100 Objects #9: Missing Children Milk Carton

Summary

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99% Invisible: 100 Objects #9 – Missing Children Milk Carton

Host: Roman Mars
Date: July 17, 2026

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Overview

In this episode of "99% Invisible," Roman Mars and team explore the story and cultural legacy of the "Missing Children Milk Carton" campaign of the 1980s. This campaign put the faces of missing children on milk cartons, fundamentally altering how America thought about child abduction, risk, and safety. Key voices—including parents, historians, and survivors—discuss the impacts, myths, and unintended consequences of this unique design intervention.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Disappearance of Johnny Gosch (01:50 – 05:02)

• Johnny Gosch, a 12-year-old Iowa paperboy, disappears in 1982. His mother, Noreen Gosch, recalls the shock and the ineffective police response.
  • "We were awakened by the phone ringing...Johnny was gone and to call the police." (Noreen Gosch, 01:50–02:20)
• In the early '80s, there were no Amber Alerts or clear procedures for missing children; kids were classified as "missing adults."
• Johnny’s parents lead search parties and advocate for new legal distinction: the Johnnie Gosch Law.
  • “I wrote the Johnnie Gosch law at my kitchen table.” (Noreen Gosch, 04:53)

The Birth of the Milk Carton Campaign (05:02 – 08:16)

• 1984: Eugene Martin, another boy, vanishes while delivering papers nearby.
• An employee at the Anderson Erickson Dairy and relatives of victims team up, putting missing children's faces on local milk cartons.
• Barbara Huggett at the National Child Safety Council pushes to make it national:
  • "Nearly everybody drinks milk. Milk also turns over quickly, so we could put a lot of different kids' photos on and pull children's off that needed to come off." (Barbara Huggett, 06:09)
• At its peak, 700 dairies and an estimated 5 billion cartons carry missing children's faces.
  • “5 billion milk cartons telling every American family this could happen to your kid.” (Roman Mars, 08:09)

Racial Disparity & Media Attention (08:42 – 11:02)

• Despite large campaigns after the disappearances of white children, similar cases among Black children in Atlanta (29 kids in two years) failed to generate national outrage or campaigns.
  • "All of these children were black...there was no real kind of cry from the public apart from the victims' families." (Paul Renfro, 09:52)
  • “The discourse around their disappearances...served to legitimate their disappearances and deaths.” (Paul Renfro, 10:09)
• The campaign predominantly focused on "dangerous stranger abductions," typically involving white children.

Effectiveness & Fallout of the Campaign (11:02 – 13:12)

• Out of 200 children on National Child Safety Council milk cartons, only two were found alive; the most notable, Bobby Smith Jr., was found by coincidence.
  • “And it was just a sense of elation...You could hear the cheer throughout the whole building. Yay, we found a child.” (Barbara Huggett, 11:20)
• The campaign raised awareness more than it solved cases.
  • “It did not reveal where Johnny's location was.” (Noreen Gosch, 12:10)
• Milk carton images catalyzed national anxiety, embedding "stranger danger" and impacting family conversations and rules.
  • “The faces on the milk cartons scared the hell out of everyone...” (Roman Mars, 13:02)

Public Backlash & Discontinuation (13:12 – 14:00)

• Campaign ends quickly amid criticism: traumatizing for kids, negative breakfast table connotations, dairies shift from cartons to plastic.
  • Dr. Benjamin Spock: “It was traumatizing. Kids shouldn’t have to face that over their Lucky Charms.” (13:37)
• Campaigns forced uncomfortable conversations about abduction.
  • “That milk carton almost demands them to have that conversation.” (Unidentified Commentator, 13:48)

Myths, Misconceptions, and Stranger Danger (14:00 – 16:00)

• Media and politicians inflate data on missing children, conflating "missing" with "kidnapped by strangers."
  • “Folks are kicking around these numbers...1.8 million missing children in the United States. And missing becomes very closely attached to abducted by strangers.” (Unidentified, 14:16)
• FBI data: Only 0.1% of missing kids are taken by strangers; most are abducted by family or acquaintances.
  • “It’s someone whose face we know.” (Unidentified, 15:42)

