Bro that was hands down one of the funniest ads I've seen lol almost as good an Internet Historian with more subtlety. I'm going to check them out because of it, job accomplished!
My mom went missing when she was 3 for two days. Everybody searched for her, my grandmother unable to eat or sleep because she was so panicked over her missing daughter. Turns out my mom was staying in an orange grove, eating oranges with a random stray dog to keep her company. She said the dog was so friendly that he let her use him as a pillow when she slept at night. She walked to the orange grove down the road while my grandmother was busy at the laundromat and decided she liked it so much she stayed there for awhile. Then when she was done, she walked back home (it was a couple of blocks away). The cops were talking to my grandmother in the house when they heard the back door open and saw my mom walking into the kitchen to ask for a drink.
@@itzyagirlsonia it’s funny to me too, don’t feel bad. My grandmother was a shitty mother and was neglectful, but my mom actually enjoyed sleeping in the oranges with the dog.
"Twas necessary. Parents of the time truly didn't. We ran the streets, and of course most of us had curfews... but that doesn't mean all of us did, and certainly not all of us complied all the time.
The worst part about the Bonnie case is that it completely goes against the whole “stranger danger” aspect of the missing children. Bonnie wasn’t kidnapped by a stranger, but by her own mother. Not even the one milk carton success story lines up with the expectations set by it.
The wild part is her mother and stepfather or clearly bad people for taking her away from her father and out of the country but what if they did it because her real father was a nasty bastard and abuser the years later her mother is in jail and is returned to the father. All just far out speculation but its a possibility
@@babygravey just stop. Don't even TRY to justify it. If the father was bad, they would have gone to the police or something, idiot. Court alredy favors mothers, wouldn't been hard. So just stop
@@Angel-lb3dw stop it I'm not trying to justify anything at all!! All I said was no one knows the reason the mother ran off with the child. Who knows. Maybe she split up with him because it was an abusive relationship and the only way to get away was to run away but I also said I have no idea at all it was just a theory. You have no clue either. If you think it's as easy as just going to the police in an abusive relationship you have no idea I am grown man now but have lived through domestic volince as a child saw my mum getting beat my sister get beat and myself from dad's step dad's and sisters boyfriends the police got called many times and it never stopped until I grew up and someone got stabbed. So be quiet because you have no clue what the hell you are talking about
I was part of the "stranger danger" generation. We all lived under the impression that someday we were going to have to run from kidnappers. The crazy part is, we were still mostly unsupervised. Our parents had no clue where we were
But you need to learn to operative outside of their supervision, too. The stranger danger thing worked for me. I kept my defenses up and looked for red flags, and I kept myself out of unsafe situations. Kids today wouldn't know how to do that because they never have that opportunity.
Man, this reminds me of those "it's 10PM, do you know where your children are?" announcements that keep popping up whenever I was allowed to stay up super late as a kid
Also grew up in this time. Granted, it was more mid to late 90s for me, but I remember being taught in schools and by my parents not to even get rides from people we knew unless it was okay'd by mom and dad in the first place. Like, I wouldn't even let my friend's mom pick me up and take me back to their house (where friend and I were walking to!) But I definitely think, for as weird as it was, I came out better as an adult. A lot of my friends have kids now, and I feel like the "stranger danger" is more prominent now, for better or worse.
When I was a kid, my mom would just scar me with stories about women going missing in her hometown in Mexico. Then she would make it worse by pointing at a random person in public and would say “if you don’t behave, they’re gonna take you like they did them.” And it would scare the hell out of me. Thanks Mom.
Jfc that's on way to give your kid paranoia... my grandma did similar stuff like tell me id get kidnapped and r***d and never be seen again if I walk too far from her
I remember hearing about a little girl being kidnapped. These 12-14 year old boys decided to ride their bikes around their neighborhood. One actually found her & literally chased the car on his bike far enough they shoved her out to him. She wouldn't let go of the boy until her parents got there. He had to sit in the ambulance with her. The boys & especially that boy were true heroes that day.
It's depressing that Jonny Gosch (the first child talked about here) went missing on the first day that he decided he didn't need his father to supervise him, as well as the Etan Patz abduction being on the first day he went to the bus stop alone.
@@sarasvensson6026 agreed that is indeed the scariest part, every day he walked his son to school there was a person not too far away plotting evil intentions for his son the second he saw him without him. He may have even waved at him one day he was caught making eye contact towards your direction. Gave myself shivers 🫣
About a decade ago a watched a pretty in-depth tv show about missing people centered on Johnny if I remember correctly it was highly speculated by PI that Johnny was scouted out on his paper routes by a pedophile ring known as the rocking x.
As a CPS worker the runaway photos are still used and distributed and it’s exceptionally helpful because it convinces youth to return home. Runaway youth are very susceptible to sex/human/drug trafficking and getting them home is a big win in avoiding that. I had a youth run away from her grandmother and ended up with fake documents in Puerto Rico at 14
I am currently 28 years old. When I was 6-8yrs old, a man I had never seen before approached me at a place I was familiar with and said my parents were looking for me. He offered to drive me back to my parents. Even being a child, I still said "no I'll ride my bike back home." After years(almost 10 yrs) of not thinking anything of that incident, I told my mother. She cried. Never would she ask for a stranger to pick me up. I think back to that moment often. I joke now, but I could've been another one of these children. Missing forever.
You were smart man. I had a neighbor at one point who was a registered child slave trader and my mom warned my dad and stepmom but they never told me and I even had a conversation of him but then heard dinner was ready and left. I had that as a 7 year old and was only told of that when I was 18 because my mom mentioned it as a recollection thing since she's a known stalker on Twitter and especially Facebook. I didn't even know, the guy didn't approach me physically but he sounded kind of drunk and I have always hated drunk people.
When I was around 4 or 5, I was playing in my front yard when a guy in a pickup truck pulled up. He asked me if I wanted a sticker, so I walked over and he handed me a sheriff's badge sticker out the window. He talked to me some more, but honestly I don't remember much of what he said. I just remember getting spooked and running back inside when he asked if my parents were hom. I watched from the window as he waited there in his truck for a little bit and drove off. I put the sheriff sticker on my shirt though haha. My mother asked me about it that night when she was getting me ready for bed, and when I told her she absolutely freaked out and emphasized stranger danger and not going to the front yard to play by myself anymore. Pretty creepy when I look back at the scenario.
I remember watching a video years ago that tested if missing kid posters did anything at all. They posted a picture of a girl in front of a mall with a big ol' "MISSING" on it, then put the girl on a bench in the busiest part of the mall. She sat there for a long time, all by herself. Nobody recognized her as the "missing" kid. Nobody really even paid attention to her.
Tbh I would be no help. I have terrible facial blindness. I recognize people by features like their hair and body type. I still don't know most notable actors even though Ive seen them a bunch and I never know who is who when I'm watching a movie. I mostly watch cartoons partially for that reason, it both the main characters of a movie are white brunettes with a similar frame and basic fashion sense I promise you for 90% of the film I guessing who is who based on conversation and I'm still confused
I have troubles with eye contact as an autistic person, so if there was a picture of her shoes I’d have a better time recognizing her. But yeah, it’s very sad no one cared enough to notice it, but I’d also want to see how in depth this study went. Like, how many flyers were posted, where, the location of the bench, etc.
That's probably also because you wouldn't expect to see the missing kid in such a public area. Like when you hear or see "missing kid" you would think that they would be somewhere hidden or something, at least I have that, I imagine the missing kid either locked up or being dragged somewhere sneaky like. So to see that kid in the bussiest area of anything your mind wouldn't first go to "damn that's the missing kid" but probably something more along the lines of "hmmm that kid looks like that one missing kid, but it can't be because that kid is missing and wouldn't just sit here in the open, so it's probably a kid that looks like the missing one." Idk if my thoughts came across clearly, what I'm trying to say is that if you saw the missing kid out in the open your first thought probably wouldn't be that it was the missing kid.
the most morbid thing ever, is that that the majority of the time when a family was looking at a missing child on their milk carton, they were looking at the face of a child that was already dead.
My aunt was abducted back in the late 60s by someone who was arrested years later for another crime. She was an adult, early 20s, but she was cognitively disabled and quite small, so she appeared as a pre-teen at best. She was kept for three days suffering some truly awful things until she was able to escape and walk and takes busses the 40 miles home. They obviously didn't find the guy at that time. Between the milk cartons and my mother's absolute fear of it happening to me, including telling me that story when I was like, 10 years old, I was so sure I'd be abducted as a kid. It was a weird upbringing.
It should be noted that in some cases (and probably more commonly), children were abducted and/or harmed by people they knew rather than by strangers. Some kids were victims of domestic homicides that were covered up.
So many kids in my old area go “missing” because of a relative or a person they are contacting picks them up either the kid was being abused in the current home or just ignored by a parent for that to happen
indeed. stranger homicides are way more publicized and considered ''sensational'' by most news media, so we get the impression that those are more likely to happen, than the often more occuring murders that are usually committed by the parents themselves
And knowing that, the fact that the "stranger danger" culture completely shattered any sense of community and mutual trust meant that children suffering domestic abuse were isolated with their abusers and had nobody to reach out to for help :(
I know all too well that it's the people you spend the most time around, the people you trust the most as a kid who end up doing something. I won't go into my life story, but it's a lot easier for someone in charge of you to get you alone, and a lot harder to remember something someone you love did to you.
I remember being told “you wanna end up on a milk carton?” As a kid and not really understanding what that meant. Now we just post them on the wall at walmart. Keep up the great work brother.
On the topic of "Stranger Danger": my mother never explained to me as a child that kids the same age as me, despite being strangers, were not the stangers to be afraid of. When we moved to a new town and i went to a new school, i was terrified of everyone, and it screwed me up socially pretty bad. By the time i learned differently, nobody wanted to be my friend anymore.
My parents used to tell me that if I didn't drink all my milk at breakfast I would be in greater danger of potential abduction. As a kid this sounded sort of crazy. But all these decades later, having always finished my glass of milk as a child, I can attest to the fact that I was never abducted. Thanks mom and dad for the sound advice. Sorry I doubted you.
Can't imagine how heartbreaking it must have been for that father to have his son go missing the very first day he didn't watch his son deliver the papers 🥺
All the more reason that it had to be someone local. It's too much of a coincidence that he disappears the first day he's alone; someone was stalking that poor boy.
@@MatthewNY94 agreed Unless it’s a random person kidnapping Usually they’ll watch someone and find out their schedule before they make a move to get them That’s why u should change your routine sometimes It’s so sad people have to live like this
22:00 That was always my issue with this. If a kid was legitimately kidnapped, by the time the face makes it onto the milk cartons, that kid is almost surely dead. It is very rare for a child to be kidnapped by a stranger (so not just a divorced parent taking the kid) to be found alive. As depressing as it is, almost always, the kid is already dead before the week is over.
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Because they don't want the victim to be able to describe them to the police. They are less likely to get caught if there is no one to tell what happened.
I wasn't alive for it, but I remember someone talking about this old PSA where it would simply display the question, "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?" It apparently started in the late 60s into the 80s and was shown in more urban areas due to increased violence in urban cities during that time (the person who had brought up the PSA grew up in New York and New Jersey, so that tracks) as a means of telling parents to keep their kids safe inside at night. I think if the whole "Stranger Danger" programs and PSAs of the late 80s early 90s did any good, it was spreading awareness that small town communities aren't perfect safety zones for kids. That even if you live outside the "gritty and violent urban areas", bad things can and have happened to kids anywhere. There's no such thing as a 100% safe community.
When I was a co I had a supervisor ask the same “It’s 10pm, where are your children?” question in the women’s block as we were putting the trustee up and collecting trash from the day, he had to leave the block shortly after that statement.
"The Face on the Milk Carton" is a really good series. It's about a highschool girl- close friends, happy family, big house- that steals her friends milk at lunch, and sees her own face on the milk carton from when she was three, and then realizes that her parents don't have her birth certificate or any pictures before she was three
Imagine getting in your parka backwards for a school picture and your asshole friend puts your picture on the local milk company’s cartons labeled as a missing child, leading to you being identified by a couple with a facial deformity, and then having your parents tell them you’re actually not their kid, so they go to the milk company and have them do a search for missing children in their database with their disability, finding out there are no search results, giving up, and then by some miracle, the technician finds their child, and it turns out, his parents were missing, and the “missing” child was in fact rich and famous, and his name was Ben Affleck.
@@7eis put missing people on cig packs! That way we don't have to look at the stupid gross pictures they put on them. Here in Canada they literally can't make their packs look "appealing" which basically means every brand looks the same it's do dumb
My mom literally traumatized me due in part to this whole era. She once made me watch a documentary on stranger danger when I was about 5. She then put her finger to my head like a gun and asked me what I should do in that situation. I tried to answer, I think with running away, she just said, "bang, you're dead. You can't run from a gun." And I started crying. I wasn't even allowed to cross the street alone until I was about 13. Saying I was sheltered would be an understatement.
A very good friend of mine was about 8 years old when he walked away from his mom in a grocery store to look at legos. A creepy guy named Gary came up and atarted talking to him and aid something to the degree of "I'll buy you whichever one you want and you can come over to my house and build it." My friend agreed, chose what he remembers to be an expensive set ($100+ in the early 2000s) As he was leaving the store he saw his mom frantically searching for him in the parking lot, looked up at Gary and "theres my mom I'll go with her." Took the legos from Gary and ran over to his mom before telling her where he got the legos, while pointing at Gary. Apparently his mom sobbed, called the police and Gary drove off never to be seen again. He said he was 18 he packed up the lego set before moving to college and the memories flooded back to him about it.
My sister was trafficked in the early 90s. The few times she was left alone in public and tried to get help from strangers no one believed her. Being dismissed by normal people which allowed her to fall back in the hands of monsters was the most traumatic thing because the other abuse she can just block out.
@@stevescott3735 I've never watched this channel before and its sad how he keeps focusing on how it wasn't effective. In today's world where everyone has seen to catch a predator people will still ignore uncomfortable things such as this, even mandated reporters. Having those milk cartons at least put the potential in the minds of the public.
I remember a news program years ago where they had kids handing out missing children flyers at a grocery store. The child on the flyer was actually the kid handing them out. Only one person noticed.
@@kimosterhout3242 Yeah, I guess. I think that the example of a missing kid sitting inside of a mall with flyers everywhere and still not getting spotted says more about it. You simply wouldn't assume that a kid handing out a flyer of themselves is the actual kid despite them looking alike (I think, anyways).
I remember feeling bad whenever I saw the missing kids and my mom grew extremely paranoid of strangers. I was the type of kid that ran off in the store a lot and you better believe I got chewed out by my mom a lot. She always told me that there were bad people who pretended to be nice, so I had to stay by her side at all times. I remember being too anxious to play outside because our house was by a busy street. And now I'm a grown adult with moderate social anxiety. I was one of those kids that as I grew older, the anxiety around stranger danger grew more. I always did wonder what happened to the milk carton missing children ads, so I'm glad you got my back, Wendigoon. lol
I can relate to this! my mom was always so overly paranoid concerning mine & my brother's safety. she took precautions w/ anything that could be potentially harmful (including strangers.. I remember her taking us to self defense classes, having a 'password', etc.) all of this has had a lasting, negative impact on my psyche as an adult. I find myself being equally as cautious at times and overthinking EVERYTHING, which holds me back from doing very simple things in life. I know she was just trying to protect us and she is still an amazing mom but I can't help but see how her paranoia rubbed off on me!
My mom wasn't. I was nearly abducted and got called a liar and told to stop pretending like I was scared. Some dude tried to lure me over to his car to "help him read a map", I was outside the store holding our little dog's leash while mom bought milk.
Do you mean you're socially anxious, or you have social anxiety disorder? As someone diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, it's frustrating to hear people say "I have social anxiety". Because misconception tends to lead most people to believe that social anxiousness and social anxiety disorder are the same thing, or mistake them for one another. So then they tend to mean that they are socially anxious, not that they have social anxiety disorder, which in turn makes it borderline self-diagnosis for them to say "I have social anxiety". It's also frustrating in the sense that I barely have anyone to relate to, considering that social anxiety disorder is a lot more rare than most people tend to believe. And the misconception certainly doesn't help.
As someone who grew up in the 80s I remember this quite well and it was depressing AF seeing all these kids faces on Milk cartons. I think the most ironic about the whole "stranger danger" scare of the 80s is that most kidnappings are perpetuated by ppl who know the child.
I grew up in the 2000s and I remember going to Walmart with my mom and being immensely creeped out by the wall of photos of missing children, all in high contrast, usually black and white images. It's honestly one of the first times I recall being disturbed. I never even imagined what it would be like to visit that feeling every morning over breakfast...
I will say that the whole stranger danger initiative, while perhaps overblown, instilled some good habits. For instance, it’s common knowledge among kids that you don’t get into cars with strangers and they’re able to recognize luring attempts (“I have some candy in my van” or “wanna come see my puppy?”). That said, the overwhelming majority of cases where a child is abducted or harmed isn’t that weird dude at the park. It’s usually someone the child knows and trusts. Like a custody dispute, or a teacher, uncle or aunt, grandparent, sibling, etc. We put a lot into stranger danger, but too often the dangerous ones aren’t the strangers
There are actual statistics that show that the vast majority of crimes against children are committed by family or people the family knows and trust, and the more heinous the crimes the more likely the criminal is close to them. Stranger danger is real, but it's peanuts compared to Family Felony
True but there really isn't much you can teach your kids against that kind of kidnapping lol. "Remember if you seeing mommy acting frantic and telling you to get in the car kick that bitch and run" 😂😂
I'm young enough to have missed the milk carton era, but there was still heavy "stranger danger" messaging in school and at home. This backfired when my younger sister and I went "missing" for about an hour at a National Park, and refused to talk to the rangers because we didn't know them.
I remember those PSA's as well. They would always have the strangers who were trying to kidnap a child act like a villain, so I thought a "stranger" would act that way while a normal person would act ordinary, and it wasn't until a couple years later when I would learn what stranger actually meant and mocked the idea of "stranger danger" since I wouldn't have had any friends since they all started as strangers at one point.
I asked my Dad if he lived with the milk cartons, as he was a kid in the 80’s - 90’s, and he said, “They need to make some for liquor so my friends will know if I’m missing or not.”
My parents taught me about stranger danger right, so I was walking home from school one day and someone I didn't recognise offered me a ride home and said my parents asked him to pick me up. I said "no, sorry. I'm going to my friends house" and went into my mates front yard a few houses up. Nobody was home. I wait there for about 20 minutes before heading home and the man is actually inside with my parents and he was in fact asked to pick me up. He actually praised me when I said why I went to my mates. In retrospect, what the actual fuck were my parents thinking? That said he was a friend of my parents but my autistic face blind ass probably didnt recognise him. As an adult I have almost been abducted a couple of times. I should really stop walking at night.
@@finch600 This is unrelated to your comment, but if you don't mind I wanted to ask if you can at all like, put a finger on the "feeling" or vibe or behaviour that makes it feel innately difficult to look at faces? I'm autistic too, but I don't have the kind of extreme aversion you're describing here. I will often have my eyes wander, usually because I like looking at my surroundings, I think?? I also like to use stuff around me to help give my head a break from examining someone's face to figure out how they feel. I still regularly look at people's faces, however, and quite like doing so. So I'm just genuinely really curious how it feels for you. Of course you dont need to answer me at all if you dont want to. Thanks for reading!!
When I was about 16-17, I briefly worked in a used bookstore in my small town. One day, this girl, who was about 11, and her brother, who was probably 5 or 6, came in by themselves to look at books, which was strange in and of itself. The reason why these particular kids stood out to me, beyond the fact that they were in there alone, was the conversation I had with the girl about birds (she was obsessed with them, and wanted to look at books about them; I was hand-raising a baby bird at the time so I was telling her about that). One of the senior staff thought the whole situation was weird, so she was asking them questions to try and suss out what their story was; they were in town for a few days visiting their Dad after their parents separated, apparently. Cut to less than a week later, and the girl was on the news as a missing person. I knew for sure it was her even though I didn't know her name at the time because she had a few unique features that made her stand out. I made my Mum sit in on call to Crimestoppers (it's an Australian thing, I'm not sure of the international alternatives) with me because I was absolutely terrified to do it by myself. I'm pretty sure I was on the phone with them for at least an hour answering questions. They ended up finding her a few days later, thankfully, and I never found out for sure if my tip helped at all, but it was one of the most bizarre and tense things I have ever experienced, constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for a phone call or a visit from the police.
