May 25: Missing Children

The disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, a Jewish child, on the streets of Soho in New York on this date in 1979 would spark a missing children’s movement in America that included a 1983 law designating May 25th as National Missing Children’s Day. Patz was walking two blocks to his school bus stop by himself for the first time when he was taken. (Update: Jose Antonio Ramos was declared responsible for Etan’s presumed death in a 2004 civil case but has never been criminally prosecuted for the crime; he is scheduled for release from prison for child molestation this November. Update: In April 2017, Pedro Hernandez, who had confessed three years earlier to the crime, was sentenced to life in prison.) Between 100 and 300 children, annually, are kidnapped by strangers (and about half of them are murdered), according to the National Incidence Study of Missing, Exploited, Runaway and Throwaway Children (NISMART), and between 3,000 and 5,000 children are sexually abused and released, with adolescent girls at the highest risk. The alarm raised by Etan’s disappearance, however (his was the first face of a missing child to appear on milk cartons) has bred exaggerated statistics and an exaggerated sense of danger among Americans about child abductions -- the great majority of which are by parents in custody disputes.

“Today, more and more of us are outsiders, strangers on our own streets. The cities are bigger, neighborhoods less stable. The ratio of strangers to friends, strangers to families has changed dramatically. This is, I think, at the root of our insecurity.” —Ellen Goodman, Washington Post