Success Stories: Bonnie Bullock (16:00 – 26:19)

• Bonnie Bullock was kidnapped by her mother/stepfather, not strangers. A local campaign features her on a milk carton.
  • “I wasn’t kidnapped by strangers. I was kidnapped by people that loved me.” (Bonnie Bullock, 16:06)
• At age 7, Bonnie discovers her own face on the carton (23:06), eventually leading to her rescue.
• Her case illustrates that most kidnappings are familial, not by strangers.
  • “I believe that I am who I am because I was on a milk carton and I was found.” (Bonnie Bullock, 25:59)

Changing the Narrative: From Milk Cartons to Moral Panics (26:30 – 32:57)

• Historian Paul Renfro links past and present, discussing how milk carton campaigns inflated fears of stranger-abduction that persist today—culminating in modern conspiracies like Pizzagate.
  • "There's a tension...children are far more likely to be exploited by people they know, by family members." (Paul Renfro, 31:19)
• The Epstein scandal adds real evidence of elite abuse, which feeds existing narratives but distracts from the far more common, less sensational abuses by known individuals.

The Enduring Power of a Symbol (36:00 – 37:14)

• The milk carton’s imagery persists because of its association with domestic unity and comfort—its very presence in the family space shared a powerful story.
  • “There is a sense of familial unity that milk helps to author...so putting missing kids’ faces on that item was quite deliberate.” (Unidentified, 36:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Noreen Gosch: "I wrote the Johnnie Gosch law at my kitchen table." (04:53)
• Barbara Huggett: "I imagine it's way into the billions when you have 700, 750 dairies printing day in and day out for years." (07:47)
• Paul Renfro: "The discourse...served to legitimate their disappearances and deaths." (10:09)
• Roman Mars: "5 billion milk cartons telling every American family this could happen to your kid." (08:09)
• Dr. Benjamin Spock: “It was traumatizing. Kids shouldn’t have to face that over their Lucky Charms.” (13:37)
• Bonnie Bullock: “I was kidnapped by people that loved me.” (16:06)
• Paul Renfro: “It is a problem that is primarily one of the family and of acquaintances. It really is not one that's focused on strangers, even though that is the phenomenon that is most feared.” (26:36)
• Annie Brown: “The more we talk about it, the more we can change and stop it. But this number is incredibly wrong.” (33:12)
• Unidentified Commentator: “There is a sense of familial unity that milk helps to author...” (36:43)

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Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 01:50 | Johnny Gosch disappearance recounted by Noreen Gosch | | 05:02 | Eugene Martin disappears; milk carton idea takes shape | | 06:09 | Barbara Huggett discusses campaign scale & logistics | | 09:52 | Discussion of Atlanta child murders, racial disparity | | 11:02 | Campaign results: only 2 children found alive | | 13:12 | Campaign wind-down; public backlash | | 14:16 | Myths: statistics on missing vs. abducted children | | 16:06 | Bonnie Bullock’s story | | 23:06 | Bonnie recognizes herself on milk carton | | 26:36 | Historian Paul Renfro on stranger vs. familial danger | | 27:17 | Pizzagate, Epstein, modern moral panics | | 33:12 | Overstated trafficking statistics debunked | | 36:43 | Significance of milk cartons in family life |

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Themes & Takeaways

• Design’s Ripple Effect: A pragmatic design decision—putting faces on milk cartons—helped create new laws, inspired other campaigns, and dramatically shifted American anxieties about childhood safety.
• Persistence of Myths: Media and social narratives exaggerated the threat of “stranger danger,” overshadowing the much higher risks of harm from acquaintances or family.
• Race and Media Coverage: The campaign's selective outrage underscores the racial dynamics of attention, empathy, and advocacy in American society.
• Enduring Cultural Impact: The milk carton as everyday object became a vessel of myth, a symbol of togetherness, and a trigger for ongoing—but misdirected—social fears about child safety.