The only time I had a personal experience with police is when I was 10, during the day. We were visiting a friend's house that was 1 or 2 blocks down I saw a dude covered from head to toe in black, even in a Hoodia. The person, probably a male, was walking left across their lawn carrying something with him. Not that big. (their lawn extended into a playground for neighborhood kids) and I remember him glancing back. Fast forward to night when we started to leave a couple police cars arrived. This scared me of course because cops = danger. A cop came up to me and asked if I had seen someone in all black. At the time I forgot about the man and said no. But after we passed him I remembered. I didn't tell him because I was scared. So I lead my brother back home. Still don't know what happened.
I was a child of the 80s. I remember being uneasy seeing the photos of missing kids on milk and orange juice cartons. I would lose my appetite seeing the kids faces on a pizza box. It was a macabre practice indeed. My worst memory from that era though, is seeing my classmates’ picture on an orange juice carton a few days before they found his body in a deep ditch. He was found next to his mangled bicycle, apparently killed by a hit and run.
@@agentepolaris4914 putting the faces of kids who could very well be dead (in the mind of whoever is buying milk) on packaging is macabre. It's a reminder that people can be lost at any moment.
My mother grew up in this era and safe to say, she became absolutely paranoid. I mean, she completely went nuts. I wasn't allowed to go to family without her being there. I wasn't allowed to see friends (that she knew well) without her being there. I wasn't allowed to do sports, clubs, or do anything extra curricular without her there. When I was really young, she would do "kidnapping drills" where she would sneak up on me and "pretend" to kidnap me and would beat me if I didn't respond the right way. She would do this in public out on walks, at home, at stores, EVERYWHERE. What I remember distinctly was how she would contort her face to look scary and unfamiliar and keep it on if I "failed" her test. When my parents divorced, she absolutely lost it. She wouldn't let me call my dad without her listening, let my sister out of my sight for fear of her being kidnapped, and had to call her damn near every hour. Listen, I understand being concerned for your children. But being a helicopter parent to the point of her breathing over my shoulder all the time. I eventually ran away. Went to live with my dad. Overbearing parents who are scared of child kidnapping often end up loosing their kids - not because of kidnappers but because of their own precautions.
tbh your mother was abusive and likely had a cluster b personality disorder such as NPD, BPD, ASPD where she fed off the fear she could provoke in you. I am so glad that you were able to escape from her to a hopefully safe person. You are right that abusive parents like yours too often drive their children to abusive relationships and people who are not safe and could kill them.
Here's a funny childhood story my dad likes to remind me of every now and again. When I was little, "stranger danger" was implemented far too heavy-handedly in my schools. So much so that one day, at the store to get groceries, I apparently asked this random lady outright 'Are you a good stranger or a bad stranger?' The funny part is that after she laughed and told me she was a good stranger, I started spouting all the personal info I knew at age 4! 🤣
imagine if she jokingly told you she was a bad stranger and you would’ve told your dad and she would’ve had to register as a sex offender or something lol
@@amberhernandez lol! All I know is that my dad likes to reenact what I did. Like I was super excited and was just like 'Hello! My name is _____ and I live with my mommy and daddy at ____! Would you like to come over and play?!' I don't really remember it well, but I may have started a conversation with the lady, decided I liked her and wanted her to be my friend. So, if that's the case, knowing how naive my ass was at the time, I probably thought to ask her that... just to be on the safe side. XD
my mom read a lot of true crime stories about our country's most famous murderers such as Slivko or Chikatilo when i was a kid and always almost recapped the stories to me so that i won't ever be a victim she never allowed me to help any grandmas (one of the murderers worked in pair with his grandma and lured helpful kids in his house to eat them) or to go at my friends houses (because you never know if their parents are normal and if you can even trust anyone there) or go out alone (obvious reasons) i thought she was overprotective but now i understand too
@@screwstatists7324 oh my god, my mom told me the same about Romani people "they're looking for a slav kid so that slav people will give them more money"
@@screwstatists7324 god its awful when paranoia starts mixing with racism. thats how cults and neo nazis recruit people, they find the most vulnerable people with anxiety or other mental illnesses and they give them a target that they can push all their paranoia on to. its really sad...
Ironically you were (literally) more likely to be struck by lightning then abducted by a stranger. The people your mom needed to worry about were the people you knew. Over 90% of child abductions are done by family members and most of the rest are done by people known to the child (family friends, teachers, coaches, etc.)
There was this case where a highschooler was drinking milk and saw her face on the cart from when she was very young. Turns out, her "mom" stole her, gave her to her grandma and dipped
Reminds me of a lifetime movie I saw that was based on a book I think it was called "the girl on the milk carton" her family kidnapped her and raised her as their own...they weren't creepy or anything like that and she actually had a nice upbringing but one day finds her face on a school milk carton.
That is a plot of a novel where the mom was a cult member and pretended to drop a kid she abducted for the cult. She changed her mind and dropped the kid of at her mother's house instead.
@@angelinacamacho8575 The novel had it the Family the kid lived with were adoptive grandparent who did not realize their daughter who joined a cult had kidnapped the kid when she dropped the kid of at their house.
The stranger danger campaign is commonly referred to its rise in the 80’s but it had a lasting effect for YEARS honestly still seem to this day. I was born in the early 2000’s and my parents and grandma would intensely lecture me about never talking to strangers, as far as to not even go to the end of the driveway where strangers cars could pull up close to you. This was heightened by both my parents being cops as well but I was effectively taught to never talk to ANYONE who was not my family or an immediate known person such as a friend or neighbor they knew. After the Casey Anthony case happened a bit later, distrust for anybody became a heavily enforced idea by my family. After growing up with this ideology it impacted my ability to not be suspicious of everybody which was both good and bad. In the current day, you honestly still see the effects of this. People will see a broken down car on the side of the highway and ignore it for a majority of different reasons, but including the fear of what if it’s a trap. Almost all of my friends I’ve known since childhood grew up with their parents running the equivalent of entire background checks on the parents of a new friend they made at school. It’s insane. On one hand, bringing the fact that there are dangerous people out there to light was a good thing, but on the other hand, it’s severely impacted the main focus of participating in society being “ Help others around you to build a stronger community” to “ keep your head down, and trust nobody”. Again, there’s positives and negatives to this intense campaign, but similar to Casey Anthony, with how many crimes that are committed by family members or someone close to the family, the strong cry of it’s always going to be a stranger who will do something terrible to you severely impacted the judgement of many, who to this day still think the creepy man who would kidnap your child will be a stranger in a white van, and never someone like your trustworthy uncle.
I see a lot of my friends with children raising their kids this way. I think some of it might be media prevalence? Like we see so many stories NOW about missing kids, so it feels so much more likely to happen. Definitely not saying that parents shouldn't be aware of who their kids are talking to. Just saw a little 11 year old girl from Texas was supposed to be taken to her bus stop by her parents' friend only for him to abduct and kill her. It's so sad. But there is a healthy level of being suspicious vs being entirely paranoid that you will be a statistic :c
When I was 5 my mom lost me in the mall due to my inability to listen, and id go around the store out of her sight. When I realized i couldnt find her i cried in a corner, and only one woman noticed. She actually took me to mall security, where my mom was crying and explaining how she lost me. That could’ve ended so differently and I am grateful to that woman who took care of me out of the kindness of her heart.
I have so many stories of being helped by strangers. Who, to be fair, probably did it more to ease my exasperated parents than me. I used to run off at every big event we went to. (I wanted to see the interesting things, not get draged around a feild looking at handmade candles and plant pots for hours!) Every time I ended up getting pampered by concerend adults. From being given multiple free icecreams, to being given a ride on the back of one of the performing knight's horses. Every time it just turned out to be a little adventure with a happy ending. But the older I get, the more I understand how easily my story could have come to a dark and brutal end only a couple of years after it began.
Yeah, a lot of stranger advice these days are get help from a mom with young kids with her, since she'd be far less likely do something awful and actually help you
A kid got lost in a small store and couldn't find his grandmother. We tried looking for the grandmother and the employees even called for her on the speakers and they still couldn't find her. I was afraid that she may have left and forgotten him, they had one of the employees go down the isles and ask the people if they were missing a child, and only THEN did she finally realize that the kid was missing. It took this woman at least 2-3 hours of shopping to figure out the kid was missing. The entire store was pissed, when she came up to the counter she was smiling and asked him something along the lines of "Where were you??". A good way for you to lose that kid permanently.
Geez it seems like for some of these kids they had people targeting them for some time as they literally disappear the first time they do something on their own.
Sometimes it might be incredible coincidence, but yes it suggests they were specifically targeted by someone who was watching them to see when they'd be alone.
Usually it is exactly that. Predators and traffickers Usually pick a kid out and watch them for weeks. Is this kid often by themselves? How close is their house to their school? Do they have friends? And so on.
most of the time people preplan stuff when they are going to do something against the law so they would be watching them for some time. But we also don't know if the parents aren't telling the truth like they sometimes walk them to the bus stop in an attempt to make themselves look like better parents which doesn't help but people do it...
Not just "these days" (and keep in mind that these Milk Carton Kid cases were news about 50 years ago!) - it's always been the case, since the dawn of time: fairy tales are full of warnings about the "werewolves", "ogres", "witches", and "fairies" that wait in the wilderness to carry children off without a trace, and literature is full of references to children "running off" to join circuses, pirate and bandit troupes, and the like - it's all just a "kid friendly" way of telling the story, with the implicit menace of the situation only thinly veiled in these devices The world has always been a harsh place for people in general, and children in particular. I wouldn't want to generalize too much on whether "most" kids are indeed being watched for weeks before their disappearance: I suspect this will mostly be true in much the same way that it's mostly true that most child abductions and assaults are committed by someone close to - or within - the child's own family, a family friend, someone working at the child's school or church, or someone in the child's own family... that is, in many cases, someone close to the child was planning something for some time before taking the child. There are, however, many cases as well that look just as much like crimes of opportunity: lots of kids have been endangered while parents are stopped at gas stations, or when they become separated at shopping malls, or while on vacation or elsewhere under situations similar to those in which vacationers are targeted by pickpockets or for assaults on women committed after their drinks are drugged at clubs and so on: a lot of predators have familiar "territory" that they stalk around in, looking for unplanned opportunities to present themselves. Others find ways to thrive on the unplanned chaos of just being in the right place at the right time.... In the case of kids on bikes disappearing, you might have a neighborhood creep who just rolls through the neighborhood the same time every day, and just "settles" for staring from a safe distance at the local paperboy as he makes his rounds while accompanied by a parent... the one day that the parent isn't there is an unplanned surprise, but the predator strikes. It might be someone who regularly creeps through the neighborhood by night or day, looking for victims, and that morning, the paperboy just happened to be convenient and vulnerable, while the predator was ready to strike. It might have happened while the father was following behind in his car on any other day, and it might have been stopped if it had happened any other morning, but by coincidence.... Or, it might as easily be an unfortunate case of the kid's own father fantasizing and planning something for days and weeks, before finally acting out on his imagination. Not saying this happened - I don't know anything about the kids involved or their fathers, but a lot of these sorts of crimes are committed by people well-known to the family, and in at least one case, disaster struck only after the father explicitly changed a pattern, and even if it didn't happen in any of these cases, I'm sure it's happened before to other kids.... Or, it might have been a drifter who happened to be driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and the kid just happened to be following his paper routine at the wrong place and time that morning. Experience predators might have planned things more carefully under more controlled conditions of a familiar neighborhood with a familiar and planned routine, but this predator might not have planned anything, but, seeing a tempting prize right that moment, and unable to believe his "luck", he might have acted out ad-hoc, making things up as he went along: many first-time predators, it seems, find themselves in this sort of situation, and - acting completely on impulse - they strike, making more or less of a mess of the situation in the process, making mistakes and almost getting caught, or almost letting the victim escape, or leaving evidence, or getting hurt when the victim fights back, letting the whole crime be committed too quickly to remember clearly or "enjoy" in any way.... It's these early experiences that often drive predators to develop a more controlled and planned routine later on. Or, it might be any of a number of other possibilities, somewhere in between any of the above, or completely different from all of them. I don't think the world has necessarily grown any more dangerous for children, at least in general: it's always been dangerous, and - except for a few exceptional circumstances of the post-modern world - it's not a lot more or less dangerous today than it was in the dark ages or in prehistory, as far as human predators are concerned. The exceptions including the increased anonymity and mobility of urban post-modernity, and the fractured families that leave it more difficult for single mothers, for example, to adequately watch over their children in neighborhoods full of strangers raised with broken family backgrounds and misery they'd love to share with the company of a captive audience - a lot of predators being, it seems, products of broken homes and tragic histories of abuse and neglect themselves.... These exceptions would, perhaps, be at least partly offset by technological advances in forensic science, communications and coordination between local police departments and organizations like the FBI, and so on that make it easier to detect, track down, and stop predators. It would, it would seem, in many ways be a lot safer for kids today than it might have been centuries ago, when there were no proper police, the neighborhood watch was made up of volunteers who couldn't get a job any other way and were barely better than criminal gangs themselves, and bandits and "werewolves" and other monsters from across the countryside might live undetected all around isolated farms just waiting for an opportunity to strike from out of nowhere and disappear back into trackless forests, even as other aspects of urban post-modernity have made things more dangerous.... Whatever the case, I think it's always been a world where even the best of parents can turn their backs for just the briefest of moments, and never see their children again, leaving small communities in isolation to explain what happened to themselves the best they can with the only tools they have to work with to cope with the unknown and make sense of it: their imaginations about all the endless horrors of an endlessly dangerous and hostile universe that lurk just beyond the glow of their campfires.... Our ancestors understood that their children were in constant danger of being snatched up by creatures of the night, monsters in human form, who would snatch away and devour innocent lives. - maybe the biggest difference between us and them is that we've managed to convince ourselves, beyond reason, than it should still be happening, not here i our neighborhoods, not today in the modern world, not with civilized and modern people, and with modern governments and police!
Hearing about missing kids always terrified me. Especially cases where there were no clues or evidence. They just disappeared and were never seen or heard from again.
@@valentine.58 exactly. Especially before security cameras and ring doorbells became so common. A kid would walk just down the street and nobody would ever see or hear from them again. It’s horrific.
I was around the same age as Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped from her room during a sleepover. We even kind of look alike. I lived in a violent neighborhood with the side of our house on a busy street, and there was a bus stop nearby so people were always walking by my bedroom window being loud at night. It would have been easy to get in my room or some other part of the house. Nothing about my house was very secure. I don't know why it wasn't a priority to my parents. It's strange because they were worried about burglaries and stuff. We didn't even have a deadbolt. My mom joked that the doorknob on the front door was a bathroom doorknob. And the door had a slot in it so anyone could look in. Anyway people would always tell me things i was scared of weren't real or whatever but Polly really got kidnapped from her bedroom, just like I was scared of. I don't mean to make it about me I'm just saying her kidnapping had a big effect on a lot of people. We thought she might be alive. It's terrible
Something that’s really important to remember - kids who are “runaways” are still in a lot of danger! These kids are highly at risk for exploitation and trafficking. Often they’re running away with someone, or to someone, who isn’t safe. Labeling a child as a “runaway” also causes the public to moralize the child’s actions and see less urgency in bringing them home. We’ve had teens in our area where I live who “ran off” with much older men who meant them harm, even intending to take them out of state to legally marry them. Please don’t spread the message that “runaways” aren’t real cases of kids in danger!
It might be a case by case issue. sometimes they're just partying teens, sometimes groomed individuals who think they know more than they do, other times it could be an abused child who finally escaped their abuser/s. I think it's tragic that one group alone can shape the way in which all of these complex and different cases are treated altogether...
yeah, the majority of runaways ive seen growing up were teenage girls running off to be with their much older, groomer boyfriend that their parents forbid them from seeing.
As a child I was kidnapped and according to my dad (because was too young to remember), it was the neighbor who saw my missing child poster and called the police once they were certain it was me! Apparently the neighbor called a few times because the police were not taking it seriously but thankfully the neighbor was persistent.
I was forced to runaway with an abusive ex at 16. It was hell. Runaways are not safer just because they "chose" to runaway. (Chose in quotes because its either groomed or forced on the victim.)
@@lyokianhitchhikerwell when I was about 8 after getting shouted at by my dad, I decided to run away. I packed a bag with a bag of oranges, my stuffed toy, and some kids scissors for protection. I made it about five minutes down the road before I remembered that I lived in Brunei where there were snakes and spiders that could bite, and I remembered that I quite liked my bed and my family, so I took my ass back home quite quickly
This reminded me of something from my childhood. My birth mother had a plan to kidnap me and my brother from school when we were kids. Our parents were divorced, we were super young, and she was our mom, so if the police hadn’t been called by our aunt, we definitely would have gotten in with her and rode across state lines. We have an older sister by the same mom who grew up with her as her primary parent. My sister and all of her friends were pimped out and strategically given drugs by our mom when they were only in high school. That was a pattern throughout her side of the family, bc if you’re a dealer, you can hook your kids at an early age and have built in clients. I am extraordinarily lucky, bc the court was really trying to give her custody since my dad wasn’t actually biologically related to me. He did get custody though, of all three of us. My sister is sober and a lot better mentally. She has kids of her own, and doesn’t plan on telling them until their late teens or adulthood that we have this secret first mother and entire family line that we were all rescued from.
god the court system for child custody can be so fucked sometimes edit cos i realised this could be misunderstood: this is in response to the "the court was really trying to give my mom custody" thing
@@Robin_Glorb My bad, I might have been a little unclear and left it kinda vague. I meant that our birth mother was our sister’s main caregiver for most of her life. She didn’t know her dad (we all have different dads), and for a long time that was the only parental figure my sister knew, which was why she blindly trusted her for so long.
This epidemic of fear still has lasting effects on parents and kids today. Ironically, when i was younger, i would go out with my friends to go downtown at worryingly young ages due to my parents being too strict. Strict parents raise sneaky kids
That's something my mom brings out pretty often. When she was a kid in the late 60s, she'd just go to her friends' houses after school, go out to play in the woods without telling her parents. Nowadays, you have to ask your parents to go to your best friend's house, ask their parents, sometimes days in advance.
I've been saying it forever. I was a free range kid. Be gone from 8 am till 8 at night and nobody thought it was strange. Edit to add this was from 87 on when I was 6.
Honestly it’s scarier now more than it was years ago, mostly because of the internet, parents today don’t give a shit and let kids do whatever they want, honestly I feel it was because parents now grew up in that era and didn’t want to shelter their own children and now they don’t shelter enough, it’s sad really, I was a kid in the 2000s and I was watched over but I was allowed to do certain things my friends weren’t.
Sneaky kids or fearful kids(me) I'm not even from the stanger danger era, but my parents raised me on fear of the outside, that someone would kidnap me and shit. On top of that I got bullied a lot by a teacher, then my classmates. By my teens they complained I never went outside with friends.
I saw the milk cartons with pictures of missing kids , n the last qauter of last century , though I think it started earlier . I'm not from the USA . Edit ; this was typed , while the sponsor was being advised .
@@MikeOcksmallClips you’re right. maybe not the best wording. What I meant was, I love videos that go into history like this. Obviously not the abducted children
That was required reading for me as a kid and I don't know if it was just me being a weird pre-teen and not understanding the words on the page, but it seemed a bit strangely written and the plot was (If I'm remembering correctly) a bit inconsistent.
You just brought back a core memory haha. I remember in the book she saw herself on the milk cartoon then was able to dig up the exact dress and I believe hair bow (?) she had on when that picture was taken in her attic. Didn’t her “parents” steal her from her real parents or something?? The cover art of the shadow against the milk cartoon on a black background creeped me out so much lmao
Yes! I remember loving that series as a kid and oddly is what sparked my study into cults. It’s wild to think that the core idea of the story (which does go off the rails a bit lol) might have sprung from that real life example.
I remember overhearing a classmate of mine talking about her boyfriend in his 20s. She was 15 or 16, it was sophomore year. She suddenly stopped coming to class and I saw her face on a missing sign plastered on the wall of an ice cream shop. I don't even remember what her name was or if she was ever found. It still haunts me.
Yeah, this is too often what actually is going on when a kid "just goes on a bender for a few days." This kind of thing needs to be taken seriously even if it's not the stereotypical image of a stranger pulling a 5 year old into a van. It's still important
One of my female friends who is 18 has a boyfriend in his 30s... This is gonna stick in my already paranoid brain for a good while 😭 (this comment literally gave me chills)
One of my friends was murdered by her older boyfriend in his 30s she’d had thru college - shot in the head in front of her New York City apartment. Guy killed himself with the same gun right after. She was starting her adult life, he wasn’t going anywhere. I never trust those relationships.
