stolen by a stranger in a van,” but the 93% of missing children are teenagers who run away from home. And almost all of them return are found quickly. According to Child Find America, 99% of runaways return home. So when a teenager doesn’t come home on Saturday night and a worried parent calls the cops, it’s reported to the NCMEC before they have a chance to stumble in at 6am.
Of the 7% of missing children who are actually abducted, 78% are taken by non-custodial parents. Of the remaining, 21% are abducted by other relatives, and 27% by acquaintances. Overall, less than 1% of missing child cases are due to abductions by strangers. The total number of stranger abductions, according to the FBI, is about 350 children per year for the whole nation of 340 million of so folks. It’s not zero, but it’s pretty close.
In Virginia, a state of 8.8 million people, 3,274 children have been reported missing since January 25. Of these, 141 (as of Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025) are still missing, or approximately 4%. Again, everyone would like the number to be 0%, but in the real world, 4% is close.
Bottom line: Almost all of the 88 cases in Virginia were teenagers who were reported missing and then either came home or were found. There was no mass abduction of children in the state. No Amber Alerts were issued because none of the cases met the criteria for an Amber Alert. (That is, a child has been abducted, is in imminent danger, and there is enough descriptive information about the child, the abductor, or the vehicle to aid in the child’s safe recovery.) And there were no reports in the media 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 does make for a scary story, and telling each other scary stories is the real point. The idea of losing a child is so scary, people have to invent fictional scenarios about government-approved trafficking rings to cope with it. Meanwhile, the runaways who actually go missing face more mundane dangers than whoever is supposed to be behind the midnight ice cream trucks. But they’re real dangers like homelessness, violence, and sexual exploitation.
The great stranger danger panic of the 1980s
The “88 missing children in Virginia” isn’t the first (nor the 50th) panic over missing children in the US. The biggest, most consequential missing-child hysteria in U.S. history was in the early 1980s. Kicked off by the 1979 abduction of Etan Patz and the 1981 murder of Adam Walsh, there were a few years where everyone was very aware of kids being snatched by violent psychos, whether it actually happened or not. The original “stranger danger” hysteria gave birth to such disparate cultural and political expressions as milk carton kids, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself—founded in 1984 by the The Missing Children’s Assistance Act.
The statistic were roughly the same back in the 1980s—95% of missing children were runaways; almost all abductors were related to the abductees—and so was the misinformation. It was widely reported that 1.5 million children disappeared in the United States every year, when the actual number was closer to 300.
This modern child-abduction panic, though, is not being spread by the media. Back in the pre-Internet days, it was the actual news media spreading misinformation instead of random goofs on TikTok, and the media should have known better. TikTok goofs can be forgiven because anything is a conspiracy theory if you don’t understand how anything works.
What does it all mean?
Missing-children panics are mirrors of the fears of our collective unconscious, not a reflection of anything happening in the real world. In the 1980s, it was anxieties over latchkey children, a crumbling sense of community, and good old-fashioned homophobia and racism (the “model” back then was a young white boy abducted by a sex-crazed molester). Today, it’s distrust of institutions and a social media ecosystem that rewards the most sensational version of any story. Instead of being lured by killer ice cream trucks, kids who run away for the same reasons they always have: Because their homes aren’t safe or their families are struggling to stay afloat. As always, the real danger and evil is so ordinary, it almost never goes viral.