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Conclusion

The "Missing Children Milk Carton" campaign left a permanent mark on American society—not for solving child abductions, but for changing how families, the media, and lawmakers think about risk, safety, and childhood itself. While the campaign raised awareness, it also seeded persistent misconceptions and anxieties, many of which linger today.

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Transcript

[Roman Mars]

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[Noreen Gosch]

we were awakened by the phone ringing.

[Roman Mars]

That's Noreen Gosch, Johnny's mother.

[Noreen Gosch]

It was the neighbors saying they did not receive their newspapers.

[Roman Mars]

This wasn't like Johnny. He'd never missed a delivery.

[Noreen Gosch]

His dad got up and said, I'll go help him finish the route. He's probably just running late. So he went up the street and that's where he saw Johnny's wagon sitting.

[Roman Mars]

Johnny's red wagon was sitting at the corner. It was still full of newspapers.

[Noreen Gosch]

So he rushed back and told me Johnny was gone and to call the police.

[Roman Mars]

Johnny Gosch was 12 when he disappeared. He had blue eyes and dirty blonde hair with a small gap between his front teeth and his face would be on the very first milk carton to ever feature a missing child.

[Annie Brown]

I have a distinct memory of being a kid and just staring at the milk carton with this blurry face on it.

[Roman Mars]

That's reporter Annie Brown, which is weird

[Annie Brown]

because I definitely wasn't alive to see one. The milk carton campaign only lasted a few years in the 80s, but it left an indelible mark on our culture. It introduced a kind of mythology around child safety that lingers to this day. And it changed what exactly Americans are afraid of when we fear for our children.

[Roman Mars]

From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the missing children milk carton. The morning that Johnny disappeared, Noreen said it took 45 minutes for the police to arrive. So she called around to the other boys who delivered papers that morning. A few of them said they saw her son talking to a man in a blue car. But the police were skeptical.

[Noreen Gosch]

The cop looked at me and said, well, has your son ever run away before? And I said, well, no, he's never run away ever. Nor did he run away today.

[Annie Brown]

This was Iowa. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen to kids like Johnny in places like Iowa.

[Noreen Gosch]

We'd never had a crime like this before.

[Roman Mars]

This was before Amber alerts, before those text messages that you get when a kid goes missing. There wasn't even a category for missing children. Kids were put in the same group as missing adults, and an adult had to be gone for three days before they were considered missing.

[Annie Brown]

So without the police's help, Johnny's parents tried everything they could to find him. They hired private investigators and coordinated search parties.

[Roman Mars]

Meanwhile, as they searched, they also wrote Iowa state legislation that would differentiate missing children from missing adults.

[Noreen Gosch]

I wrote the John Agash law at my kitchen table.

[Annie Brown]

But after all of this, Noreen's son was still gone.

[Roman Mars]

And then two years later, in 1984, another little boy disappeared while delivering newspapers. He lived in a neighborhood not far from Johnny's.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Eugene Martin was last seen delivering newspapers

[Roman Mars]

between 5:30 and 6 that morning. His paper bag with newspapers still inside was found just outside of Des Moines.

[Annie Brown]

This second paperboy had a relative who worked at a local dairy, the Anderson and Erickson Dairy. That relative and the dairy's owner came up with an idea to help find these boys.

[Noreen Gosch]

The Anderson Erickson Dairy contacted each family, and they wanted to do something helpful in the investigations.

[Annie Brown]

And within a few short weeks, thousands of milk cartons were rolled out of trucks and into grocery stores. All Over Des Moines, as clerks stocked their shelves, the faces of Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin smiled back.

[Roman Mars]

The campaign started at one local dairy, but over the next few weeks it spread to other midwestern towns. And an Illinois dairy saw it and said, why don't we try that? And from there, it went national.