See, it's stories like these that make me never want to be in a serious relationship with anyone. I do want kids eventually, though. Just not a husband.
@@anonymousx1101 Same, but I don't want a wife. I always imagined starting a family of my own, but I have never seen a lady, I can imagine spending my life with. A girl I can trust. My mom and my sister are the last women I trust in today's age, and I would rather spend all my time and energy on my family than wooing some girl. Still, a shame. :/
I'm a child of the '80s, so I remember that era of fear. I grew up in Chicago and had a couple of paper routes in the late '80s through the early '90s. I started just before a turned 8 years old and my mother never let me deliver them alone until I got a little older. Even then, I was allowed to carry my buck knife with me, and on a couple of occasions I had creepy guys try to call me over to their cars. Each time I told them to f*ck off, but one was very insistent, so I brandished my knife and told him not to f*cking try me and he peeled out.
I remember when I had a route, I had to deliver at night sometimes when the days got shorter and a car pulled up and the dude asked for a paper. Being as stupid as I was I went “what house do you live at I might’ve already delivered”, and after a bit of repeating the dude got frustrated and fucked off. I only realized a couple years later if I had handed him that paper I could’ve been dead I was literally so stupid it saved my life
I saw a recent Amber Alert situation where someone literally took a photo of the car WHILE IT WAS UNDERNEATH the highway board showing the Amber Alert. They, infuriatingly, didnt call it in because the car was one brand but the Amber Alert said another. Turns out the two models of car are very similar and commonly mistaken for each other. The person who took the photo didnt understand that there is only ONE license plate that will match an Amber Alert. So a missing kid was quite literally right there, in front of them, and they lacked the common sense to think "Hey the entire description and license plate match other than the brand of car. It cant be that kid."
I read a book in school called "the face on the milk carton" that followed the premise of a girl who had been kidnapped as a toddler and found a picture of herself on a milk carton years later. I don't remember the book being very good but I think a lot about the strange uncanny valley nature of the faces on the milk cartons. the thought of thousands upon thousands of kids going missing every day has our minds racing when in reality it's probably just divorce disputes. great video!!!
I know that book! It's by Caroline B. Cooney. It's about a red headed girl that had trouble going back to her biological family. I read one of the books from the series called "The Voice on the Radio" about her boyfriend getting famous with her story.
I was a kid in the 70's and 80's , we were so worried about being put on a milk carton. There were so many children going missing!! Thank you for all your stories!!!
Imma be honest, as a Brit who was only exposed to america through American RUclipsrs and tv shows as a kid, I genuinely thought these were still around and just people bought box cartons less nowadays because big plastic cartons/jugs were more efficient, cost affective, and lasted longer
You are kind of right actually milk cartons do still exist here just without the missing kids on them obviously and from what I have seen it's mostly just the "healthier" non dairy milk that gets put in cartons or milk for kids school lunches. I think the plastic jugs are just more cost effective for milk distributors and the handle on the side is very convenient for customers
As a fellow Brit, as a kid I used to be so angry that we didn’t do it! We never had cartons of milk here and I blamed that. Because it was spoken about so much I just assumed that it meant every kid on the milk would be found safe. When I learned the truth it made me so angry. How can anyone exploit the pain of missing children.
We still mainly use cartons in my country. The type of carton that juice boxes are made of, I've never known anyone who bought bottled milk in real life. And a lot of them have a plastic cap inserted into it, rather than being all paper or all plastic. We don't have ads on out milk though
I mean milk cartons are still around, but you really only ever see them these days in a school lunch. They don't have missing kids or advertisements on them anymore tho.
Teaching children to not talk to strangers IS important! Even more nowadays when parents gives their children tablets with unlimited access to the internet (and to strangers), and don't even care to see with whom their children are interacting.
I think it makes sense that its not longer "stranger danger" and instead "tricky people". Children are much more likely to be victimized by someone they know than a stranger. And stranger danger can stop children from seeking help when they need it.
@@castielnovak2900 I get this in real life but on the INTERNET they're not interacting with know people only. Most kids already interact with strangers on online games, discord, facebook etc... Last month in my country, Brasil, cases of pedophilia, torture and humiliation of girls as young as 10yo perpetrated by organized groups of male teenagers and adults broke out.
Most of the kidnapping are done by someone the kids already know. It's good not to talk to strangers, but the "stranger danger" is one of the failed campaing from the FBI.
Im sure agoraphobia, childhood obesity, and stranger danger are totally unrelated. Im sure being afraid to talk to people has never had any effects on society. Im sure rampant tribalism in the united states has nothing to do with fear mongering towards children causing deep seated anxieties towards interacting with """"strangers"""". Remember, if someone dies its probably the spouse. If a child dies its probably a family member
As a kid the local Walmart had the entire wall by the entrance to store covered with GIANT posters of missing kids. It freaked me out every single time we went in there. They have a smaller wall now that's for missing people in general.
I was too young to remember, but my parents told me a story of how I went "missing" in a Walmart. They alerted the front and then alarms went off and all the exits were locked until I was found. Turns out I had just wandered off on my own to gaze at the toy section lmao.
Oh God I think I remember those too. There's occasional newspapers that get thrown in my neighborhood, and as a kid I'd see the back of it with missing kids and the words "HAVE YOU SEEN ME?" and the photos would be age-processed, kinda leaning into uncanny valley a bit? They used to scare me, still make me anxious today honestly.
The saddest stories are the ones where rebellious kids disobey their parents thinking they’re gonna be okay despite having ignored the warnings, only for the worst possible scenario to happen to them shortly afterwards. Like imagine being in their shoes, you just want to discover yourself and try to be a little more independent and you’re punished for it, you find out the warnings made sense but you’re not going to live to learn. These stories sound like fabricated cautionary tales for how quickly things go wrong.
If they're kidnapped by traffickers, they were probably already a target. The kidnappers were waiting for the right moment to snatch them, then doing so as soon as they're alone. But that's just my theory
Side note: I can't imagine how the parents of these children feel when their child does something without them just once and they are gone. So heartbreaking
My family knocked stranger danger into me so hard I still have these fears as an adult. As an adult woman I’m all too aware of what dangers could be out there where something easily could happen to me (I take all measures to prevent this from my stranger danger anxiety and general distrust of others from trauma) but it’s definitely manifested in a larger less healthy fear and anxiety of others out there. I’m glad I know how to keep myself safe, but the hyper vigilance to avoid getting out of my car if it doesn’t feel like the area I’m in is the safest even if there’s not a real danger present that anyone is aware of aisles in stores and who is walking them, sometimes completely avoiding them. I’m not saying keeping kids from strangers is bad, it should be taught, just maybe not to the degree of my raising where even aside from that topic I’m just extremely anxious person and I feel like some aspects wouldn’t have been so bad on me mentally causing so much fear (I don’t believe this was their intention and do see how it affects my anxiety levels even now). All that adhd rambling just to say theres a big difference between a healthy fear of something as opposed to an unhealthy one that makes you struggle in adulthood. Not here to bash anyones parenting either, this is just like the first time I've watched something and be able to share one of my more obscure characteristics as not everyday i talk about milk carton missing kids or stranger danger. 😅😅
It is wild I was almost abducted as a toddler, my mom let go of my hand to pay for something at the gas station and the next moment I was outside with two men walking with them to their car. The men claimed they didn't realize I was walking between them, but my mom was so panicked she had the police called. Since there was no proof of intent, nothing was filed. But she was so shocked with how quickly and quietly a child can disappear from your side without you even knowing. I've seen it happen at my workplace. A child was wandering away from their parents and I ended up blocking the child from walking out the door with a different customer, but the mom came screaming in a panic because she realized her kid was no longer next to her. But I had given the kid a toy and had them up at the front register playing because I wasn't sure which customer was actually the child's parents. I just knew the one leaving wasn't the parent because it was a regular at my store (a really old lady with no nearby grandchildren). I think it's important for parents to realize how easy it is to lose a child. It isn't hard to muffle a child and sneak off with them, especially when they're super tiny.
That’s why I’ve gotten used to being observant in public places. I’ve seen more than a few kids wander off and I slow wayyy tf down and wait to see mom or dad come around the corner. Meanwhile my friends I’m with are completely oblivious and don’t notice that the scenario is playing out. I’ll be 10 paces behind them and they’ll ask what I’m doing and I reply “making sure a kid doesn’t get kidnapped today!”
Dae, Sadly in this world today the few times when I’ve seen little kids in public places who look obviously lost, I get really anxious and look for the nearest female to help sort it out. I don’t want to be seen alone chatting up someone else’s kid because next thing you know I’m accused of being “stranger danger”.
@@VampyBlood17 guessing you are a woman? Just the idea of staring at a kid for a long time because I've noticed his parents aren't around man's me begin feeling the steel from the cuffs around my wrists.
I used to work in a furniture shop. I walked into the storeroom one day to find a young child holding one of our electric drills. I'm a father now and I don't know how any competent parent could lose their child so badly.
When I was younger, back in like 2008, a friend of my mother’s pulled up next to me in a car. I didn’t recognize her, since we were visiting my mom’s hometown (where I didn’t live) at the time, but apparently this woman used to babysit me and my parents were very close. Anyways, she rolls her window down and says “want some candy kid?” Before unlocking the back door. My mom told me I threw my scooter on the side of her door and ran back into the house 😭 not even a few days before hand we had learned about “stranger danger”. (The friend of my mom was trying to pull a joke. Her name is Kandy, and apparently it was an inside joke with our family that I guess I didn’t know about lol)
“Don’t talk to weird people…” I accidentally became the stranger in Stranger Danger scenarios. A kid in my neighborhood had a kitten. I love cats, so I struck up a conversation with her about her kitten. It was only when I saw the nervous look on the kid’s face that I realized, “Oh, crap!” and politely and slowly booked it back home.
DUDE I know I am late to this video, but when I was 15-16 and basically homeless, I was often listed as missing because I had to walk for 45 minutes (both ways) to a community center to speak with a social worker twice a week. I eventually just stopped because it was pointless, they have my number and new where I was staying, I kept them updated via phone and email, AND YET I was listed missing about 13 times in a year. Everytime I didn't show for a meeting, the worker HAD to list me as missing with the police, it was so stupid and wasted so many resources. Again they literally knew where I was, the worker even picked me up a couple times. I totally relate to this video.
@@literallygrass1328 because some people have an emotionally, mentally, physically, and sexually abusive parent who's favorite punishments are throwing a 5 year old child down the stairs by their hair and locking them in an empty room for days at a time without food or water.
This reminds me of an isolated memory from my younger years that has stayed with me. I was at local pizza place when I was in the 6th/7th grade (around 2013). They had a set of candy machines, the ones you use quarters to get a handful of different candies from. I went to investigate being hungry and impatient waiting for our order. On the back of the candy machine, pointed at the wall so it was unseen by most, was a picture of a young boy, a little younger than I was. In big letters it said "MISSING" at the top. I thought about how sad it was and hoped the best for him, only to realize that the date he went missing at the bottom said "1992". My stomach sank along with my heart and I didn't get any candy. I went home uneasy and disturbed.
This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about. He said the year was 1996 and he was cleaning out his yard. He said it was very windy that week in Texas and usually a lot of papers that were on the street flew into his yard. Well one of papers was a picture of a girl. The letters were faded so he couldn't really make out her name or most of the letters but he instantly recognized it as a missing poster. The only thing that he was mostly able to make out was the date that he said only had on it was half of the word December along with only the year number of 89 and not the day as it was too faded to see it. I think it's just terrifying to know there are children that to this day haven't been found and are just lost forever.
I think some people made money off this deal. I have "Heard some crooked rumors". Who knows. The real great thing like "The Amber Alert", I have sen some great results with that. I think I see an Amber alert about once every 9 months & the (Usually) Dad gets caught with his kids quickly. This I feel is important as these poeple who abduct kids, or anyone for that matter are not stable to say the least. I know many times dangerous, even if it is their child being involved. I am all for anything to put a rapid resolve to a major problem like this.
i had a similar experience when i was like 8 or so. the walmart bathrooms always had a board of missing persons posters, and some were weeks, months, or years old. i used to read each report until i saw one of a little girl who the poster said would be in her 50s present day. i felt so upset and disturbed that after that day i just stopped using the bathroom at walmart to avoid the posters.
I remember going to Walmart with my grandma in the early 2000s as a really little kid and seeing the wall of kids they used to have that had been missing since before I was born, and I would always get this uneasy feeling I couldn’t articulate or explain bc I was so young yet understood something very bad had happened.
I was a child in the 80s, and stranger danger was a very real thing. Our teachers talked about it at school. Local police ran child I.D. programs at the malls. Perhaps it was a leftover of surviving the horrors of WWII in Europe, but my grandmother was much more paranoid about strangers than my parents ever were. I was already an extremely shy child, and only recently (I'm in my 40s), my mom told me she never really worried about me going off with some stranger because I hated people even then. By the time I was babysitting in the mid-90s, parents seemed to have laid off the whole stranger danger thing. I think you're absolutely right that the milk carton program laid the groundwork for Amber Alerts (and Silver Alerts... and Ashanti Alerts).
My parents sure as hell didn't, and we're talking the mid-late 2000's. Then again, my parents were literal boomers giving birth to Gen Z kids so maybe it was a generation thing?
I remember those "kiddie mugshots" complete with our fingerprints. Do you remember when they started handing out the "do it yourself home I.D. kits"? Most of those fingerprints weren't even usable, unless your parents were trained in proper fingerprint taking.
As a 43 year old, between the missing children on milk cartons, the satanic panic of the 80’s, and the challenger exploding on tv while we all watched in classrooms across America in ‘86, we 80’s kids are truly warped a bit.
I now realize that we're just becoming Gen X sequel. We're living in one of worst times of the world and we've got to see it happen since we were little. Especially with how our famous authority figures that we're supposed to respect have all been humiliated in these recent times (recent Controversies featuring the president of the USA, recent controversies involving the topic of Police Officers, and the very loud and public message of our lack of care for the environment barely phasing government organizations). I'm starting to feel that the cynicism and rebellious nature of Gen Z that all older generations have come to know us for seems to come from a similar root that of Gen X. Now this doesn't mean that "we're all gonna die" or "everybody can be a jerk and nihilistic because it's not our fault" but it adds a lot of perspective.
90s babies were also, between most of us seeing 9/11 happen on tv while we were at school, the wild west of early unfiltered internet taking you to dark scary places, the sudden awareness of school violence after columbine, and the scare tactics and horror stories used in schools when it came to drugs/stds/kidnapping/etc. Millennials were pretty traumatized.
When I was a child, we had the Vietnam War on our TV daily. Every generation has their own mind/society control coming at them from the television. Why do you think Bush demanded digital television? Why? Because it's a much better mind control device that way. This is why there is a television in every home. It was not this way before the "scientists" came over after WWII. We did not win that war, they did, and that is why we're all prisoners now. Infiltration over invasion.
Reading about a missing kid your own age while eating breakfast was a great way to start the day. But at least it made me afraid of strangers and now I'm overprotective of my own kids.
One of the most insidious aspects of “Stranger Danger,” in my opinion, is how it inadvertently made it easier for abusive parents/family members to isolate children from adults that might be able to help them. It’s important to remember that most cases of child murder and CSA are committed by someone within the child’s family or within the family’s social circle.
That still doesn't mean that it's useless for kids to be taught not to trust a rando telling them to come see something they have or some shit. In this comment section alone I've seen like 100 comments about how they've had run-ins like this that the stranger danger thing helped them with. What needs to not be taught is that parents are ALWAYS too be trusted, or that every stranger ever is dangerous and can't be trusted. But a person telling a kid to help them find their dog or something is still a huge fucking danger.
The campaign was specifically about distrusting adults that randomly come up to you, not about distrusting all adults. I don't think it had this effect at all.
That's in my opinion, really stupid. The person taught about in stranger danger, showing up to offer you candy on the street isn't the one likely to be rescuing abused children. And that's not counting how the lack of strangers harming might be due to the fact that kids have been taught to be aware, you cant really avoid your parents as a child.
The real problem with the whole stranger danger panic is that it’s completely untrue. Absolutely, don’t get into cars with strangers, but a vast majority of the bad things that happen to kids happen in the home. The vast majority of people who hurt kids are people the kids know, or even relatives like parents, uncles, siblings, etc. A lot of stranger danger rhetoric focused on very rare instances and told kids that the people they knew were safe, to go to your priest, parents, teachers, etc for safety any time you need. Those people were the ones most likely to take advantage of kids, in reality. Also that most missing childrens cases are unresolved custody disputes or runaways that show up within a week or so.
almost everytime an amber alert pops up on my phone and I look into it for a bit more detail...it's some sort of parent or close relative who's running off with the child so yeah, i agree with u
I'm a criminal justice student and this is usually referred to as "the three Ls" - children are most often abused by folks they: like, love, or live with
Agreed - we've created a couple of generations of paranoiacs. The destruction of basic childhood free play, which is critical to a person's mental development, has crippled whole generations. It is stupid and infuriating.
Wow, I had no idea that Molly Bish was the last milk carton kid. She's from a town very close to where I grew up. I visited the beach where she went missing and it was a beautiful place, but knowing what happened there was an eerie feeling. Her family is still fighting to find her killer to this day. If anyone's interested, please consider following Molly's sister, Heather Bish, and support her efforts to get Molly justice.
It’s one of my favorite movie tropes when people drink out of one of these milk cartons casually while they are either the person on the carton or kidnapped the person on the carton
@@Judi_ Sure thing. keep in mind I misspoke when when I said movies it’s a trope that’s very spread out in different forms of media. Big (1988), The real slim shady by Eminem music video, The lost boys (1987), Sin city (2005), the happy tree friends episode “all in vein”, home star runner, sidewalk stories (1989), and I’m pretty sure it was in the new don’t hug me I’m scared television show but I may be wrong.
I grew up after milk carton kids were a thing, but still in the era of stranger danger PSAs. My mom is a social worker so she knew that stranger danger was far less of an issue than being abducted by someone you know. I think the "rules" me and my sister had as a kid are still pretty good. One was if someone besides a parent was coming to get us, they HAD to have the password, even if we knew them. Nowadays I can just text or call my mom but as a kid it was pretty useful, although we only used it once or twice when a family friend picked us up from school. Another was if you get lost, find a mom to help you. Of all the people likely to abduct a child old enough to be able to ask for help, a mom with her kids is pretty low on the list. I actually used that at one point and the lady helped me find my dad, so it's pretty good advice in my book! But in school I was shown those awful stranger danger PSAs, where a man with a moustache (he always had a moustache for some reason) comes up in a big white van and asks if I want any candy. while that is probably good advice, most kidnappers have picked up on that and probably won't follow that motif nowadays. Amber Alerts are definitely useful, I remember when I had my first phone when I was a young teen and I got an Amber Alert and stared out my window for an hour looking at every single car that passes to see if it fit the description. While I didn't personally save the kid by spotting a black sedan, the kid did end up getting found alive and well!
I heard of human traffickers using women that looked like moms to abduct people because of exactly that thought "a woman who had children won't harm me she is just like my mom" However it's still a good idea to look for women who are with their children - them interacting with each other or playing and stuff like that because the chance is probably still slim anyway thank you for the information
I had an experience with the stereotypical adult man trying to give out candies to kids, when I was a kid in the early 2000s. I was extremely young and had zero awareness of "stranger danger", so if those still exist, they probably still target kids who are too young to have been told yet. Thankfully, nothing happened to me - I had been lagging behind my mom in the street that day, and he thought I was straight up on my own. When he offered me candy, I assumed he must have been a friendly man, so I immediately told him that I was going to tell my mom, who was right there, that he was there and kindly gave me candy! When I looked back behind me, he had left. Evidently, he didn't want to talk to my parent. It's still terrifying to think that this man was out there, and possibly went after other kids.
My mom is also a social worker. She just forbade me from going almost anywhere on my own (bc we lived in a big city) until I was like 12 lol. I grew up in the 2010s tho. We had amber alert and missing kids in newspapers. I do vividly remember the newspapers.
The one thing it did do is discourage some teenagers (like me) from running away because ending up on a milk carton would've been the most embarrassing thing ever.
