Paul Mokrzycki

A Flower Smashed by a Rock

Introduction

A flower smashed by a rock. Explore the 1970s-80s American missing children's campaign. Discover how perceived childhood innocence prioritized white boyhood cases, exposing societal privilege.

Abstract

This article explores the origins of the American missing children’s campaign in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the ways in which specific conceptions of childhood innocence brought attention to certain cases of alleged child kidnapping, while ignoring other such incidents. Although many media scholars have identified and interrogated how news outlets privilege telegenic missing white females—going so far as to coin the term “missing white woman syndrome” in the 2000s—this work takes a longer historical approach to the subject and argues that white boyhood trumps girlhood and womanhood in its claims to “innocence.” The missing children phenomenon thus reveals and reifies existing markers of privilege in contemporary American society.

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