[Barbara Huggett]

Nearly everybody drinks milk. Milk also turns over quickly so we could put a lot of different kids photos on and pull children's off that needed to come off.

[Annie Brown]

That's Barbara Huggett. She was working as an artist at the National Child Safety Council in Michigan when the milk carton campaign took off.

[Barbara Huggett]

Our founder, apparently he'd seen Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin on the Anderson Erickson dairy milk cartons, but he felt that the program should be nationwide.

[Roman Mars]

A nationwide milk carton campaign would alert families in California to look for a child that went missing in Iowa.

[Annie Brown]

The national campaign brought together local groups looking for missing children, and together they came up with an initial list of 77 kids from all over the country.

[Barbara Huggett]

We used cases that were believed to be what they termed in those days, dangerous stranger abductions.

[Roman Mars]

In other words, kids that weren't taken by someone they knew.

[Annie Brown]

Barb's team didn't have computers, so they cut and arranged all the layouts by hand.

[Barbara Huggett]

We designed a layout that was just, you know, rather simple.

[Roman Mars]

In black block letters. The word missing was printed across the top of each waxy paper panel. Photos of two children were laid side by side in black and white. Under the photos were their dates of birth, height, weight, and where they were last seen. They also printed the pictures on school milk cartons, but only one child could fit on those.

[Annie Brown]

The National Child Safety Council reached out to dairies all over the country asking if they'd be part of the campaign. Within months, 700 independent dairies had signed on.

[Barbara Huggett]

Boy, I wish I knew how many cartons had circulated. I imagine it's way into the billions when you have 700, 750 dairies printing day in and day out for years.

[Annie Brown]

Some sources have estimated that as many as 5 billion milk cartons were printed with the faces of missing children.

[Roman Mars]

5 billion milk cartons telling every American family this could happen to your kid.

[Noreen Gosch]

It's every parent's worst nightmare. As I said, we had not had cases of this going on in our community. Johnny's was the first really big case to hit.

[Annie Brown]

Johnny's may have been the first big case to hit and the first to spark the national milk carton campaign, but there had been previous kidnappings of other children in other places that hadn't sparked the same outrage.

[Paul Renfro]

It's interesting. In Atlanta there were two young boys who also went missing at around the same time in July of 1979.

[Annie Brown]

This is historian Paul Renfro.

[Paul Renfro]

And this didn't really initiate the same sort of panic, the same sort of concern that you saw in Iowa with the disappearances of two paper boys.

[Annie Brown]

It wasn't just two boys in Atlanta who disappeared. It was a whole slew of them. And it's striking to see just how differently the world responded. First, a 14 year old boy named Teddy Smith went missing. Four days later, 13 year old Alfred Evans disappears. A few months after that, another 14 year old vanishes on the way to the bank for his mom. Then a nine year old running an errand for a neighbor. The national media was largely quiet. There was no innovative campaign to find them. But it happened over and over again. In fact, over the course of two years, 29 kids and young people disappeared in Atlanta. One clear difference was that all of these children were black,

[Paul Renfro]

all of these youths were African American. And the discourse around it. There was no real kind of cry from the public apart from the victims families.

[Annie Brown]

And why didn't the Atlanta kidnappings lead to a similar campaign?

[Paul Renfro]

I think it has to do with our understandings of childhood and childhood innocence. And I think those things are always racialized in very particular ways. And so the descriptors of innocence that were so readily attached to Johnny Gosh and Eugene Wade Martin in Iowa and other missing or slain white kids, those descriptors were not applied to the youngsters who were kidnapped and killed in Atlanta. Oftentimes they were described as streetwise, as street hustlers. And so in a way, some of the discourse surrounding their disappearances and deaths served to legitimate their disappearances and deaths.

[Annie Brown]

Many of the children kidnapped in Atlanta were found dead in the weeks and months after they disappeared. But some remained missing. And yet none of them appeared in the National Child Safety Council's milk carton campaign.