@@snook.1 I was raised in an era where people - even minors - were expected to have dignity and self-control. Behaving like an emotionally incontinent brat was considered foolish & unproductive.
@@snook.1 I'm used to jokes being funny. 😁 Actually, I probably was a little hard on you. There are so many irritating pricks on YT, but I shouldn't immediately assume everyone is. Btw... I did pass on good things to the next generation - but I only had 2 kids (and took in 2 more) so my impact was kinda limited. 😆
The problem with "stranger danger" could be its own episode. A big problem is that a lot of child abuse happens from people that the child already knows, either their own family (or friends of the family) or people that went into positions of authority so they could have access to kids and who often were protected by whatever organization that authority belonged to. How confusing must it have been to hear all the stranger danger stuff in the 80s when you were being abused by your priest, coach, or uncle? Would it even sound like the same thing? It certainly wouldn't explain what to do next if your parent didn't listen. They recently found out what happened with a missing child case from the 70s that I'd never heard about- it happened right near where I grew up around a beautiful church we passed all the time. A girl was walking to summer bible camp which was only a few blocks away and disappeared. Eventually people who had been children in that church started to come forward to say that the youth counselor from that church had had a habit of giving girls a 'ride' but taking them to the woods instead and abusing them. The little girl had caught a ride with him and when she fought him he killed her. That girl would have probably been safer if she'd caught a ride with a total stranger instead of that guy who she "knew"
I’m 17 and I live in hungary. We also had missing children on milk cartons, only much much later in the early 2000’s. Whenever I was eating my breakfast cereal I’d just read the names and watch the faces of missing children every day. I still remember their faces. The program was much more shortlived that it was in the US. It probably ended for similar reasons.
I found an abandoned house years ago in the middle of the woods somewhere in Pennsylvania that had hundreds of these milk cartons all over the house with all of the kids eyes poked out. Weirdest thing I’ve ever found
I'm a 90s kid and I think the whole Stranger Danger fear was extremely useful back then, not so much now. I played in empty fields with my friends, rode my bike to school, went to the grocery store on my own, etc. No cell phones and no internet, so communication was done with a post-it note on the fridge. As a kid before the 2000s, you were almost always on your own, especially if both your parents worked. Having a healthy paranoia of strangers was a lifesaver when it came to being a kid. I think now it's not as useful since that paranoia has kinda transferred over to parents and adults who won't even let their kids play in the front yard, and are convinced the kid will be murdered if they're allowed to walk to school on their own.
It's true. A few years ago, before the pandemic, my 80 year old mom fell down in her house. I drove over, but couldn't lift her alone. She said a next door neighbor and his 20 something son had helped her in the past, so I rang the doorbell. A 6 foot tall burly 20 something answered the door, but he was clearly afraid of me, the middle aged, weak looking stranger. It was like pulling teeth to get him to help. Eventually I convinced him, and I'm honestly quite grateful, but it was still odd seeing this strong 20 something kid, in a nice safe suburb, afraid of someone ringing his doorbell at 1pm on a nice fall Saturday. Just this fall I sold a dolly on craiglist. I gave the guy my address, he says he's coming over. I wait... see someone that might be him playing around with his phone from across the street, but not coming up to my door to ring it. He walks over the the neighbors house, continues playing with his phone. No doorbell ring, just a guy hanging out outside. Weird. Eventually the guy works up the courage to call me (I gave me my number if he got lost or had to cancel), and makes sure he's at the right place. I sell him the dolly. Later on I check my email. He'd emailed me that he was here! So instead of... ringing the doorbell... he send an email. I'm not very outgoing myself, and don't find it easy talking to people I don't know. But these days? I'm a huge extrovert compared to some of these 20 somethings today who are intimated to talk to someone on the phone they don't know, or ring a doorbell!
It is still very useful, most people let their kids play in a fenced in backyard unsupervised, or sometimes even a whole neighborhood now that there are phones but it’s too dangerous to let your kids play outside at night or if you live somewhere that’s not safe. In Japan, kids as little as 4 go to school by themselves in busy cities, that’s because Japan is a lot safer than the U.S. We’re no 3rd world country, but It would be hard to say that children are safe here. I honestly don’t believe children are safe anywhere, not even from those that should protect them. More than half of children experience some sort of abuse at home, school or church. Back then, most of the world didn’t have the internet or an abundance of media to show them the reality of the world at your fingertips. Things were simpler because we lived in ignorance, and children were taught to always trust adults, but that led to countless children being kidnapped, abused and ignored. The world has always been cruel, our perception of it was just different. Now we see the world for what as it is.
I think you might be missing the point that no matter the decade or the technology, almost all child disappearances are perpetrated by people close to the child. A focus on stranger danger makes you blind to the threats closer to you.
If you haven't already, you should do a story on the moral panic over Halloween candy in the 80s. I grew up right in the middle of it. People thought their neighbors were putting needles in the Halloween candy. Media and schools played along and told parents they had to examine the candy before the kids ate it. Around here, we even had local hospitals that volunteered to x-ray the candy. They eventually realized they were doing more harm than good by sending the message you NEED to x-ray the candy. Similar to the panic created by kids on milk cartons. Years later I found it none of it ever happened, and nobody ever put needles in candy. All these cases are traced back to pranks by friends or family members, and none were traced back to people putting needles or razor blades in candy or apples.
it's because of that scare that kids in schools are no longer allowed to bring baked goods to pass out to their classmates now kids have to buy store-made, individually wrapped foods
The real life basis of that is really messed up. Long story short, father laced his own kids pixie stix with cyanide to get back at a neighbor. Along the same lines, I'd love to see a video on the Satanic Panic.
Same thing happened when people were freaking out over candy secretly being drugged or poisoned. With the latter, the very few times they ever happened was when it was a family member that was trying to commit insurance fraud or just straight up kill their child because they wanted to. Really scary, but not exactly something to scare the shit out of parents for
There's sorta something like this that occured IRL, with the Pixy Stix Killer, but that was just the father of the children using that convenient paranoia as his alibi iirc.
To be fair they were outnumbered by children who were never truly missing in the first place (runaways, custody disputes, etc.). Generally though, outside of a few outliers, if a child goes missing they're either found very quickly or never at all. By the time they manage to get on a milk credit the chance of them ever being found alive and well (or at all) was very low; one of the major reasons this program stopped. (That and Amber Alert made it obsolete.)
@@brawndothethirstmutilator9848 not really. I grew up in the 90s and was young enough around the 2000's that children's entertainment was still a casual watch. The milk carton thing was still a thing referenced in the 2000's American media. Even if it wasn't an actual thing anymore kids still knew about it.
I was one of those kids eating breakfast with missing children. I always wanted to help them or help find them. My step-dad just told me they were dead already so to stop caring. Yet, stranger danger never clicked with me. Then, my uncle gave me my first gun when I was 11 so as a result, if anything; I was a danger to strangers that had ill intent.
I’m pretty sure you were, just a general menace. I was also given a hunting rifle as a child though, by my drunk uncle to. The difference is I was six, and thankfully didn’t keep it.
Your dad was sort of right. Most cases if its a teenager or old person it's them running away and committing suicide in a remote area. Or teenagers running away or going out with their boyfriend/girlfriend (this is how a lot of young women get trafficked as they are betrayed and sold by their "bf") A HUGE number of cases are the Mom or Dad who lost the custody battle in the divorce taking the kid and going off the wire. Only a small percentage are random killings whee victim and killer are unrelated.
When I was growing up we didn’t really see children’s faces on milk cartons, but I do remember this board outside the exit of our town’s local Walmart that was dedicated to kids that went missing, either inside the store itself or somewhere near it (since it was such a small town this was one of the biggest places there, and your best chance if you needed to put up a missing poster). I remember seeing it every time me and my mom left the store. Didn’t understand at the time why she would tell my sister and I to keep one hand on the cart while we were shopping and never to run ahead. She would hold my hand as we walked by those missing kid flyers and her grip would tighten, but she never really said much about it, just looked at the board for a second or two with a sad look in her eyes and then walked past. Every week when we went by it there were new faces. I think I asked about it once or twice, about where they went and ‘were their mommies and daddies okay?’ She would answer quickly about it but didn’t go in depth. And of course we had the Stranger Danger rule, though we were lucky to never be in a situation where a stranger tried to talk to me or my sister. Looking back I’m so grateful for my mom. She didn’t try to scare us into not talking to strangers, it was just more of a “If you don’t know them, just don’t talk to them.” Our rule was that if we were ever in that situation, “Ask them if they know Mommy and Daddy, and if they don’t, then don’t tell them your name”. If they grabbed us, scream at the top of our lungs until someone came, either an employee, a well-meaning shopper, or one of our parents. Though that was just a backup since we were taught to never leave Mom’s side in the store. Even now shopping at Walmart, a stranger I don’t know will stand next to me to pick out something on the shelf, and I scoot away from them as a subconscious movement. And I’ll still hold onto the cart or my mom’s hand, just in case. And that missing child board is still at the exit of the store. I look at it each time I’m there. More new faces and names each time.
Whenever I raised the idea of "Stranger Danger" to my mother, she would tell me that "No one would try to kidnap you" because I was built like a Brick Shithouse. Good times
Hahahahahah I'm that mother. I told my daughter if someone kidnapped you, they would've return you within an hour cos you talk so much, no one can handle it! 😂
It’s such a trope that there’s a book. “The Face on the Milk Carton” tells the story of a teen who recognizes her own face and it leads to her finding out she was kidnapped (although there is an interesting twist) and a crazy series of events follows.
@@emilykeegan4345 Lifetime movies are delightfully unhinged tbh. My favourite was the one where the doctor had two kids, but one had Downs, and so the nurse adopted her and blackmailed him for years.
One of my best friends went missing for a day, and what had happened was his foster family had moved a few cities over and he was devastated. He loved the city we lived in and ran away to go back. He had only made it a few miles away but it was terrifying for all parties. He did it again the next year, was found after a day, and I haven't heard anything since.
My sister was kidnapped a few year ago because of accepting a ride, not even from a stranger. Some of you might even know about it, it was pretty recent. Teen from NC got kidnapped and taken all the way to Mexico before she was found. Thankfully beyond all measure my sister miraculously was found but still.
A girl my age went missing in our neighborhood when I was little. My mum never let me out of her sight, and told me terrifying stories of what ~could~ happen to me. I believe the perpetrator was discovered a few years ago, may he rot.
i remember going to walmart and seeing “have you seen me?” posters, with lots of kids on them. some of them had been missing for a very long time, and they used some software to approximate what they would look like in the present day and put that next to the photo of them from when they went missing. it was very disturbing
I had several people I knew run away in high school and more than once I discovered they had run away by seeing their pic on that wall in Walmart. To this day (nearly 30 years later) I will still stop and look over all the pics on that wall half expecting to see someone I know.
Yeah same. I'm thinking like: "It's sad but we know the statistics by now...They're not coming home anymore." And some of those pictures I've seen at my local Walmart have been up for years while the child has been missing for years as well so.
@@allisonr6263 Right? Like I might actually know this person but actually putting 2+2 together in this age of fast paced information is a mess to say the least. By the time the full details of one story come out another just as gruesome story pops up somewhere else.
Maybe not due to the kid on the Carten being 3 or 2 when she at the time was 7 Also I rember hearing an interview where she might have said her step dad kinda hid her face when checking out? Idk the Memory of hearing that isn’t very vivid
I'm a native Iowan and its surreal hearing about Johnny from outside here. I went to a school right next to where he went missing and it was a huge urban legend for us. It's a bizarre case, for sure. Thanks for bringing it up! Great video, as always!
I lived in Des Moines with my family when I was a toddler in the early to mid 1980s. My late father in particular was overprotective of me, and my parents were "helicopter parents" before that was popular. When I got much older, my dad told me that back in those days, he once had a nightmare that a photo of me was on a milk carton. Watching this and learning that those early disappearances and the first milk cartons with missing kids on them overlapped with our family's time in Des Moines really puts things into perspective.
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This is what a addiction looks like. Also where do you get your shirts?
The most magical thing about magic spoon is the price of 60$US for 4 boxes
*casually pulls out a gun* wait! *edits it out*
Funny ad
Bro that was hands down one of the funniest ads I've seen lol almost as good an Internet Historian with more subtlety. I'm going to check them out because of it, job accomplished!
My mom went missing when she was 3 for two days. Everybody searched for her, my grandmother unable to eat or sleep because she was so panicked over her missing daughter.
Turns out my mom was staying in an orange grove, eating oranges with a random stray dog to keep her company. She said the dog was so friendly that he let her use him as a pillow when she slept at night. She walked to the orange grove down the road while my grandmother was busy at the laundromat and decided she liked it so much she stayed there for awhile. Then when she was done, she walked back home (it was a couple of blocks away). The cops were talking to my grandmother in the house when they heard the back door open and saw my mom walking into the kitchen to ask for a drink.
You probably dont know, but did the dog ever find a home?
@@_jax sadly, I don’t know the answer to that. I hope the dog found a home, though. My mom wanted him, but my grandmother refused to take him.
i'm sorry, that must have been really traumatizing for your grandma, but i can't stop laughing at this
@@itzyagirlsonia it’s funny to me too, don’t feel bad. My grandmother was a shitty mother and was neglectful, but my mom actually enjoyed sleeping in the oranges with the dog.
@@DolliMiu i would have run all the necessary paperwork for the dog to become the legal guardian
I remember the PSA at night on TV "its 10:0 clock, do you know where your kids are"? Creepy.
omg yes lol
"Twas necessary. Parents of the time truly didn't. We ran the streets, and of course most of us had curfews... but that doesn't mean all of us did, and certainly not all of us complied all the time.
"I told you last night, no!"
Do you know where my kids are? Didn’t think so
I remember seeing a post about that on Twitter and it's crazy to think how normalized it was to neglect your child
The worst part about the Bonnie case is that it completely goes against the whole “stranger danger” aspect of the missing children. Bonnie wasn’t kidnapped by a stranger, but by her own mother. Not even the one milk carton success story lines up with the expectations set by it.
Strangers mostly sexually assault and then kill the kids. A "fun" product of the sexual revolution was a massive rise in attacks on children.
The wild part is her mother and stepfather or clearly bad people for taking her away from her father and out of the country but what if they did it because her real father was a nasty bastard and abuser the years later her mother is in jail and is returned to the father. All just far out speculation but its a possibility
It got the father pice of mind my husband tried to run off with my child w brute force. In the 80s I'd never found her
@@babygravey just stop. Don't even TRY to justify it. If the father was bad, they would have gone to the police or something, idiot. Court alredy favors mothers, wouldn't been hard. So just stop
@@Angel-lb3dw stop it I'm not trying to justify anything at all!! All I said was no one knows the reason the mother ran off with the child. Who knows. Maybe she split up with him because it was an abusive relationship and the only way to get away was to run away but I also said I have no idea at all it was just a theory. You have no clue either. If you think it's as easy as just going to the police in an abusive relationship you have no idea I am grown man now but have lived through domestic volince as a child saw my mum getting beat my sister get beat and myself from dad's step dad's and sisters boyfriends the police got called many times and it never stopped until I grew up and someone got stabbed. So be quiet because you have no clue what the hell you are talking about
I was part of the "stranger danger" generation. We all lived under the impression that someday we were going to have to run from kidnappers. The crazy part is, we were still mostly unsupervised. Our parents had no clue where we were
But you need to learn to operative outside of their supervision, too. The stranger danger thing worked for me. I kept my defenses up and looked for red flags, and I kept myself out of unsafe situations. Kids today wouldn't know how to do that because they never have that opportunity.
@@sabrinashelton1997don’t generalize an entires generation of children. You sound dense in the head
John Mulaney covers this generational experience well in his Kid Gorgeous special.
Man, this reminds me of those "it's 10PM, do you know where your children are?" announcements that keep popping up whenever I was allowed to stay up super late as a kid
Also grew up in this time. Granted, it was more mid to late 90s for me, but I remember being taught in schools and by my parents not to even get rides from people we knew unless it was okay'd by mom and dad in the first place. Like, I wouldn't even let my friend's mom pick me up and take me back to their house (where friend and I were walking to!) But I definitely think, for as weird as it was, I came out better as an adult. A lot of my friends have kids now, and I feel like the "stranger danger" is more prominent now, for better or worse.
When I was a kid, my mom would just scar me with stories about women going missing in her hometown in Mexico. Then she would make it worse by pointing at a random person in public and would say “if you don’t behave, they’re gonna take you like they did them.” And it would scare the hell out of me. Thanks Mom.
W mom
Lmao my mom would do the same. Always pointing at random ass people saying "Ese señor te va llevar"
Jfc that's on way to give your kid paranoia... my grandma did similar stuff like tell me id get kidnapped and r***d and never be seen again if I walk too far from her
@@slug-rt3302 horrbile but tbh better than having your kid not aware and actually be r'ed, killed, tortured etc. etc.
Minuscule amount of child abuse
I remember hearing about a little girl being kidnapped. These 12-14 year old boys decided to ride their bikes around their neighborhood. One actually found her & literally chased the car on his bike far enough they shoved her out to him.
She wouldn't let go of the boy until her parents got there. He had to sit in the ambulance with her. The boys & especially that boy were true heroes that day.
Coolest kid on the playground
The Jocelyn Rojas case. Good kids.
They have main character syndrome
They dropped their crowns
That is so amazing Holy fuck he was brave
It's depressing that Jonny Gosch (the first child talked about here) went missing on the first day that he decided he didn't need his father to supervise him, as well as the Etan Patz abduction being on the first day he went to the bus stop alone.
It makes it seem as if somebody was already watching them and waiting for an opportunity.
@@sarasvensson6026 agreed that is indeed the scariest part, every day he walked his son to school there was a person not too far away plotting evil intentions for his son the second he saw him without him. He may have even waved at him one day he was caught making eye contact towards your direction.
Gave myself shivers 🫣
About a decade ago a watched a pretty in-depth tv show about missing people centered on Johnny if I remember correctly it was highly speculated by PI that Johnny was scouted out on his paper routes by a pedophile ring known as the rocking x.
Yeah and their parents were good too but they ignored their parents :(.
@@rgkong8783 Well yeah but at least patz had his parents permission ircc
As a CPS worker the runaway photos are still used and distributed and it’s exceptionally helpful because it convinces youth to return home. Runaway youth are very susceptible to sex/human/drug trafficking and getting them home is a big win in avoiding that.
I had a youth run away from her grandmother and ended up with fake documents in Puerto Rico at 14
Yes, get them home, so that CPS can continue to do fuck-all about the reasons why they ran away to begin with.
@JakeClipsESO fuck CPS In all honesty from a young age I learned don't trust you and that won't change
@@senorsnout4417CPS is a shitshow
you should look up the story behind come back home by seo taeji and boys. it had a similar effect to kids in South Korea in the 90s
If a kid runs away, check the parents
I am currently 28 years old. When I was 6-8yrs old, a man I had never seen before approached me at a place I was familiar with and said my parents were looking for me. He offered to drive me back to my parents. Even being a child, I still said "no I'll ride my bike back home." After years(almost 10 yrs) of not thinking anything of that incident, I told my mother. She cried. Never would she ask for a stranger to pick me up. I think back to that moment often. I joke now, but I could've been another one of these children. Missing forever.
You were smart man.
I had a neighbor at one point who was a registered child slave trader and my mom warned my dad and stepmom but they never told me and I even had a conversation of him but then heard dinner was ready and left. I had that as a 7 year old and was only told of that when I was 18 because my mom mentioned it as a recollection thing since she's a known stalker on Twitter and especially Facebook. I didn't even know, the guy didn't approach me physically but he sounded kind of drunk and I have always hated drunk people.
@@anglepsycho The most chaotically written comment I’ve ever seen.
@@anglepsychoThat's so brazen wow, you'd think the government would crack down on people who register as child slave traders.
When I was around 4 or 5, I was playing in my front yard when a guy in a pickup truck pulled up. He asked me if I wanted a sticker, so I walked over and he handed me a sheriff's badge sticker out the window. He talked to me some more, but honestly I don't remember much of what he said. I just remember getting spooked and running back inside when he asked if my parents were hom. I watched from the window as he waited there in his truck for a little bit and drove off. I put the sheriff sticker on my shirt though haha. My mother asked me about it that night when she was getting me ready for bed, and when I told her she absolutely freaked out and emphasized stranger danger and not going to the front yard to play by myself anymore. Pretty creepy when I look back at the scenario.
