Analysis
National Registry
The Milk Carton Campaign led to a variety of innovations that increased the number of missing children coming home safely:
"Significant Measures Enacted to Assist Children At-Risk". Source: NCMEC's "Missing and Abducted Children...".
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"There needed to be something on a national level, a clearinghouse to intake information about missing children and then help promote that information to either regional areas, if a child was believed to be missing within the state of Georgia, then spread the image of the child and information about that child to people within the state of Georgia, for that Child was believed to be within the Eastern seaboard have the information about that child be promoted on a national level. So that is where the national center came in play." |
Data
The Milk Carton campaign was a first effort to let America know of the prevalence of missing children. While the recovery rate did not increase dramatically with the campaign, the actions society took after led to higher recovery rates today:
"Walmart's missing-children bords--found in every store--have recovered 324 children. Since 1984 the NCMEC has helped find more than 169,000. Recovery rates have improved enormously, jumping from 62% in 1990 to 97% in 2011." |
Mollie Halpern
FBI Office of Public Affairs at U.S. Department of Justice, on how many kids go missing in America, 2011
The sharing of information between organizations and law enforcement, along with innovations in disseminating information, have led to a more effective way of finding missing children and preventing abductions. While children still go missing, the number that are reunited with their families has increased.
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The End of the Campaign
Photographs of missing children still adorn telephone poles and billboards, but, the Milk Carton campaign came to an end when several dairies received complaints from parental groups and medical professionals:
"To our knowledge, [the Milk Carton Ads] were removed from public view following media stories about a couple of mothers worrying that their children would look at their school lunchtime milk carton and assume they, too, could become a victim of a child abduction. While this erroneous notion had no historic merit, it was negative enough that eventually the donor milk companies stepped back and eventually the project dissolved" "Milk cartons eventually stopped featuring missing children in the late 1980s, after prominent pediatricians like Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton worried that they frightened children unnecessarily." |
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