[Roman Mars]

And even for the kids who did end up on milk cartons, the campaign was largely unsuccessful. Of the 200 kids who were featured in the National Child Safety Council's campaign, only two were ever found alive.

[Annie Brown]

Barbara still remembers the day they got the call that a boy named Bobby Smith Jr. Was found.

[Barbara Huggett]

The day they called and said that he had been found, we got on the loudspeaker, on an intercom and let everyone know. And it was just a sense of elation. And you wanted to let everyone in the building that had mailed it, boxed it, shipped it you know, you just wanted to tell everyone who had touched it that it was worthwhile. You could hear the cheer throughout the whole building. Yay, we found a child. It was wonderful, you know.

[Annie Brown]

But Bobby Smith wasn't found because of the milk carton.

[Roman Mars]

Bobby was found by coincidence.

[Annie Brown]

His kidnapper's car had been involved in an accident. And when the police came looking for the owner of the car, they found Bobby.

[Roman Mars]

But most of the kids featured in the national campaign and in the smaller local ones were never found.

[Noreen Gosch]

Unfortunately, the leads from the milk cartons did not reveal where Johnny's location was.

[Annie Brown]

That's Noreen Gosch again. Her son Johnny was never found, but she and Barbara Huggett are both adamant that the campaign had a positive impact.

[Noreen Gosch]

What it did was promote more awareness so that people were looking. If they saw a child that looked like they were in distress, maybe you questioned whether or not those were the parents.

[Annie Brown]

Mostly, the milk cartons just got people thinking about kidnapping.

[Noreen Gosch]

I have talked to quite a number of adults, and they could remember their mom putting the milk carton on the kitchen table and saying, now we're going to go over the rules again. And they would use the example of the boys on the milk carton and

[Barbara Huggett]

then make the correlation between that child and their child's life.

[Roman Mars]

In other words, the faces on the milk cartons scared the hell out of

[Annie Brown]

everyone, which ultimately led to the campaign's downfall.

[Roman Mars]

Almost as quickly as they began, the milk carton campaigns started to wind down. Dairies began to pull the missing kids pictures from their side panels.

[Barbara Huggett]

One reason, of course, with the cartons is that the industry shifted to plastic.

[Annie Brown]

But dairies also started to get tired of the depressing message.

[Noreen Gosch]

They took it away because there were people that were complaining that they thought it might scare children at the breakfast table.

[Annie Brown]

The famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock condemned the milk carton campaign. It was traumatizing. He said kids shouldn't have to face that over their lucky charms.

[Unidentified Expert/Commentator]

They see these missing kids kind of staring at them. That milk carton almost demands them to have that conversation.

[Paul Renfro]

What to do if you see a

[Unidentified Expert/Commentator]

stranger or a stranger accosts you?

[Roman Mars]

That's historian Paul Renfro again. Paul wrote a book about the milk carton kids and the larger panic gripping society at the time. Stranger Danger.

[Annie Brown]

Paul studies the way child safety was talked about at this time in the news, on the radio by politicians.

[Unidentified Expert/Commentator]

Folks are kicking around these numbers that are just astronomical. Folks are saying there are 1.8 million missing children in the United States. And missing becomes very Closely attached to abducted by strangers.

[Roman Mars]

But that just wasn't true.

[Annie Brown]

Every year, around 350,000 kids are reported missing to the authorities. That's around 1,000 every day. But the most recent report from the FBI found that the number of kids who are actually taken by strangers is only 0.1% of that.

[Unidentified Expert/Commentator]

The major cases that kind of spur national anxiety about this sort of thing are presumed to be stranger kidnappings. But the overwhelming majority of kidnappings are perpetrated by parents or someone close to the child. This mirrors a kind of larger societal myth that those who are more likely to perpetrate sexual assaults are strangers or those who don't know the victim. And that's kind of a way to obscure or overlook the real source of that danger. It's not the stranger that we've constructed in our minds of this kind of evil individual who is lurking in the shadows, but, you know, it's someone whose face we know.