@@anglepsycho Wait hol' up your mom is a known stalker?! I need more details on that one
I remember watching a video years ago that tested if missing kid posters did anything at all. They posted a picture of a girl in front of a mall with a big ol' "MISSING" on it, then put the girl on a bench in the busiest part of the mall. She sat there for a long time, all by herself. Nobody recognized her as the "missing" kid. Nobody really even paid attention to her.
I'm not crying you're crying
Tbh I would be no help. I have terrible facial blindness. I recognize people by features like their hair and body type. I still don't know most notable actors even though Ive seen them a bunch and I never know who is who when I'm watching a movie. I mostly watch cartoons partially for that reason, it both the main characters of a movie are white brunettes with a similar frame and basic fashion sense I promise you for 90% of the film I guessing who is who based on conversation and I'm still confused
Yeah unfortunately I'd probably do the same thing. I'm terrible at recognizing faces
I have troubles with eye contact as an autistic person, so if there was a picture of her shoes I’d have a better time recognizing her.
But yeah, it’s very sad no one cared enough to notice it, but I’d also want to see how in depth this study went. Like, how many flyers were posted, where, the location of the bench, etc.
That's probably also because you wouldn't expect to see the missing kid in such a public area.
Like when you hear or see "missing kid" you would think that they would be somewhere hidden or something, at least I have that, I imagine the missing kid either locked up or being dragged somewhere sneaky like. So to see that kid in the bussiest area of anything your mind wouldn't first go to "damn that's the missing kid" but probably something more along the lines of "hmmm that kid looks like that one missing kid, but it can't be because that kid is missing and wouldn't just sit here in the open, so it's probably a kid that looks like the missing one."
Idk if my thoughts came across clearly, what I'm trying to say is that if you saw the missing kid out in the open your first thought probably wouldn't be that it was the missing kid.
the most morbid thing ever, is that that the majority of the time when a family was looking at a missing child on their milk carton, they were looking at the face of a child that was already dead.
edgy
How original
@@jimmybalzac6021 ?
And killed by someone they knew in most cases
I don't think it's the majority of time, or i hope
My aunt was abducted back in the late 60s by someone who was arrested years later for another crime. She was an adult, early 20s, but she was cognitively disabled and quite small, so she appeared as a pre-teen at best. She was kept for three days suffering some truly awful things until she was able to escape and walk and takes busses the 40 miles home. They obviously didn't find the guy at that time. Between the milk cartons and my mother's absolute fear of it happening to me, including telling me that story when I was like, 10 years old, I was so sure I'd be abducted as a kid. It was a weird upbringing.
did they ever catch the guy!! i'm so sorry that happened to her, i hope she's doing well now
@@sh4rkss well yea, there's a part that says "by someone who was arrested years later for another crime" so yea he was caught
that's crazy so you're saying he didn't do any jail time for what he did to her?? just something random after the fact???
It should be noted that in some cases (and probably more commonly), children were abducted and/or harmed by people they knew rather than by strangers. Some kids were victims of domestic homicides that were covered up.
So many kids in my old area go “missing” because of a relative or a person they are contacting picks them up either the kid was being abused in the current home or just ignored by a parent for that to happen
indeed. stranger homicides are way more publicized and considered ''sensational'' by most news media, so we get the impression that those are more likely to happen, than the often more occuring murders that are usually committed by the parents themselves
And knowing that, the fact that the "stranger danger" culture completely shattered any sense of community and mutual trust meant that children suffering domestic abuse were isolated with their abusers and had nobody to reach out to for help :(
I know all too well that it's the people you spend the most time around, the people you trust the most as a kid who end up doing something. I won't go into my life story, but it's a lot easier for someone in charge of you to get you alone, and a lot harder to remember something someone you love did to you.
Can any of you show data of your claims?
I remember being told “you wanna end up on a milk carton?” As a kid and not really understanding what that meant. Now we just post them on the wall at walmart. Keep up the great work brother.
Putting someone inside a milk carton is one hell of a threat...
Sinister on many levels.
@@haroldthaf inside a carton...fate worse than death
"You wanna end up on a wall at Walmart, kid?"
Nope, does not feel right lol
@@GrandDawggy damn my mom did that to me but on the wall of Sam's.
Now we got
"You'll get put on a shirt"
'The missing kid who ate breakfast with them every day' is a very powerful line.
i know right, i had chills go up my spine when i heard him say that
I read this as he said it. Scary.
Ok Mr passed his English exam
It's sad isn't it 😞
walt jr
On the topic of "Stranger Danger": my mother never explained to me as a child that kids the same age as me, despite being strangers, were not the stangers to be afraid of. When we moved to a new town and i went to a new school, i was terrified of everyone, and it screwed me up socially pretty bad. By the time i learned differently, nobody wanted to be my friend anymore.
Trust issues keep me alive. Clearly, they did the same for you. Just don't get a job that requires social skills.
My parents used to tell me that if I didn't drink all my milk at breakfast I would be in greater danger of potential abduction. As a kid this sounded sort of crazy. But all these decades later, having always finished my glass of milk as a child, I can attest to the fact that I was never abducted. Thanks mom and dad for the sound advice. Sorry I doubted you.
I used to be gay with your dad; he told me about this.
Hahahahahah
Clearly good advice! 😂😂
r/neverbrokeabone
Amazing advice! Gonna tell that to my kids!
Can't imagine how heartbreaking it must have been for that father to have his son go missing the very first day he didn't watch his son deliver the papers 🥺
All the more reason that it had to be someone local. It's too much of a coincidence that he disappears the first day he's alone; someone was stalking that poor boy.
@@MatthewNY94 same with the 6y.o walking to the bus
sad indeed
@@MatthewNY94 agreed
Unless it’s a random person kidnapping
Usually they’ll watch someone and find out their schedule before they make a move to get them
That’s why u should change your routine sometimes
It’s so sad people have to live like this
If you look at what the father’s connections were and how he has behaved through the years, it’s obvious he had something to do with it.
22:00
That was always my issue with this. If a kid was legitimately kidnapped, by the time the face makes it onto the milk cartons, that kid is almost surely dead. It is very rare for a child to be kidnapped by a stranger (so not just a divorced parent taking the kid) to be found alive. As depressing as it is, almost always, the kid is already dead before the week is over.
Ok but why do they kill the kid?
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Paedophilia maybe
@@airplanes_aren.t_real why do child murders happen?
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Because they don't want the victim to be able to describe them to the police. They are less likely to get caught if there is no one to tell what happened.
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Probably because they're murderers too, idk
I wasn't alive for it, but I remember someone talking about this old PSA where it would simply display the question, "It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?" It apparently started in the late 60s into the 80s and was shown in more urban areas due to increased violence in urban cities during that time (the person who had brought up the PSA grew up in New York and New Jersey, so that tracks) as a means of telling parents to keep their kids safe inside at night.
I think if the whole "Stranger Danger" programs and PSAs of the late 80s early 90s did any good, it was spreading awareness that small town communities aren't perfect safety zones for kids. That even if you live outside the "gritty and violent urban areas", bad things can and have happened to kids anywhere. There's no such thing as a 100% safe community.
The reason for those commercials was because of a curfew time. In Chgo the curfew was 10:30 back in the late 70s.
When I was a co I had a supervisor ask the same “It’s 10pm, where are your children?” question in the women’s block as we were putting the trustee up and collecting trash from the day, he had to leave the block shortly after that statement.
"The Face on the Milk Carton" is a really good series. It's about a highschool girl- close friends, happy family, big house- that steals her friends milk at lunch, and sees her own face on the milk carton from when she was three, and then realizes that her parents don't have her birth certificate or any pictures before she was three
So that's what it's called! I've seen that when I was a kid.
Sounds like a show for unintelligent girls who wish they were a victim
Holy shit that sounds rad
It's more than one book?
I forgot I read this!
imagine asking to put your missing dad on a milk carton after he said he’s going to get milk but never came back
Lmao
Mine went for cigarettes
Imagine getting in your parka backwards for a school picture and your asshole friend puts your picture on the local milk company’s cartons labeled as a missing child, leading to you being identified by a couple with a facial deformity, and then having your parents tell them you’re actually not their kid, so they go to the milk company and have them do a search for missing children in their database with their disability, finding out there are no search results, giving up, and then by some miracle, the technician finds their child, and it turns out, his parents were missing, and the “missing” child was in fact rich and famous, and his name was Ben Affleck.
@@7eis put missing people on cig packs! That way we don't have to look at the stupid gross pictures they put on them. Here in Canada they literally can't make their packs look "appealing" which basically means every brand looks the same it's do dumb
Based
My mom literally traumatized me due in part to this whole era. She once made me watch a documentary on stranger danger when I was about 5. She then put her finger to my head like a gun and asked me what I should do in that situation. I tried to answer, I think with running away, she just said, "bang, you're dead. You can't run from a gun." And I started crying. I wasn't even allowed to cross the street alone until I was about 13. Saying I was sheltered would be an understatement.
lmao thats funny, your mom was weird.
That's literally child abuse. If there's nothing that can be done, don't trumatise a child with it.
@@karlhans6678 if you find narcissistic abuse funny. 🤷
@@karlhans6678 this lack of care kinda feels like something out of a Sigma sextillionaire grindset meme ngl
but you didn't get kidnapped
so it obviously worked
A very good friend of mine was about 8 years old when he walked away from his mom in a grocery store to look at legos. A creepy guy named Gary came up and atarted talking to him and aid something to the degree of "I'll buy you whichever one you want and you can come over to my house and build it." My friend agreed, chose what he remembers to be an expensive set ($100+ in the early 2000s) As he was leaving the store he saw his mom frantically searching for him in the parking lot, looked up at Gary and "theres my mom I'll go with her." Took the legos from Gary and ran over to his mom before telling her where he got the legos, while pointing at Gary. Apparently his mom sobbed, called the police and Gary drove off never to be seen again. He said he was 18 he packed up the lego set before moving to college and the memories flooded back to him about it.
He managed to swindle a Lego set out of a child predator. Nice!
Free lego is a win
My sister was trafficked in the early 90s. The few times she was left alone in public and tried to get help from strangers no one believed her. Being dismissed by normal people which allowed her to fall back in the hands of monsters was the most traumatic thing because the other abuse she can just block out.
thats horrible. No child should go through that, is she still alive?
This guy seems to think it’s a joke. Strange angle he’s taking
@@0heda734 Yes she is! She struggled with addiction for a few years but now is married with kids.
@@stevescott3735 I've never watched this channel before and its sad how he keeps focusing on how it wasn't effective. In today's world where everyone has seen to catch a predator people will still ignore uncomfortable things such as this, even mandated reporters. Having those milk cartons at least put the potential in the minds of the public.
So true I was at Barnes and noble said as a teen a man was agressively trying to get me to leave with him and passer bys did nothing.
I remember a news program years ago where they had kids handing out missing children flyers at a grocery store. The child on the flyer was actually the kid handing them out. Only one person noticed.
😀
I mean... that's a pretty stupid experiment.
@@snook.1 It probably should have been conducted differently, but interesting results all the same…
@@kimosterhout3242 Yeah, I guess. I think that the example of a missing kid sitting inside of a mall with flyers everywhere and still not getting spotted says more about it. You simply wouldn't assume that a kid handing out a flyer of themselves is the actual kid despite them looking alike (I think, anyways).
@@snook.1 Fair point.
I remember feeling bad whenever I saw the missing kids and my mom grew extremely paranoid of strangers. I was the type of kid that ran off in the store a lot and you better believe I got chewed out by my mom a lot. She always told me that there were bad people who pretended to be nice, so I had to stay by her side at all times. I remember being too anxious to play outside because our house was by a busy street. And now I'm a grown adult with moderate social anxiety. I was one of those kids that as I grew older, the anxiety around stranger danger grew more. I always did wonder what happened to the milk carton missing children ads, so I'm glad you got my back, Wendigoon. lol
I can relate to this! my mom was always so overly paranoid concerning mine & my brother's safety. she took precautions w/ anything that could be potentially harmful (including strangers.. I remember her taking us to self defense classes, having a 'password', etc.) all of this has had a lasting, negative impact on my psyche as an adult. I find myself being equally as cautious at times and overthinking EVERYTHING, which holds me back from doing very simple things in life. I know she was just trying to protect us and she is still an amazing mom but I can't help but see how her paranoia rubbed off on me!
son husband ?
My mom wasn't. I was nearly abducted and got called a liar and told to stop pretending like I was scared. Some dude tried to lure me over to his car to "help him read a map", I was outside the store holding our little dog's leash while mom bought milk.
@@Goku_Kiyosaki what
Do you mean you're socially anxious, or you have social anxiety disorder? As someone diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, it's frustrating to hear people say "I have social anxiety". Because misconception tends to lead most people to believe that social anxiousness and social anxiety disorder are the same thing, or mistake them for one another. So then they tend to mean that they are socially anxious, not that they have social anxiety disorder, which in turn makes it borderline self-diagnosis for them to say "I have social anxiety".
It's also frustrating in the sense that I barely have anyone to relate to, considering that social anxiety disorder is a lot more rare than most people tend to believe. And the misconception certainly doesn't help.
As someone who grew up in the 80s I remember this quite well and it was depressing AF seeing all these kids faces on Milk cartons. I think the most ironic about the whole "stranger danger" scare of the 80s is that most kidnappings are perpetuated by ppl who know the child.
I grew up in the 2000s and I remember going to Walmart with my mom and being immensely creeped out by the wall of photos of missing children, all in high contrast, usually black and white images. It's honestly one of the first times I recall being disturbed. I never even imagined what it would be like to visit that feeling every morning over breakfast...
That feeling: " oh hey, good morning"
You:"yea it was, wasn't it?"
Oh god, you too?
Same dude.. same
I remember when they finally started paying a little extra for colored ink, and started using colored poster.
Me too
I will say that the whole stranger danger initiative, while perhaps overblown, instilled some good habits. For instance, it’s common knowledge among kids that you don’t get into cars with strangers and they’re able to recognize luring attempts (“I have some candy in my van” or “wanna come see my puppy?”).
That said, the overwhelming majority of cases where a child is abducted or harmed isn’t that weird dude at the park. It’s usually someone the child knows and trusts. Like a custody dispute, or a teacher, uncle or aunt, grandparent, sibling, etc. We put a lot into stranger danger, but too often the dangerous ones aren’t the strangers
Yes
There are actual statistics that show that the vast majority of crimes against children are committed by family or people the family knows and trust, and the more heinous the crimes the more likely the criminal is close to them. Stranger danger is real, but it's peanuts compared to Family Felony
Stranger danger or or danger coming from someone one a child thought they knew, it's all just so vile people would do a horrid thing to a child.
Even worse is in cases were the police can just do fuck all and let the kids get murdered
True but there really isn't much you can teach your kids against that kind of kidnapping lol. "Remember if you seeing mommy acting frantic and telling you to get in the car kick that bitch and run" 😂😂
I'm young enough to have missed the milk carton era, but there was still heavy "stranger danger" messaging in school and at home.
This backfired when my younger sister and I went "missing" for about an hour at a National Park, and refused to talk to the rangers because we didn't know them.
ranger danger
I remember those PSA's as well. They would always have the strangers who were trying to kidnap a child act like a villain, so I thought a "stranger" would act that way while a normal person would act ordinary, and it wasn't until a couple years later when I would learn what stranger actually meant and mocked the idea of "stranger danger" since I wouldn't have had any friends since they all started as strangers at one point.
I asked my Dad if he lived with the milk cartons, as he was a kid in the 80’s - 90’s, and he said, “They need to make some for liquor so my friends will know if I’m missing or not.”
lmao
My parents taught me about stranger danger right, so I was walking home from school one day and someone I didn't recognise offered me a ride home and said my parents asked him to pick me up.
I said "no, sorry. I'm going to my friends house" and went into my mates front yard a few houses up. Nobody was home.
I wait there for about 20 minutes before heading home and the man is actually inside with my parents and he was in fact asked to pick me up. He actually praised me when I said why I went to my mates.
In retrospect, what the actual fuck were my parents thinking? That said he was a friend of my parents but my autistic face blind ass probably didnt recognise him.
As an adult I have almost been abducted a couple of times. I should really stop walking at night.
You really did well, also just making sure you’re actually autistic and not using it as an insult
@@placeholderdoe Properly diagnosed, I never look at faces so it's prolly why I didnt recognise their friend
@@finch600 I’m bad at eye contact too, it’s just hard sometimes
@@finch600 This is unrelated to your comment, but if you don't mind I wanted to ask if you can at all like, put a finger on the "feeling" or vibe or behaviour that makes it feel innately difficult to look at faces?
I'm autistic too, but I don't have the kind of extreme aversion you're describing here. I will often have my eyes wander, usually because I like looking at my surroundings, I think?? I also like to use stuff around me to help give my head a break from examining someone's face to figure out how they feel. I still regularly look at people's faces, however, and quite like doing so. So I'm just genuinely really curious how it feels for you.
Of course you dont need to answer me at all if you dont want to. Thanks for reading!!
I actually have a same experience but with my uncle. At the time I was undiagnosed but at least I remember my uncle's face now 😅
When I was about 16-17, I briefly worked in a used bookstore in my small town. One day, this girl, who was about 11, and her brother, who was probably 5 or 6, came in by themselves to look at books, which was strange in and of itself. The reason why these particular kids stood out to me, beyond the fact that they were in there alone, was the conversation I had with the girl about birds (she was obsessed with them, and wanted to look at books about them; I was hand-raising a baby bird at the time so I was telling her about that). One of the senior staff thought the whole situation was weird, so she was asking them questions to try and suss out what their story was; they were in town for a few days visiting their Dad after their parents separated, apparently. Cut to less than a week later, and the girl was on the news as a missing person. I knew for sure it was her even though I didn't know her name at the time because she had a few unique features that made her stand out. I made my Mum sit in on call to Crimestoppers (it's an Australian thing, I'm not sure of the international alternatives) with me because I was absolutely terrified to do it by myself. I'm pretty sure I was on the phone with them for at least an hour answering questions. They ended up finding her a few days later, thankfully, and I never found out for sure if my tip helped at all, but it was one of the most bizarre and tense things I have ever experienced, constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for a phone call or a visit from the police.
The only time I had a personal experience with police is when I was 10, during the day. We were visiting a friend's house that was 1 or 2 blocks down I saw a dude covered from head to toe in black, even in a Hoodia.
The person, probably a male, was walking left across their lawn carrying something with him. Not that big. (their lawn extended into a playground for neighborhood kids) and I remember him glancing back.
Fast forward to night when we started to leave a couple police cars arrived. This scared me of course because cops = danger. A cop came up to me and asked if I had seen someone in all black. At the time I forgot about the man and said no. But after we passed him I remembered. I didn't tell him because I was scared. So I lead my brother back home.
Still don't know what happened.
I bet you saved that girl's life. It's likely that your tip narrowed down their search area.
Crime stoppers is kind of a thing in the US as well (at least here in Oregon). However, I have no idea if the two organizations are linked in a way.
have you ever figured out the reason as to how she managed to go missing and why she was there with another kid?
@@TheShadowcreator I often think about that. I hope I helped in some way
I was a child of the 80s. I remember being uneasy seeing the photos of missing kids on milk and orange juice cartons. I would lose my appetite seeing the kids faces on a pizza box. It was a macabre practice indeed. My worst memory from that era though, is seeing my classmates’ picture on an orange juice carton a few days before they found his body in a deep ditch. He was found next to his mangled bicycle, apparently killed by a hit and run.
While I understand why someone would be creeped out by it, I don't see how it was a "macabre practice"
@@agentepolaris4914 hes soy. Thats why.
@@NeverComplyEver indeed
@@agentepolaris4914 putting the faces of kids who could very well be dead (in the mind of whoever is buying milk) on packaging is macabre. It's a reminder that people can be lost at any moment.
@@NeverComplyEver not necessarily soy to be scared when you're a small child looking at pictures of potentsly dead children
My mother grew up in this era and safe to say, she became absolutely paranoid. I mean, she completely went nuts.
I wasn't allowed to go to family without her being there. I wasn't allowed to see friends (that she knew well) without her being there. I wasn't allowed to do sports, clubs, or do anything extra curricular without her there.
When I was really young, she would do "kidnapping drills" where she would sneak up on me and "pretend" to kidnap me and would beat me if I didn't respond the right way. She would do this in public out on walks, at home, at stores, EVERYWHERE. What I remember distinctly was how she would contort her face to look scary and unfamiliar and keep it on if I "failed" her test.
