Apparently the whole thing with kids' faces being put on milk cartons is actually a huge rabbit hole.
There's a lot of controversy about how effective the whole thing was, especially given that the majority of children marked as going missing are either runaways or were taken by a parent in a custody dispute, and how for those few (115 per year) that weren't, well, you know how the first 48 hours are the most important in a missing persons case? It took more than that to get a picture of a missing child, plaster it on a milk carton, ship said milk carton, and have some family actually see it. There was exactly one case Wendigoon could find of it actually recovering an abducted child, plus a few other cases of runaway teens who saw their own faces on cartons and decided "Yeah, the Parental Units are definitely getting too worried. I should probably just go home." Meanwhile, you have millions of parents worried about the possibility of their kids getting abducted and killed (a very understandable fear, but one that they didn't know had crucial context stripped), and millions of kids who sit down to breakfast every morning to someone who, for all they know, was a living cautionary tale staring at them while they ate their corn flakes. On the other hand, this was somehow the thing that actually brought the issue to the forefront, got lawmakers to actually differentiate between adult and child kidnapping.
That said, this was only something I saw on TV, because my family was more of a milk jug family than a milk carton family. And if the AMBER alert system didn't kill off the program, the switch from cartons to jugs definitely did.
There's a lot of controversy about how effective the whole thing was, especially given that the majority of children marked as going missing are either runaways or were taken by a parent in a custody dispute, and how for those few (115 per year) that weren't, well, you know how the first 48 hours are the most important in a missing persons case? It took more than that to get a picture of a missing child, plaster it on a milk carton, ship said milk carton, and have some family actually see it. There was exactly one case Wendigoon could find of it actually recovering an abducted child, plus a few other cases of runaway teens who saw their own faces on cartons and decided "Yeah, the Parental Units are definitely getting too worried. I should probably just go home." Meanwhile, you have millions of parents worried about the possibility of their kids getting abducted and killed (a very understandable fear, but one that they didn't know had crucial context stripped), and millions of kids who sit down to breakfast every morning to someone who, for all they know, was a living cautionary tale staring at them while they ate their corn flakes. On the other hand, this was somehow the thing that actually brought the issue to the forefront, got lawmakers to actually differentiate between adult and child kidnapping.
That said, this was only something I saw on TV, because my family was more of a milk jug family than a milk carton family. And if the AMBER alert system didn't kill off the program, the switch from cartons to jugs definitely did.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.