[Annie Brown]

The National Child Safety Council's campaign was built on this misconception, and they were criticized for featuring only kids who had been abducted by strangers. But smaller grassroots campaigns cropped up across the country, ones that didn't have those rules.

[Roman Mars]

It was one of these other milk carton campaigns that ended up featuring the face of a missing girl named Bonnie Bullock.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I wasn't kidnapped by strangers. I was kidnapped by people that loved me.

[Annie Brown]

And Bonnie was found after she saw her own face on the milk carton.

[Roman Mars]

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[Barbara Huggett]

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[Annie Brown]

in 1995, a few years after the milk carton campaign had ended, CBS aired a brand new made for TV movie called the Face on the Milk Carton.

[Casual Speaker/Interviewer]

Hi guys. Hey, what's up?

[Paul Renfro]

Hey, what's up guys?

[Annie Brown]

In it there's a classic scene. Janie Johnson, a typical teenager living a comfortable life with her loving parents, is in the cafeteria one day at school.

[Bonnie Bullock]

Great bologna relish.

[Annie Brown]

A friend spills some milk on her lap.

[Bonnie Bullock]

You know, I have milk intolerance.

[Annie Brown]

And starts to comment on the milk carton.

[Bonnie Bullock]

How is anyone supposed to recognize a 3 year old kidnapped 13 years ago?

[Annie Brown]

Only then does Janie glance down at the picture of the three year old girl and she recognizes her own face. This movie played over and over, over again throughout my childhood. And I think it was this story that actually introduced me to the milk carton kids and to the idea that it was possible that you could be kidnapped and not even know was fiction, of course. But something very similar had already happened to a very real little girl named Bonnie Bullock.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I want to say I was gone from. I think I was a little after three and I was found when I was almost seven.

[Roman Mars]

Bonnie had been kidnapped not by a stranger, but by her mother and her stepfather. And because of that, Bonnie's dad didn't know if her story would qualify to get on a milk carton.

[Bonnie Bullock]

Someone introduced him to this campaign and he said, well, it's her mom that has her, you know. And they're like well do you know where she is? And he goes no. And he's like is she coming back? Have you talked to her? Have anything? He's like no, I know nothing. And he goes well then that's considered missing.

[Annie Brown]

A local campaign decided to start printing Bonnie's picture. Meanwhile, three year old Bonnie has no idea she's been kidnapped. But her childhood was pretty strange.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I don't know where we started on the run. I mean, I know we went to places like Pennsylvania, we went To San Antonio. We were gone for a while in a place called Saipan.

[Annie Brown]

They spend a year in Saipan, this small island near Guam.

[Bonnie Bullock]

Yeah, we lived in the woods, like in a shack.

[Roman Mars]

Next was Hawaii, but they were still lying pretty low.

[Bonnie Bullock]

We stayed inside all the time in Hawaii. I recall maybe one or two times being outside.

[Annie Brown]

Finally, they end up in Colorado, and her mom and stepdad start to relax a bit. The next door neighbors had a bunch of kids, and Bonnie would play over there all the time.

[Bonnie Bullock]

We would play Barbies, and I had my little, you know, Barbie case, and I would bring that over.

[Roman Mars]

Aside from going to her neighbors, Bonnie was hardly ever allowed to leave the house. But on an unusual occasion, when Bonnie was 7 years old, her stepdad took her to the supermarket. They needed milk.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I just remember, like, looking and seeing how many cartons of milk there were. Nowadays, it's like whatever brand it is would be facing you. Whereas at that time, it's seemed like all the pictures were facing you. He grabbed the milk. He's like, hey, do you know who that is? Hey, you're famous, you know? He's like, look, look, you're. You're here. And I was like, oh. And I saw myself. And I was like, ooh, is that me?

[Annie Brown]

And he's like, hush, hush. Bonnie's stepdad bought the milk carton with her face on it. And when they finished it, he asked her a question.