When my parents divorced, she absolutely lost it. She wouldn't let me call my dad without her listening, let my sister out of my sight for fear of her being kidnapped, and had to call her damn near every hour.
Listen, I understand being concerned for your children. But being a helicopter parent to the point of her breathing over my shoulder all the time. I eventually ran away. Went to live with my dad.
Overbearing parents who are scared of child kidnapping often end up loosing their kids - not because of kidnappers but because of their own precautions.
tbh your mother was abusive and likely had a cluster b personality disorder such as NPD, BPD, ASPD where she fed off the fear she could provoke in you. I am so glad that you were able to escape from her to a hopefully safe person. You are right that abusive parents like yours too often drive their children to abusive relationships and people who are not safe and could kill them.
Here's a funny childhood story my dad likes to remind me of every now and again. When I was little, "stranger danger" was implemented far too heavy-handedly in my schools. So much so that one day, at the store to get groceries, I apparently asked this random lady outright 'Are you a good stranger or a bad stranger?'
The funny part is that after she laughed and told me she was a good stranger, I started spouting all the personal info I knew at age 4! 🤣
Hilarious thanks so much for this enlightening story. It changed my life
I can just imagine it now:
"And and and I think Daddy keeps his credi-di-det card in his top lef--"
"Ooooookay, kid; time to get you home!"
imagine if she jokingly told you she was a bad stranger and you would’ve told your dad and she would’ve had to register as a sex offender or something lol
@@amberhernandez lol! All I know is that my dad likes to reenact what I did. Like I was super excited and was just like 'Hello! My name is _____ and I live with my mommy and daddy at ____! Would you like to come over and play?!'
I don't really remember it well, but I may have started a conversation with the lady, decided I liked her and wanted her to be my friend. So, if that's the case, knowing how naive my ass was at the time, I probably thought to ask her that... just to be on the safe side. XD
Strangers aren't even the #1 perpetrator of kidnappings, it's someone you already know
Growing up as a millennial, my mom was always terrified of me being randomly kidnapped and constantly gave me speeches about it. Now I understand.
my mom was the same and i lived in a small town with less than 2,000 people lol. it got kind of ridiculous at times
my mom read a lot of true crime stories about our country's most famous murderers such as Slivko or Chikatilo when i was a kid and always almost recapped the stories to me so that i won't ever be a victim
she never allowed me to help any grandmas (one of the murderers worked in pair with his grandma and lured helpful kids in his house to eat them) or to go at my friends houses (because you never know if their parents are normal and if you can even trust anyone there) or go out alone (obvious reasons)
i thought she was overprotective but now i understand too
@@screwstatists7324 oh my god, my mom told me the same about Romani people
"they're looking for a slav kid so that slav people will give them more money"
@@screwstatists7324 god its awful when paranoia starts mixing with racism. thats how cults and neo nazis recruit people, they find the most vulnerable people with anxiety or other mental illnesses and they give them a target that they can push all their paranoia on to. its really sad...
Ironically you were (literally) more likely to be struck by lightning then abducted by a stranger. The people your mom needed to worry about were the people you knew. Over 90% of child abductions are done by family members and most of the rest are done by people known to the child (family friends, teachers, coaches, etc.)
There was this case where a highschooler was drinking milk and saw her face on the cart from when she was very young. Turns out, her "mom" stole her, gave her to her grandma and dipped
Reminds me of a lifetime movie I saw that was based on a book I think it was called "the girl on the milk carton" her family kidnapped her and raised her as their own...they weren't creepy or anything like that and she actually had a nice upbringing but one day finds her face on a school milk carton.
@@angelinacamacho8575 That book and movie (which is on RUclips) are based on that story cj mentioned
That is a plot of a novel where the mom was a cult member and pretended to drop a kid she abducted for the cult. She changed her mind and dropped the kid of at her mother's house instead.
@@angelinacamacho8575 The novel had it the Family the kid lived with were adoptive grandparent who did not realize their daughter who joined a cult had kidnapped the kid when she dropped the kid of at their house.
That’s bananas!
The stranger danger campaign is commonly referred to its rise in the 80’s but it had a lasting effect for YEARS honestly still seem to this day. I was born in the early 2000’s and my parents and grandma would intensely lecture me about never talking to strangers, as far as to not even go to the end of the driveway where strangers cars could pull up close to you. This was heightened by both my parents being cops as well but I was effectively taught to never talk to ANYONE who was not my family or an immediate known person such as a friend or neighbor they knew. After the Casey Anthony case happened a bit later, distrust for anybody became a heavily enforced idea by my family. After growing up with this ideology it impacted my ability to not be suspicious of everybody which was both good and bad. In the current day, you honestly still see the effects of this. People will see a broken down car on the side of the highway and ignore it for a majority of different reasons, but including the fear of what if it’s a trap. Almost all of my friends I’ve known since childhood grew up with their parents running the equivalent of entire background checks on the parents of a new friend they made at school. It’s insane. On one hand, bringing the fact that there are dangerous people out there to light was a good thing, but on the other hand, it’s severely impacted the main focus of participating in society being “ Help others around you to build a stronger community” to “ keep your head down, and trust nobody”. Again, there’s positives and negatives to this intense campaign, but similar to Casey Anthony, with how many crimes that are committed by family members or someone close to the family, the strong cry of it’s always going to be a stranger who will do something terrible to you severely impacted the judgement of many, who to this day still think the creepy man who would kidnap your child will be a stranger in a white van, and never someone like your trustworthy uncle.
I see a lot of my friends with children raising their kids this way. I think some of it might be media prevalence? Like we see so many stories NOW about missing kids, so it feels so much more likely to happen. Definitely not saying that parents shouldn't be aware of who their kids are talking to. Just saw a little 11 year old girl from Texas was supposed to be taken to her bus stop by her parents' friend only for him to abduct and kill her. It's so sad. But there is a healthy level of being suspicious vs being entirely paranoid that you will be a statistic :c
Thank you. People need to realize that abusers are rarely stupid and hit and runs are VERY unlikely.
When I was 5 my mom lost me in the mall due to my inability to listen, and id go around the store out of her sight. When I realized i couldnt find her i cried in a corner, and only one woman noticed. She actually took me to mall security, where my mom was crying and explaining how she lost me. That could’ve ended so differently and I am grateful to that woman who took care of me out of the kindness of her heart.
I have so many stories of being helped by strangers. Who, to be fair, probably did it more to ease my exasperated parents than me.
I used to run off at every big event we went to. (I wanted to see the interesting things, not get draged around a feild looking at handmade candles and plant pots for hours!)
Every time I ended up getting pampered by concerend adults. From being given multiple free icecreams, to being given a ride on the back of one of the performing knight's horses. Every time it just turned out to be a little adventure with a happy ending.
But the older I get, the more I understand how easily my story could have come to a dark and brutal end only a couple of years after it began.
Yeah, a lot of stranger advice these days are get help from a mom with young kids with her, since she'd be far less likely do something awful and actually help you
A kid got lost in a small store and couldn't find his grandmother. We tried looking for the grandmother and the employees even called for her on the speakers and they still couldn't find her. I was afraid that she may have left and forgotten him, they had one of the employees go down the isles and ask the people if they were missing a child, and only THEN did she finally realize that the kid was missing. It took this woman at least 2-3 hours of shopping to figure out the kid was missing. The entire store was pissed, when she came up to the counter she was smiling and asked him something along the lines of "Where were you??". A good way for you to lose that kid permanently.
@@Spoonishplsbut women can be traffickers and it's a common tactic because we tend to trust women more.
Geez it seems like for some of these kids they had people targeting them for some time as they literally disappear the first time they do something on their own.
Sometimes it might be incredible coincidence, but yes it suggests they were specifically targeted by someone who was watching them to see when they'd be alone.
Usually it is exactly that. Predators and traffickers Usually pick a kid out and watch them for weeks. Is this kid often by themselves? How close is their house to their school? Do they have friends? And so on.
@@midnightgod123 ... More like a lot of these people pick children they already know rather than stranger children.
most of the time people preplan stuff when they are going to do something against the law so they would be watching them for some time. But we also don't know if the parents aren't telling the truth like they sometimes walk them to the bus stop in an attempt to make themselves look like better parents which doesn't help but people do it...
Not just "these days" (and keep in mind that these Milk Carton Kid cases were news about 50 years ago!) - it's always been the case, since the dawn of time: fairy tales are full of warnings about the "werewolves", "ogres", "witches", and "fairies" that wait in the wilderness to carry children off without a trace, and literature is full of references to children "running off" to join circuses, pirate and bandit troupes, and the like - it's all just a "kid friendly" way of telling the story, with the implicit menace of the situation only thinly veiled in these devices The world has always been a harsh place for people in general, and children in particular.
I wouldn't want to generalize too much on whether "most" kids are indeed being watched for weeks before their disappearance: I suspect this will mostly be true in much the same way that it's mostly true that most child abductions and assaults are committed by someone close to - or within - the child's own family, a family friend, someone working at the child's school or church, or someone in the child's own family... that is, in many cases, someone close to the child was planning something for some time before taking the child.
There are, however, many cases as well that look just as much like crimes of opportunity: lots of kids have been endangered while parents are stopped at gas stations, or when they become separated at shopping malls, or while on vacation or elsewhere under situations similar to those in which vacationers are targeted by pickpockets or for assaults on women committed after their drinks are drugged at clubs and so on: a lot of predators have familiar "territory" that they stalk around in, looking for unplanned opportunities to present themselves. Others find ways to thrive on the unplanned chaos of just being in the right place at the right time....
In the case of kids on bikes disappearing, you might have a neighborhood creep who just rolls through the neighborhood the same time every day, and just "settles" for staring from a safe distance at the local paperboy as he makes his rounds while accompanied by a parent... the one day that the parent isn't there is an unplanned surprise, but the predator strikes.
It might be someone who regularly creeps through the neighborhood by night or day, looking for victims, and that morning, the paperboy just happened to be convenient and vulnerable, while the predator was ready to strike. It might have happened while the father was following behind in his car on any other day, and it might have been stopped if it had happened any other morning, but by coincidence....
Or, it might as easily be an unfortunate case of the kid's own father fantasizing and planning something for days and weeks, before finally acting out on his imagination. Not saying this happened - I don't know anything about the kids involved or their fathers, but a lot of these sorts of crimes are committed by people well-known to the family, and in at least one case, disaster struck only after the father explicitly changed a pattern, and even if it didn't happen in any of these cases, I'm sure it's happened before to other kids....
Or, it might have been a drifter who happened to be driving through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and the kid just happened to be following his paper routine at the wrong place and time that morning. Experience predators might have planned things more carefully under more controlled conditions of a familiar neighborhood with a familiar and planned routine, but this predator might not have planned anything, but, seeing a tempting prize right that moment, and unable to believe his "luck", he might have acted out ad-hoc, making things up as he went along: many first-time predators, it seems, find themselves in this sort of situation, and - acting completely on impulse - they strike, making more or less of a mess of the situation in the process, making mistakes and almost getting caught, or almost letting the victim escape, or leaving evidence, or getting hurt when the victim fights back, letting the whole crime be committed too quickly to remember clearly or "enjoy" in any way.... It's these early experiences that often drive predators to develop a more controlled and planned routine later on.
Or, it might be any of a number of other possibilities, somewhere in between any of the above, or completely different from all of them.
I don't think the world has necessarily grown any more dangerous for children, at least in general: it's always been dangerous, and - except for a few exceptional circumstances of the post-modern world - it's not a lot more or less dangerous today than it was in the dark ages or in prehistory, as far as human predators are concerned.
The exceptions including the increased anonymity and mobility of urban post-modernity, and the fractured families that leave it more difficult for single mothers, for example, to adequately watch over their children in neighborhoods full of strangers raised with broken family backgrounds and misery they'd love to share with the company of a captive audience - a lot of predators being, it seems, products of broken homes and tragic histories of abuse and neglect themselves.... These exceptions would, perhaps, be at least partly offset by technological advances in forensic science, communications and coordination between local police departments and organizations like the FBI, and so on that make it easier to detect, track down, and stop predators. It would, it would seem, in many ways be a lot safer for kids today than it might have been centuries ago, when there were no proper police, the neighborhood watch was made up of volunteers who couldn't get a job any other way and were barely better than criminal gangs themselves, and bandits and "werewolves" and other monsters from across the countryside might live undetected all around isolated farms just waiting for an opportunity to strike from out of nowhere and disappear back into trackless forests, even as other aspects of urban post-modernity have made things more dangerous....
Whatever the case, I think it's always been a world where even the best of parents can turn their backs for just the briefest of moments, and never see their children again, leaving small communities in isolation to explain what happened to themselves the best they can with the only tools they have to work with to cope with the unknown and make sense of it: their imaginations about all the endless horrors of an endlessly dangerous and hostile universe that lurk just beyond the glow of their campfires.... Our ancestors understood that their children were in constant danger of being snatched up by creatures of the night, monsters in human form, who would snatch away and devour innocent lives. - maybe the biggest difference between us and them is that we've managed to convince ourselves, beyond reason, than it should still be happening, not here i our neighborhoods, not today in the modern world, not with civilized and modern people, and with modern governments and police!
Hearing about missing kids always terrified me. Especially cases where there were no clues or evidence. They just disappeared and were never seen or heard from again.
missing people in general are just so unsettling to think about, but missing children are a special kind of sadness and disturbing
Agreed. It's so scary to think that one minute you could be in one place and next you've seemingly vanished into thin air.
@@valentine.58 exactly. Especially before security cameras and ring doorbells became so common. A kid would walk just down the street and nobody would ever see or hear from them again. It’s horrific.
I was around the same age as Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped from her room during a sleepover. We even kind of look alike. I lived in a violent neighborhood with the side of our house on a busy street, and there was a bus stop nearby so people were always walking by my bedroom window being loud at night. It would have been easy to get in my room or some other part of the house. Nothing about my house was very secure. I don't know why it wasn't a priority to my parents. It's strange because they were worried about burglaries and stuff. We didn't even have a deadbolt. My mom joked that the doorknob on the front door was a bathroom doorknob. And the door had a slot in it so anyone could look in. Anyway people would always tell me things i was scared of weren't real or whatever but Polly really got kidnapped from her bedroom, just like I was scared of. I don't mean to make it about me I'm just saying her kidnapping had a big effect on a lot of people. We thought she might be alive. It's terrible
@@no_peace that’s horrifying omg…
'Johnny Gosh' is the most paperboy name imaginable
His best friend at the time was Timmy Geez
Something that’s really important to remember - kids who are “runaways” are still in a lot of danger! These kids are highly at risk for exploitation and trafficking. Often they’re running away with someone, or to someone, who isn’t safe. Labeling a child as a “runaway” also causes the public to moralize the child’s actions and see less urgency in bringing them home. We’ve had teens in our area where I live who “ran off” with much older men who meant them harm, even intending to take them out of state to legally marry them. Please don’t spread the message that “runaways” aren’t real cases of kids in danger!
It might be a case by case issue. sometimes they're just partying teens, sometimes groomed individuals who think they know more than they do, other times it could be an abused child who finally escaped their abuser/s. I think it's tragic that one group alone can shape the way in which all of these complex and different cases are treated altogether...
yeah, the majority of runaways ive seen growing up were teenage girls running off to be with their much older, groomer boyfriend that their parents forbid them from seeing.
she didnt eat plastic lmao, she was lying from the start. the blonde girl tried a frozen one with plastic and it not crunch like that.
My mom being a whore, ran off with many men before she ran off with my dad.
thank you for this, i was thinking the exact same thing
As a child I was kidnapped and according to my dad (because was too young to remember), it was the neighbor who saw my missing child poster and called the police once they were certain it was me!
Apparently the neighbor called a few times because the police were not taking it seriously but thankfully the neighbor was persistent.
That's so scary!! Glad you're alright. Your neighbor probably saw you more often than most which probably helped in recognizing you!
Yeah, that sounds like police.
As an old 80's kid, I can confirm. We were simultaneously panicked over & left completely unattended 🤣
Nailed it lol
Exactly I was out with friends or by myself until dark each night. Be home by dark was the standard saying in my house.
💯
FACTS! (born in 1980)
The 80s was the decade that ushered in the age of paranoia right? Must have been a strange time to be young.
I was forced to runaway with an abusive ex at 16. It was hell. Runaways are not safer just because they "chose" to runaway. (Chose in quotes because its either groomed or forced on the victim.)
Are runaways who genuinely did so out of choice even a thing IRL?
@@lyokianhitchhikeryes. But it's very rare, and usually still influenced by outside sources (such as a shitty home situation)
@@spiritsys I was referring to cases where neither grooming nor it being forced on them was involved
@@lyokianhitchhiker I know
@@lyokianhitchhikerwell when I was about 8 after getting shouted at by my dad, I decided to run away. I packed a bag with a bag of oranges, my stuffed toy, and some kids scissors for protection. I made it about five minutes down the road before I remembered that I lived in Brunei where there were snakes and spiders that could bite, and I remembered that I quite liked my bed and my family, so I took my ass back home quite quickly
This reminded me of something from my childhood.
My birth mother had a plan to kidnap me and my brother from school when we were kids. Our parents were divorced, we were super young, and she was our mom, so if the police hadn’t been called by our aunt, we definitely would have gotten in with her and rode across state lines.
We have an older sister by the same mom who grew up with her as her primary parent. My sister and all of her friends were pimped out and strategically given drugs by our mom when they were only in high school. That was a pattern throughout her side of the family, bc if you’re a dealer, you can hook your kids at an early age and have built in clients.
I am extraordinarily lucky, bc the court was really trying to give her custody since my dad wasn’t actually biologically related to me. He did get custody though, of all three of us. My sister is sober and a lot better mentally. She has kids of her own, and doesn’t plan on telling them until their late teens or adulthood that we have this secret first mother and entire family line that we were all rescued from.
I'm so sorry for your mother being this monster. Hopefully she gets help, or gets taken down so as not to harm anyone else.
god the court system for child custody can be so fucked sometimes
edit cos i realised this could be misunderstood: this is in response to the "the court was really trying to give my mom custody" thing
very minor detail, but what do you mean by saying your sister grew up as your birth mother's "primary parent"?
@@Robin_Glorb
My bad, I might have been a little unclear and left it kinda vague. I meant that our birth mother was our sister’s main caregiver for most of her life. She didn’t know her dad (we all have different dads), and for a long time that was the only parental figure my sister knew, which was why she blindly trusted her for so long.
@@dezs.5202 ah, now I understand. From how you worded it, it seemed like you were saying your sister was the "primary parent" and I was confused.
This epidemic of fear still has lasting effects on parents and kids today. Ironically, when i was younger, i would go out with my friends to go downtown at worryingly young ages due to my parents being too strict. Strict parents raise sneaky kids
Said it better than I could. I was a sneaky kid.
That's something my mom brings out pretty often. When she was a kid in the late 60s, she'd just go to her friends' houses after school, go out to play in the woods without telling her parents. Nowadays, you have to ask your parents to go to your best friend's house, ask their parents, sometimes days in advance.
I've been saying it forever. I was a free range kid. Be gone from 8 am till 8 at night and nobody thought it was strange.
Edit to add this was from 87 on when I was 6.
Honestly it’s scarier now more than it was years ago, mostly because of the internet, parents today don’t give a shit and let kids do whatever they want, honestly I feel it was because parents now grew up in that era and didn’t want to shelter their own children and now they don’t shelter enough, it’s sad really, I was a kid in the 2000s and I was watched over but I was allowed to do certain things my friends weren’t.
Sneaky kids or fearful kids(me)
I'm not even from the stanger danger era, but my parents raised me on fear of the outside, that someone would kidnap me and shit.
On top of that I got bullied a lot by a teacher, then my classmates.
By my teens they complained I never went outside with friends.
Missing kids on milk cartons are one of those things I’ve never seen in person but saw it a lot on movies. I love this
I saw the milk cartons with pictures of missing kids , n the last qauter of last century , though I think it started earlier .
I'm not from the USA .
Edit ; this was typed , while the sponsor was being advised .
You love abducted children? Hell yeah dude .
@@MikeOcksmallClips you’re right. maybe not the best wording. What I meant was, I love videos that go into history like this. Obviously not the abducted children
I think the desensitization of the milk carton kids is how most feel on amber alerts
There's a book called "the face on the milk carton" where the main character sees her face on a carton while at school. It's a good read
Thanks for the recommendation!
That has happened a few times irl with posters and milk cartons, the one that comes to mind is Bonnie Lohman. Thanks for the rec.
