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  • 2018-07-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Has Iowa Seen an Alarming Increase in Vanishing Children This Summer? (en)
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  • On 27 July 2018, independent journalist Rachel Blevins shared an article she penned for the conspiracy-prone Free Thought Project website, about dozens of children in Iowa having vanished over the previous two weeks: The article opened with a discussion of missing Iowa college student Mollie Tibbits, whose disappearance has garnered significant news coverage. Blevins then attempted to make the point that Mollie’s disappearance was part of a much larger and troubling trend by offering up a statistic largely devoid of any context: Blevins took a snapshot of the Iowa Missing Person database at a given point in time and counted how many individuals on that list had been reported missing over the past two weeks. Such an approach created the impression that the current number of missing persons in that state was unusual, and that a majority of those missing persons cases represented children who were vanishing (presumably permanently). But the reported numbers were, unfortunately, not unusual. Due to sensationalized reporting of this type, on 27 July 2018 the Iowa Department of Public Safety (DPS) released a statement putting Blevin’s numbers in context. That context revealed that, from a missing juvenile standpoint, nothing unique, unusual, or alarming had occurred over the previous two weeks in Iowa: In 2016, by comparison, a total of 4,108 missing juveniles were reported in Iowa, but only 209 of them actually remained missing at the time of their reporting. In neighboring Missouri, 7,170 juveniles were reported missing (roughly 20 per day) in 2017, but the number of open missing juvenile cases remaining at the end of the year was 52. Indeed, even the list of missing persons provided alongside the 27 July 2018 Iowa DPS statement had changed significantly in the three days after it was posted. That list initially included 37 individuals comprising both adults and juveniles, but as of the publication of this article (according to our count), 13 of those names had already been removed from the list, indicating those cases had been resolved: Moreover, Blevins' article closed by asserting that While individual cases such as the disappearance of Mollie Tibbetts do receive some national media attention, the overwhelming majority are swept under the rug and forgotten. This statement was also misleading and inaccurate: Mollie Tibbetts is not an example of a missing child (she's a 20-year-old woman), and in fact the overwhelming majority of missing children (over 97%) are found and returned home: Also contrary to Blevins' assertion is NCMEC's own website, which proclaims that (at least within their purview) no missing child is ever forgotten: While the missing persons numbers presented by Free Thought Project were accurate at the time of publication, the implication that they represented an alarming trend or a deviation from normal rates of missing persons — much less an epidemic of vanishing children underway in Iowa — was without basis. (en)
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