That was required reading for me as a kid and I don't know if it was just me being a weird pre-teen and not understanding the words on the page, but it seemed a bit strangely written and the plot was (If I'm remembering correctly) a bit inconsistent.
You just brought back a core memory haha. I remember in the book she saw herself on the milk cartoon then was able to dig up the exact dress and I believe hair bow (?) she had on when that picture was taken in her attic. Didn’t her “parents” steal her from her real parents or something?? The cover art of the shadow against the milk cartoon on a black background creeped me out so much lmao
Yes! I remember loving that series as a kid and oddly is what sparked my study into cults. It’s wild to think that the core idea of the story (which does go off the rails a bit lol) might have sprung from that real life example.
I remember overhearing a classmate of mine talking about her boyfriend in his 20s. She was 15 or 16, it was sophomore year. She suddenly stopped coming to class and I saw her face on a missing sign plastered on the wall of an ice cream shop. I don't even remember what her name was or if she was ever found. It still haunts me.
Yeah, this is too often what actually is going on when a kid "just goes on a bender for a few days." This kind of thing needs to be taken seriously even if it's not the stereotypical image of a stranger pulling a 5 year old into a van. It's still important
One of my female friends who is 18 has a boyfriend in his 30s... This is gonna stick in my already paranoid brain for a good while 😭 (this comment literally gave me chills)
One of my friends was murdered by her older boyfriend in his 30s she’d had thru college - shot in the head in front of her New York City apartment. Guy killed himself with the same gun right after. She was starting her adult life, he wasn’t going anywhere. I never trust those relationships.
See, it's stories like these that make me never want to be in a serious relationship with anyone. I do want kids eventually, though. Just not a husband.
@@anonymousx1101 Same, but I don't want a wife. I always imagined starting a family of my own, but I have never seen a lady, I can imagine spending my life with. A girl I can trust.
My mom and my sister are the last women I trust in today's age, and I would rather spend all my time and energy on my family than wooing some girl.
Still, a shame.
:/
I'm a child of the '80s, so I remember that era of fear. I grew up in Chicago and had a couple of paper routes in the late '80s through the early '90s. I started just before a turned 8 years old and my mother never let me deliver them alone until I got a little older. Even then, I was allowed to carry my buck knife with me, and on a couple of occasions I had creepy guys try to call me over to their cars. Each time I told them to f*ck off, but one was very insistent, so I brandished my knife and told him not to f*cking try me and he peeled out.
Props to your mom for letting have a knife, and you for letting how to use it.
That's some real 'dont be a menace in south central while drinking your juice in the hood' shenanigans right there
@@jeremiahfink6330
Do. We. Have. A. Problem?
Hell yeah little kids with buckknifes are the answer we've been looking for.
I remember when I had a route, I had to deliver at night sometimes when the days got shorter and a car pulled up and the dude asked for a paper. Being as stupid as I was I went “what house do you live at I might’ve already delivered”, and after a bit of repeating the dude got frustrated and fucked off. I only realized a couple years later if I had handed him that paper I could’ve been dead
I was literally so stupid it saved my life
I saw a recent Amber Alert situation where someone literally took a photo of the car WHILE IT WAS UNDERNEATH the highway board showing the Amber Alert. They, infuriatingly, didnt call it in because the car was one brand but the Amber Alert said another.
Turns out the two models of car are very similar and commonly mistaken for each other. The person who took the photo didnt understand that there is only ONE license plate that will match an Amber Alert. So a missing kid was quite literally right there, in front of them, and they lacked the common sense to think "Hey the entire description and license plate match other than the brand of car. It cant be that kid."
HOW can somebody be that dumb??? i thought everybody been taught that plate numbers are like fingerprints
I read a book in school called "the face on the milk carton" that followed the premise of a girl who had been kidnapped as a toddler and found a picture of herself on a milk carton years later. I don't remember the book being very good but I think a lot about the strange uncanny valley nature of the faces on the milk cartons. the thought of thousands upon thousands of kids going missing every day has our minds racing when in reality it's probably just divorce disputes. great video!!!
It's a real story
Didn't he mention that girl in the video?
I know that book! It's by Caroline B. Cooney. It's about a red headed girl that had trouble going back to her biological family. I read one of the books from the series called "The Voice on the Radio" about her boyfriend getting famous with her story.
I was a kid in the 70's and 80's , we were so worried about being put on a milk carton. There were so many children going missing!! Thank you for all your stories!!!
Same and a common fear tactic in my house "wanna end up on a milk carton?! Better listen then!"
Timeline still doesn't add up, think of how often kids would play on the street, it was well after that era that kids ended up never seen outside.
@@steffymuze That's really horrible, I'm sorry
There still is, and always has been.
When I was a child my parents had a milk carton tattooed on me...
Imma be honest, as a Brit who was only exposed to america through American RUclipsrs and tv shows as a kid, I genuinely thought these were still around and just people bought box cartons less nowadays because big plastic cartons/jugs were more efficient, cost affective, and lasted longer
SOME BITCH CALLED SOFFY VLOGS STOLE YOUR COMMENT THEN GOT 100 LIKES
You are kind of right actually milk cartons do still exist here just without the missing kids on them obviously and from what I have seen it's mostly just the "healthier" non dairy milk that gets put in cartons or milk for kids school lunches. I think the plastic jugs are just more cost effective for milk distributors and the handle on the side is very convenient for customers
As a fellow Brit, as a kid I used to be so angry that we didn’t do it! We never had cartons of milk here and I blamed that. Because it was spoken about so much I just assumed that it meant every kid on the milk would be found safe. When I learned the truth it made me so angry. How can anyone exploit the pain of missing children.
We still mainly use cartons in my country. The type of carton that juice boxes are made of, I've never known anyone who bought bottled milk in real life. And a lot of them have a plastic cap inserted into it, rather than being all paper or all plastic. We don't have ads on out milk though
I mean milk cartons are still around, but you really only ever see them these days in a school lunch. They don't have missing kids or advertisements on them anymore tho.
Teaching children to not talk to strangers IS important! Even more nowadays when parents gives their children tablets with unlimited access to the internet (and to strangers), and don't even care to see with whom their children are interacting.
I think it makes sense that its not longer "stranger danger" and instead "tricky people". Children are much more likely to be victimized by someone they know than a stranger. And stranger danger can stop children from seeking help when they need it.
@@castielnovak2900 I get this in real life but on the INTERNET they're not interacting with know people only. Most kids already interact with strangers on online games, discord, facebook etc... Last month in my country, Brasil, cases of pedophilia, torture and humiliation of girls as young as 10yo perpetrated by organized groups of male teenagers and adults broke out.
Most of the kidnapping are done by someone the kids already know. It's good not to talk to strangers, but the "stranger danger" is one of the failed campaing from the FBI.
It's a balance. Of course teach them, but make sure they aren't terrified of talking to anyone or taking a step outside.
Im sure agoraphobia, childhood obesity, and stranger danger are totally unrelated. Im sure being afraid to talk to people has never had any effects on society. Im sure rampant tribalism in the united states has nothing to do with fear mongering towards children causing deep seated anxieties towards interacting with """"strangers"""".
Remember, if someone dies its probably the spouse. If a child dies its probably a family member
As a kid the local Walmart had the entire wall by the entrance to store covered with GIANT posters of missing kids. It freaked me out every single time we went in there. They have a smaller wall now that's for missing people in general.
I was too young to remember, but my parents told me a story of how I went "missing" in a Walmart. They alerted the front and then alarms went off and all the exits were locked until I was found. Turns out I had just wandered off on my own to gaze at the toy section lmao.
@@BababooeyGooey ah a code A****. Yeah those are taken REALLY seriously even they have a code we don't tell anyone about
Oh God I think I remember those too. There's occasional newspapers that get thrown in my neighborhood, and as a kid I'd see the back of it with missing kids and the words "HAVE YOU SEEN ME?" and the photos would be age-processed, kinda leaning into uncanny valley a bit? They used to scare me, still make me anxious today honestly.
@@runningbetweenspaces Angel
@@bltn7469 No its Adam LUL
The saddest stories are the ones where rebellious kids disobey their parents thinking they’re gonna be okay despite having ignored the warnings, only for the worst possible scenario to happen to them shortly afterwards. Like imagine being in their shoes, you just want to discover yourself and try to be a little more independent and you’re punished for it, you find out the warnings made sense but you’re not going to live to learn. These stories sound like fabricated cautionary tales for how quickly things go wrong.
If they're kidnapped by traffickers, they were probably already a target. The kidnappers were waiting for the right moment to snatch them, then doing so as soon as they're alone. But that's just my theory
most kidnappers choose and study a victim before they make their move.
That's an interesting observation 🤔 So true 👍🏾
Side note: I can't imagine how the parents of these children feel when their child does something without them just once and they are gone. So heartbreaking
My family knocked stranger danger into me so hard I still have these fears as an adult. As an adult woman I’m all too aware of what dangers could be out there where something easily could happen to me (I take all measures to prevent this from my stranger danger anxiety and general distrust of others from trauma) but it’s definitely manifested in a larger less healthy fear and anxiety of others out there. I’m glad I know how to keep myself safe, but the hyper vigilance to avoid getting out of my car if it doesn’t feel like the area I’m in is the safest even if there’s not a real danger present that anyone is aware of aisles in stores and who is walking them, sometimes completely avoiding them. I’m not saying keeping kids from strangers is bad, it should be taught, just maybe not to the degree of my raising where even aside from that topic I’m just extremely anxious person and I feel like some aspects wouldn’t have been so bad on me mentally causing so much fear (I don’t believe this was their intention and do see how it affects my anxiety levels even now). All that adhd rambling just to say theres a big difference between a healthy fear of something as opposed to an unhealthy one that makes you struggle in adulthood. Not here to bash anyones parenting either, this is just like the first time I've watched something and be able to share one of my more obscure characteristics as not everyday i talk about milk carton missing kids or stranger danger. 😅😅
It is wild
I was almost abducted as a toddler, my mom let go of my hand to pay for something at the gas station and the next moment I was outside with two men walking with them to their car. The men claimed they didn't realize I was walking between them, but my mom was so panicked she had the police called. Since there was no proof of intent, nothing was filed. But she was so shocked with how quickly and quietly a child can disappear from your side without you even knowing.
I've seen it happen at my workplace. A child was wandering away from their parents and I ended up blocking the child from walking out the door with a different customer, but the mom came screaming in a panic because she realized her kid was no longer next to her. But I had given the kid a toy and had them up at the front register playing because I wasn't sure which customer was actually the child's parents. I just knew the one leaving wasn't the parent because it was a regular at my store (a really old lady with no nearby grandchildren).
I think it's important for parents to realize how easy it is to lose a child. It isn't hard to muffle a child and sneak off with them, especially when they're super tiny.
That’s why I’ve gotten used to being observant in public places. I’ve seen more than a few kids wander off and I slow wayyy tf down and wait to see mom or dad come around the corner. Meanwhile my friends I’m with are completely oblivious and don’t notice that the scenario is playing out. I’ll be 10 paces behind them and they’ll ask what I’m doing and I reply “making sure a kid doesn’t get kidnapped today!”
Dae, Sadly in this world today the few times when I’ve seen little kids in public places who look obviously lost, I get really anxious and look for the nearest female to help sort it out. I don’t want to be seen alone chatting up someone else’s kid because next thing you know I’m accused of being “stranger danger”.
@@VampyBlood17 guessing you are a woman? Just the idea of staring at a kid for a long time because I've noticed his parents aren't around man's me begin feeling the steel from the cuffs around my wrists.
I used to work in a furniture shop. I walked into the storeroom one day to find a young child holding one of our electric drills. I'm a father now and I don't know how any competent parent could lose their child so badly.
@@VampyBlood17
How to get accused of being a pedo, step one:
When I was younger, back in like 2008, a friend of my mother’s pulled up next to me in a car. I didn’t recognize her, since we were visiting my mom’s hometown (where I didn’t live) at the time, but apparently this woman used to babysit me and my parents were very close. Anyways, she rolls her window down and says “want some candy kid?” Before unlocking the back door. My mom told me I threw my scooter on the side of her door and ran back into the house 😭 not even a few days before hand we had learned about “stranger danger”.
(The friend of my mom was trying to pull a joke. Her name is Kandy, and apparently it was an inside joke with our family that I guess I didn’t know about lol)
This is so weird i follow you on instagram ! Didn’t expect to see your account in a random comments section lol
nah you're good fam, even as a grown ass teen, i would've freaked out when someone i dont know suddenly asked if i wanted candy and unlocks the door
It isn't a joke if the receiver isn't in on it. At least no harm came of it aside from a dented car door.
@@arthurfine4284 It definitely can still be a joke without the target being in on it.
@@arthurfine4284 If it was a real attempt at an abduction, a dent on a certain car door would have been a good indicator to locating the suspect!
“Don’t talk to weird people…”
I accidentally became the stranger in Stranger Danger scenarios. A kid in my neighborhood had a kitten. I love cats, so I struck up a conversation with her about her kitten.
It was only when I saw the nervous look on the kid’s face that I realized, “Oh, crap!” and politely and slowly booked it back home.
Yeaa man... Same thing happened to me... As soon as is saw the nervous look on kids face... I unzipped my pant and slowly walked away.. 😮😂😂
@@rashmibhargav1343WHAT????? 😢
yea its quite easy to not talk to others children
@@rashmibhargav1343🤨
@@rashmibhargav1343urinal conversations be crazy 😅
DUDE I know I am late to this video, but when I was 15-16 and basically homeless, I was often listed as missing because I had to walk for 45 minutes (both ways) to a community center to speak with a social worker twice a week. I eventually just stopped because it was pointless, they have my number and new where I was staying, I kept them updated via phone and email, AND YET I was listed missing about 13 times in a year. Everytime I didn't show for a meeting, the worker HAD to list me as missing with the police, it was so stupid and wasted so many resources. Again they literally knew where I was, the worker even picked me up a couple times. I totally relate to this video.
Why be homeless? Just get a home
@@literallygrass1328 because some people have an emotionally, mentally, physically, and sexually abusive parent who's favorite punishments are throwing a 5 year old child down the stairs by their hair and locking them in an empty room for days at a time without food or water.
This reminds me of an isolated memory from my younger years that has stayed with me. I was at local pizza place when I was in the 6th/7th grade (around 2013). They had a set of candy machines, the ones you use quarters to get a handful of different candies from. I went to investigate being hungry and impatient waiting for our order. On the back of the candy machine, pointed at the wall so it was unseen by most, was a picture of a young boy, a little younger than I was. In big letters it said "MISSING" at the top. I thought about how sad it was and hoped the best for him, only to realize that the date he went missing at the bottom said "1992". My stomach sank along with my heart and I didn't get any candy. I went home uneasy and disturbed.
This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about. He said the year was 1996 and he was cleaning out his yard. He said it was very windy that week in Texas and usually a lot of papers that were on the street flew into his yard. Well one of papers was a picture of a girl. The letters were faded so he couldn't really make out her name or most of the letters but he instantly recognized it as a missing poster. The only thing that he was mostly able to make out was the date that he said only had on it was half of the word December along with only the year number of 89 and not the day as it was too faded to see it. I think it's just terrifying to know there are children that to this day haven't been found and are just lost forever.
I think some people made money off this deal. I have "Heard some crooked rumors". Who knows. The real great thing like "The Amber Alert", I have sen some great results with that. I think I see an Amber alert about once every 9 months & the (Usually) Dad gets caught with his kids quickly. This I feel is important as these poeple who abduct kids, or anyone for that matter are not stable to say the least. I know many times dangerous, even if it is their child being involved. I am all for anything to put a rapid resolve to a major problem like this.
i had a similar experience when i was like 8 or so. the walmart bathrooms always had a board of missing persons posters, and some were weeks, months, or years old. i used to read each report until i saw one of a little girl who the poster said would be in her 50s present day. i felt so upset and disturbed that after that day i just stopped using the bathroom at walmart to avoid the posters.
My heart sank reading this, that’s insanely sad
I remember going to Walmart with my grandma in the early 2000s as a really little kid and seeing the wall of kids they used to have that had been missing since before I was born, and I would always get this uneasy feeling I couldn’t articulate or explain bc I was so young yet understood something very bad had happened.
I was a child in the 80s, and stranger danger was a very real thing. Our teachers talked about it at school. Local police ran child I.D. programs at the malls. Perhaps it was a leftover of surviving the horrors of WWII in Europe, but my grandmother was much more paranoid about strangers than my parents ever were. I was already an extremely shy child, and only recently (I'm in my 40s), my mom told me she never really worried about me going off with some stranger because I hated people even then. By the time I was babysitting in the mid-90s, parents seemed to have laid off the whole stranger danger thing. I think you're absolutely right that the milk carton program laid the groundwork for Amber Alerts (and Silver Alerts... and Ashanti Alerts).
My parents sure as hell didn't, and we're talking the mid-late 2000's. Then again, my parents were literal boomers giving birth to Gen Z kids so maybe it was a generation thing?
@@olliegoria Your parents were born in the 1950s/60s? How were they giving birth to zoomers? Pergaps you don't know what "boomer" means?
I remember those "kiddie mugshots" complete with our fingerprints. Do you remember when they started handing out the "do it yourself home I.D. kits"? Most of those fingerprints weren't even usable, unless your parents were trained in proper fingerprint taking.
I don't think I should be laughing but "Ashanti Alerts" is very funny to me.
@@therealevilmudbug xD why tho?
As a 43 year old, between the missing children on milk cartons, the satanic panic of the 80’s, and the challenger exploding on tv while we all watched in classrooms across America in ‘86, we 80’s kids are truly warped a bit.
How did your class react to the challenger exploding? (If you saw it all go down in class?)
I now realize that we're just becoming Gen X sequel.
We're living in one of worst times of the world and we've got to see it happen since we were little. Especially with how our famous authority figures that we're supposed to respect have all been humiliated in these recent times (recent Controversies featuring the president of the USA, recent controversies involving the topic of Police Officers, and the very loud and public message of our lack of care for the environment barely phasing government organizations). I'm starting to feel that the cynicism and rebellious nature of Gen Z that all older generations have come to know us for seems to come from a similar root that of Gen X.
Now this doesn't mean that "we're all gonna die" or "everybody can be a jerk and nihilistic because it's not our fault" but it adds a lot of perspective.
90s babies were also, between most of us seeing 9/11 happen on tv while we were at school, the wild west of early unfiltered internet taking you to dark scary places, the sudden awareness of school violence after columbine, and the scare tactics and horror stories used in schools when it came to drugs/stds/kidnapping/etc. Millennials were pretty traumatized.
When I was a child, we had the Vietnam War on our TV daily. Every generation has their own mind/society control coming at them from the television. Why do you think Bush demanded digital television? Why? Because it's a much better mind control device that way. This is why there is a television in every home. It was not this way before the "scientists" came over after WWII. We did not win that war, they did, and that is why we're all prisoners now. Infiltration over invasion.
Reading about a missing kid your own age while eating breakfast was a great way to start the day. But at least it made me afraid of strangers and now I'm overprotective of my own kids.
This video is very informative! Being from Europe, I only knew of the pictures on milk cartons through TV and movies, so I learned a lot.
One of the most insidious aspects of “Stranger Danger,” in my opinion, is how it inadvertently made it easier for abusive parents/family members to isolate children from adults that might be able to help them. It’s important to remember that most cases of child murder and CSA are committed by someone within the child’s family or within the family’s social circle.
That still doesn't mean that it's useless for kids to be taught not to trust a rando telling them to come see something they have or some shit. In this comment section alone I've seen like 100 comments about how they've had run-ins like this that the stranger danger thing helped them with.
What needs to not be taught is that parents are ALWAYS too be trusted, or that every stranger ever is dangerous and can't be trusted. But a person telling a kid to help them find their dog or something is still a huge fucking danger.
The campaign was specifically about distrusting adults that randomly come up to you, not about distrusting all adults. I don't think it had this effect at all.
Yeah, but Gosch was held at a house where the FBI found fingerclaw marks and initials in the crawlspace. All linked to Larry King.
That's in my opinion, really stupid. The person taught about in stranger danger, showing up to offer you candy on the street isn't the one likely to be rescuing abused children. And that's not counting how the lack of strangers harming might be due to the fact that kids have been taught to be aware, you cant really avoid your parents as a child.
@@AlexK-sk4qb The problem is that it does have the effect of distrusting strangers overall.
The real problem with the whole stranger danger panic is that it’s completely untrue. Absolutely, don’t get into cars with strangers, but a vast majority of the bad things that happen to kids happen in the home. The vast majority of people who hurt kids are people the kids know, or even relatives like parents, uncles, siblings, etc. A lot of stranger danger rhetoric focused on very rare instances and told kids that the people they knew were safe, to go to your priest, parents, teachers, etc for safety any time you need. Those people were the ones most likely to take advantage of kids, in reality. Also that most missing childrens cases are unresolved custody disputes or runaways that show up within a week or so.
almost everytime an amber alert pops up on my phone and I look into it for a bit more detail...it's some sort of parent or close relative who's running off with the child
so yeah, i agree with u
I'm a criminal justice student and this is usually referred to as "the three Ls" - children are most often abused by folks they: like, love, or live with
Agreed - we've created a couple of generations of paranoiacs. The destruction of basic childhood free play, which is critical to a person's mental development, has crippled whole generations. It is stupid and infuriating.
@@dddgaming885 Usually it's related to a custody dispute, and the kid is with one of their parents and is in no danger whatsoever.
exactly!! not only should you be teaching stranger danger but you should also be teaching them what weird/predatory behaviour is
Wow, I had no idea that Molly Bish was the last milk carton kid. She's from a town very close to where I grew up. I visited the beach where she went missing and it was a beautiful place, but knowing what happened there was an eerie feeling. Her family is still fighting to find her killer to this day. If anyone's interested, please consider following Molly's sister, Heather Bish, and support her efforts to get Molly justice.
I’m late but I found this a very interesting comment and there’s no replies so I’m changing that
seems like seeing missing people on milk cartons will never stop reminding me of the 'grandma got run over by a reindeer' animated film
It’s one of my favorite movie tropes when people drink out of one of these milk cartons casually while they are either the person on the carton or kidnapped the person on the carton
any examples of movies like that?
@@Judi_ I'm gonna go ahead and say no, lmao.
@@Zargabaath There's definitely at least one, I just can't for the life of me remember what film it is.
@@Judi_ Sure thing. keep in mind I misspoke when when I said movies it’s a trope that’s very spread out in different forms of media. Big (1988), The real slim shady by Eminem music video, The lost boys (1987), Sin city (2005), the happy tree friends episode “all in vein”, home star runner, sidewalk stories (1989), and I’m pretty sure it was in the new don’t hug me I’m scared television show but I may be wrong.
@@Judi_ The Face on the Milk Carton. Originally a book by Caroline B Cooney
I grew up after milk carton kids were a thing, but still in the era of stranger danger PSAs. My mom is a social worker so she knew that stranger danger was far less of an issue than being abducted by someone you know. I think the "rules" me and my sister had as a kid are still pretty good. One was if someone besides a parent was coming to get us, they HAD to have the password, even if we knew them. Nowadays I can just text or call my mom but as a kid it was pretty useful, although we only used it once or twice when a family friend picked us up from school. Another was if you get lost, find a mom to help you. Of all the people likely to abduct a child old enough to be able to ask for help, a mom with her kids is pretty low on the list. I actually used that at one point and the lady helped me find my dad, so it's pretty good advice in my book! But in school I was shown those awful stranger danger PSAs, where a man with a moustache (he always had a moustache for some reason) comes up in a big white van and asks if I want any candy. while that is probably good advice, most kidnappers have picked up on that and probably won't follow that motif nowadays. Amber Alerts are definitely useful, I remember when I had my first phone when I was a young teen and I got an Amber Alert and stared out my window for an hour looking at every single car that passes to see if it fit the description. While I didn't personally save the kid by spotting a black sedan, the kid did end up getting found alive and well!
I heard of human traffickers using women that looked like moms to abduct people because of exactly that thought "a woman who had children won't harm me she is just like my mom"
However it's still a good idea to look for women who are with their children - them interacting with each other or playing and stuff like that because the chance is probably still slim
anyway thank you for the information
@@isartoxic3481 for some reason reading your reply gave me chills. i hate humanity
I had an experience with the stereotypical adult man trying to give out candies to kids, when I was a kid in the early 2000s. I was extremely young and had zero awareness of "stranger danger", so if those still exist, they probably still target kids who are too young to have been told yet. Thankfully, nothing happened to me - I had been lagging behind my mom in the street that day, and he thought I was straight up on my own. When he offered me candy, I assumed he must have been a friendly man, so I immediately told him that I was going to tell my mom, who was right there, that he was there and kindly gave me candy! When I looked back behind me, he had left. Evidently, he didn't want to talk to my parent. It's still terrifying to think that this man was out there, and possibly went after other kids.
I had the same thing. If somoeone said they were there to take us home, we were supposed to ask if they knew our dog's middle name.
My mom is also a social worker. She just forbade me from going almost anywhere on my own (bc we lived in a big city) until I was like 12 lol. I grew up in the 2010s tho. We had amber alert and missing kids in newspapers. I do vividly remember the newspapers.
The one thing it did do is discourage some teenagers (like me) from running away because ending up on a milk carton would've been the most embarrassing thing ever.
Leave a note saying "Mom I'm running away, please don't put me on a fucking milk carton". Problem solved.
😂😂😂😂
@@snook.1 I was raised in an era where people - even minors - were expected to have dignity and self-control.
Behaving like an emotionally incontinent brat was considered foolish & unproductive.
@@DamePiglet Too bad you didn't teach the next generation to behave the same then I guess. Was this before the invention of jokes as well?
@@snook.1 I'm used to jokes being funny. 😁
Actually, I probably was a little hard on you. There are so many irritating pricks on YT, but I shouldn't immediately assume everyone is.
Btw... I did pass on good things to the next generation - but I only had 2 kids (and took in 2 more) so my impact was kinda limited. 😆
The problem with "stranger danger" could be its own episode. A big problem is that a lot of child abuse happens from people that the child already knows, either their own family (or friends of the family) or people that went into positions of authority so they could have access to kids and who often were protected by whatever organization that authority belonged to. How confusing must it have been to hear all the stranger danger stuff in the 80s when you were being abused by your priest, coach, or uncle? Would it even sound like the same thing? It certainly wouldn't explain what to do next if your parent didn't listen. They recently found out what happened with a missing child case from the 70s that I'd never heard about- it happened right near where I grew up around a beautiful church we passed all the time. A girl was walking to summer bible camp which was only a few blocks away and disappeared. Eventually people who had been children in that church started to come forward to say that the youth counselor from that church had had a habit of giving girls a 'ride' but taking them to the woods instead and abusing them. The little girl had caught a ride with him and when she fought him he killed her. That girl would have probably been safer if she'd caught a ride with a total stranger instead of that guy who she "knew"
I’m 17 and I live in hungary. We also had missing children on milk cartons, only much much later in the early 2000’s. Whenever I was eating my breakfast cereal I’d just read the names and watch the faces of missing children every day. I still remember their faces. The program was much more shortlived that it was in the US. It probably ended for similar reasons.
another hungarian here! this video actually made me remember that this campaign happened here too, i really forgot about it
If you're 17, how were you eating cereal in the early 2000's? A time traveler, surely.
@@Backstorm13 Eastern european time
@@Backstorm13 they think 2012 is early 2000s, give the kid a break
@@codexmachina1358 would it not be 2005 though? 17 years ago... Duh duh duuum
I found an abandoned house years ago in the middle of the woods somewhere in Pennsylvania that had hundreds of these milk cartons all over the house with all of the kids eyes poked out.
Weirdest thing I’ve ever found
That sounds like it would've made a great photo for an album cover.
Suicideboyz would steal that for their next album 100%
Wtf
Mt fight or flight would have kicked in if I saw some shit like that
New horror game concept just dropped
23:44 This actually the norm. Most children who are abducted are abducted by family, usually in relation to custody issues.
I'm a 90s kid and I think the whole Stranger Danger fear was extremely useful back then, not so much now. I played in empty fields with my friends, rode my bike to school, went to the grocery store on my own, etc. No cell phones and no internet, so communication was done with a post-it note on the fridge. As a kid before the 2000s, you were almost always on your own, especially if both your parents worked. Having a healthy paranoia of strangers was a lifesaver when it came to being a kid. I think now it's not as useful since that paranoia has kinda transferred over to parents and adults who won't even let their kids play in the front yard, and are convinced the kid will be murdered if they're allowed to walk to school on their own.
It's true. A few years ago, before the pandemic, my 80 year old mom fell down in her house. I drove over, but couldn't lift her alone. She said a next door neighbor and his 20 something son had helped her in the past, so I rang the doorbell. A 6 foot tall burly 20 something answered the door, but he was clearly afraid of me, the middle aged, weak looking stranger. It was like pulling teeth to get him to help. Eventually I convinced him, and I'm honestly quite grateful, but it was still odd seeing this strong 20 something kid, in a nice safe suburb, afraid of someone ringing his doorbell at 1pm on a nice fall Saturday.
Just this fall I sold a dolly on craiglist. I gave the guy my address, he says he's coming over. I wait... see someone that might be him playing around with his phone from across the street, but not coming up to my door to ring it. He walks over the the neighbors house, continues playing with his phone. No doorbell ring, just a guy hanging out outside. Weird.
Eventually the guy works up the courage to call me (I gave me my number if he got lost or had to cancel), and makes sure he's at the right place. I sell him the dolly.
Later on I check my email. He'd emailed me that he was here! So instead of... ringing the doorbell... he send an email.
I'm not very outgoing myself, and don't find it easy talking to people I don't know. But these days? I'm a huge extrovert compared to some of these 20 somethings today who are intimated to talk to someone on the phone they don't know, or ring a doorbell!
It is still very useful, most people let their kids play in a fenced in backyard unsupervised, or sometimes even a whole neighborhood now that there are phones but it’s too dangerous to let your kids play outside at night or if you live somewhere that’s not safe. In Japan, kids as little as 4 go to school by themselves in busy cities, that’s because Japan is a lot safer than the U.S. We’re no 3rd world country, but It would be hard to say that children are safe here. I honestly don’t believe children are safe anywhere, not even from those that should protect them. More than half of children experience some sort of abuse at home, school or church. Back then, most of the world didn’t have the internet or an abundance of media to show them the reality of the world at your fingertips. Things were simpler because we lived in ignorance, and children were taught to always trust adults, but that led to countless children being kidnapped, abused and ignored. The world has always been cruel, our perception of it was just different. Now we see the world for what as it is.
It's always been useful, because children have always rapidly gone missing and still do now.
I think you might be missing the point that no matter the decade or the technology, almost all child disappearances are perpetrated by people close to the child. A focus on stranger danger makes you blind to the threats closer to you.
My kid is not allowed in the yard to play bc ... Changelings
If you haven't already, you should do a story on the moral panic over Halloween candy in the 80s.
I grew up right in the middle of it. People thought their neighbors were putting needles in the Halloween candy. Media and schools played along and told parents they had to examine the candy before the kids ate it.
Around here, we even had local hospitals that volunteered to x-ray the candy. They eventually realized they were doing more harm than good by sending the message you NEED to x-ray the candy. Similar to the panic created by kids on milk cartons.
Years later I found it none of it ever happened, and nobody ever put needles in candy. All these cases are traced back to pranks by friends or family members, and none were traced back to people putting needles or razor blades in candy or apples.
it's because of that scare that kids in schools are no longer allowed to bring baked goods to pass out to their classmates
now kids have to buy store-made, individually wrapped foods
The real life basis of that is really messed up. Long story short, father laced his own kids pixie stix with cyanide to get back at a neighbor.
Along the same lines, I'd love to see a video on the Satanic Panic.
Same thing happened when people were freaking out over candy secretly being drugged or poisoned. With the latter, the very few times they ever happened was when it was a family member that was trying to commit insurance fraud or just straight up kill their child because they wanted to. Really scary, but not exactly something to scare the shit out of parents for
There's sorta something like this that occured IRL, with the Pixy Stix Killer, but that was just the father of the children using that convenient paranoia as his alibi iirc.
Everyone always talking about people lacing halloween candy with drugs. Who t.f. giving out free drugs? Seriously lmk.
It's so morbid to realise that a lot of the children who were missing died before their face even showed up on the milk cartons.
edgy
To be fair they were outnumbered by children who were never truly missing in the first place (runaways, custody disputes, etc.). Generally though, outside of a few outliers, if a child goes missing they're either found very quickly or never at all. By the time they manage to get on a milk credit the chance of them ever being found alive and well (or at all) was very low; one of the major reasons this program stopped. (That and Amber Alert made it obsolete.)
@@jimmybalzac6021 oh shut up
I know right.. so horrible 😢
@@jimmybalzac6021 🤓
“Weird, sad, useless knowledge” is literally my favorite genre
I remember my mom telling me not to talk to strangers as a kid and her saying “Do you want to end up on the side of a milk carton??”.
Yes! I remember that threat too!
My mom said that to me before…. I’m a 2002 baby
lily mackie, That must have confused tf out of you.
As an early 2000’s kid, i remember that threat all too clearly
@@brawndothethirstmutilator9848 not really. I grew up in the 90s and was young enough around the 2000's that children's entertainment was still a casual watch. The milk carton thing was still a thing referenced in the 2000's American media. Even if it wasn't an actual thing anymore kids still knew about it.
I was one of those kids eating breakfast with missing children. I always wanted to help them or help find them. My step-dad just told me they were dead already so to stop caring. Yet, stranger danger never clicked with me. Then, my uncle gave me my first gun when I was 11 so as a result, if anything; I was a danger to strangers that had ill intent.
It's funny at the end. But I don't know about the whole giving a gun to an 11 year old tho.
damn thats fortnite age, idk if i would give a fortnite player a gun, ever
I’m pretty sure you were, just a general menace.
I was also given a hunting rifle as a child though, by my drunk uncle to. The difference is I was six, and thankfully didn’t keep it.
@@DominikaHare that’s horrible. Rather than… idk saying “they were found” or you know anything else..
Your dad was sort of right. Most cases if its a teenager or old person it's them running away and committing suicide in a remote area.
Or teenagers running away or going out with their boyfriend/girlfriend (this is how a lot of young women get trafficked as they are betrayed and sold by their "bf")
A HUGE number of cases are the Mom or Dad who lost the custody battle in the divorce taking the kid and going off the wire. Only a small percentage are random killings whee victim and killer are unrelated.
When I was growing up we didn’t really see children’s faces on milk cartons, but I do remember this board outside the exit of our town’s local Walmart that was dedicated to kids that went missing, either inside the store itself or somewhere near it (since it was such a small town this was one of the biggest places there, and your best chance if you needed to put up a missing poster). I remember seeing it every time me and my mom left the store. Didn’t understand at the time why she would tell my sister and I to keep one hand on the cart while we were shopping and never to run ahead. She would hold my hand as we walked by those missing kid flyers and her grip would tighten, but she never really said much about it, just looked at the board for a second or two with a sad look in her eyes and then walked past. Every week when we went by it there were new faces. I think I asked about it once or twice, about where they went and ‘were their mommies and daddies okay?’ She would answer quickly about it but didn’t go in depth. And of course we had the Stranger Danger rule, though we were lucky to never be in a situation where a stranger tried to talk to me or my sister.
Looking back I’m so grateful for my mom. She didn’t try to scare us into not talking to strangers, it was just more of a “If you don’t know them, just don’t talk to them.” Our rule was that if we were ever in that situation, “Ask them if they know Mommy and Daddy, and if they don’t, then don’t tell them your name”. If they grabbed us, scream at the top of our lungs until someone came, either an employee, a well-meaning shopper, or one of our parents. Though that was just a backup since we were taught to never leave Mom’s side in the store.
Even now shopping at Walmart, a stranger I don’t know will stand next to me to pick out something on the shelf, and I scoot away from them as a subconscious movement. And I’ll still hold onto the cart or my mom’s hand, just in case.
And that missing child board is still at the exit of the store. I look at it each time I’m there. More new faces and names each time.
Whenever I raised the idea of "Stranger Danger" to my mother, she would tell me that "No one would try to kidnap you" because I was built like a Brick Shithouse. Good times
I was always told I was too annoying and kidnappers would be scared of me because of how weird I was lol
Hahahahahah I'm that mother. I told my daughter if someone kidnapped you, they would've return you within an hour cos you talk so much, no one can handle it! 😂
@@integrak5609 great parenting
@@davideventili2881 yup
@@lykiaookami6070 pfp checks out
It’s such a trope that there’s a book. “The Face on the Milk Carton” tells the story of a teen who recognizes her own face and it leads to her finding out she was kidnapped (although there is an interesting twist) and a crazy series of events follows.
I remember that story.. I'm pretty sure they made a movie about it on lifetime
Oh I had to write about it in my English class once
I totally remember reading that book in high school! Did you know that there was a sequel?
@@emilykeegan4345 Lifetime movies are delightfully unhinged tbh. My favourite was the one where the doctor had two kids, but one had Downs, and so the nurse adopted her and blackmailed him for years.
@@amberhernandez well that seems [medical term for slow] of her.
One of my best friends went missing for a day, and what had happened was his foster family had moved a few cities over and he was devastated. He loved the city we lived in and ran away to go back. He had only made it a few miles away but it was terrifying for all parties. He did it again the next year, was found after a day, and I haven't heard anything since.
My sister was kidnapped a few year ago because of accepting a ride, not even from a stranger. Some of you might even know about it, it was pretty recent. Teen from NC got kidnapped and taken all the way to Mexico before she was found. Thankfully beyond all measure my sister miraculously was found but still.
Thank goodness she was found
Thank goodness. NC here as well. Hope she, you, and your family are doing okay!
A girl my age went missing in our neighborhood when I was little. My mum never let me out of her sight, and told me terrifying stories of what ~could~ happen to me. I believe the perpetrator was discovered a few years ago, may he rot.
what about the girl?
What did he do to the girl??
what happened to the girl
@@Game_Hero imma assume dead.
He doesn't deserve to rot, he deserves to burn.
i remember going to walmart and seeing “have you seen me?” posters, with lots of kids on them. some of them had been missing for a very long time, and they used some software to approximate what they would look like in the present day and put that next to the photo of them from when they went missing. it was very disturbing
That’s still at every Walmart now
I had several people I knew run away in high school and more than once I discovered they had run away by seeing their pic on that wall in Walmart. To this day (nearly 30 years later) I will still stop and look over all the pics on that wall half expecting to see someone I know.
Yeah same. I'm thinking like: "It's sad but we know the statistics by now...They're not coming home anymore."
And some of those pictures I've seen at my local Walmart have been up for years while the child has been missing for years as well so.
somehow the "aging-up" editing always creeped me out more, especially when they kids weren't kids anymore and they were just straight up 20
@@allisonr6263 Right? Like I might actually know this person but actually putting 2+2 together in this age of fast paced information is a mess to say the least. By the time the full details of one story come out another just as gruesome story pops up somewhere else.
24:55 did the cashier not recognize the kid probably got desensitized towards them after so many of milk cartens
Maybe not due to the kid on the Carten being 3 or 2 when she at the time was 7
Also I rember hearing an interview where she might have said her step dad kinda hid her face when checking out? Idk the Memory of hearing that isn’t very vivid
I'm a native Iowan and its surreal hearing about Johnny from outside here. I went to a school right next to where he went missing and it was a huge urban legend for us. It's a bizarre case, for sure. Thanks for bringing it up! Great video, as always!
It's not bizarre. Someone took him, most likely sexually assaulted him, and then killed him. Evil people do evil things.
I'm also an Iowan not too long of a drive away from where he was taken. It really surprised me to learn about this situation.
69th like
I lived in Des Moines with my family when I was a toddler in the early to mid 1980s. My late father in particular was overprotective of me, and my parents were "helicopter parents" before that was popular. When I got much older, my dad told me that back in those days, he once had a nightmare that a photo of me was on a milk carton. Watching this and learning that those early disappearances and the first milk cartons with missing kids on them overlapped with our family's time in Des Moines really puts things into perspective.
Urban legends are stories like aligators in the sewers, not child abductions that receive national news coverage.
I always look forward to seeing Wendigoons continued decent into madness with each and every Magic Spoon sponsor
The way he opened the box is the most disturbing part of this video.
honestly feels like hes only doing the bit because the cereal isnt good lol
That cereal is way over priced. Plus you can't order 1 box. They force you to spend like 30$ on their products which is a huge signal to me that "it ain't worth it".
@@nyawrcut It tastes bad and is like $25 a box. If Wendig read this he's probably like "HAHA YUP, CAN'T SAY THAT THO."
Actual dry dog food is more nutritional than breakfast cereal.