[Bonnie Bullock]

Do you want it? You want to keep it? And so I remember cutting it out and being like, whoa. And staring at the picture. And I think my hair was, like, in a little ponytail on the side, and I was wearing this little dress. He's like, now you gotta keep it in, you know, a safe place. And I must have tossed it in my Barbie case.

[Annie Brown]

At this moment, Bonnie didn't know that anything was wrong.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I know I didn't read then because I would have realized that I was missing. Because on the picture it actually said missing child. And then my name and the date.

[Roman Mars]

At seven years old, she couldn't read. Bonnie doesn't remember ever going to a real school.

[Bonnie Bullock]

He was so confident in himself that he could show me that because nothing's going to happen with it.

[Annie Brown]

But one of the next times, Bonnie was at the neighbor's house, she left her Barbie case there with the picture she cut out of her own face on the milk carton.

[Bonnie Bullock]

And I remember going back over there a couple days later, and I was like, oh, I left my Barbies. Can I get my Barbies? And the mom was there, and I Remember her being like, oh, Bonnie, we found this beautiful picture of you. And she was like, is this you? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's me. I'm famous. And she was like, oh, is your name Bonnie Bullock? And I go, no, no, no, my name's Bonnie Smith. And she's like, oh. She's like, I don't have any pictures of you. She goes, do you care if I keep it? And I was like, oh, I don't know if you're allowed to keep it. And she goes, oh, I'll give it right back. Can I just keep it for a little bit on the refrigerator? And I was like, yeah. I was like, okay.

[Annie Brown]

Not long after everything changed, I remember

[Bonnie Bullock]

there a lot of police showing up. A lot of police showing up.

[Roman Mars]

Police swarmed Bonnie's home. She was whisked away and returned to a her father. But the reunion wasn't easy at first.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I remember being scared because I didn't

[Barbara Huggett]

know my dad and all I wanted

[Bonnie Bullock]

to do was be with her. It kind of sucked, you know.

[Annie Brown]

After returning to her dad, Bonnie had a pretty normal life. She started school, went on to college, and eventually became a nurse. She's one of the milk carton campaign's few success stories.

[Bonnie Bullock]

I believe that I am who I am because I was on a milk carton and I was found. And, you know, I had opportunities with my dad growing up that I might not have had with my mom. I was able to live a great life, and I'm grateful for it.

[Annie Brown]

Her story, while the stuff of a literal made for TV movie, is actually much more representative than a lot of the missing child cases that made headlines.

[Paul Renfro]

It just underscores the reality of the problem of kidnapping. Right.

[Annie Brown]

This is historian Paul Renfro.

[Paul Renfro]

Again, it is a problem that is primarily one of the family and of acquaintances. It really is not one that's focused on strangers, even though that is the phenomenon that is most feared and the one that drove this panic in the 80s and 90s.

[Annie Brown]

Unfortunately, stranger danger didn't stop driving panic in the 80s and 90s, though. The fear itself has kind of mutated. New Tonight, a popular D.C. pizza joint is at the center of a social media firestorm accused of being a human trafficking hotspot, using children for satanic rituals and worse.

[Paul Renfro]

It begins on Twitter.

[Annie Brown]

Actually, just weeks before the 2016 election, a theory starts to take Twitter and Reddit by storm.

[News Reporter]

Under the hashtag Pizzagate, the vandals are spreading an imaginary story that the popular Northwest D.C. pizza shop is the center of a child sex Slave ring.

[Paul Renfro]

This notion that the Democratic Party and specifically folks in the orbit of Hillary Clinton were abducting and abusing children and they were doing all of this in a pizza parlor.

[Annie Brown]

Now it's not just strangers taking your kids, it's political elites. Reddit sleuths believed that Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta were using underground tunnels to access the basement of a pizza place called Comet Ping Pong.

[News Reporter]

The conspiracy theory may sound absurd, but. But it has won over lots of believers who keep turning up at the restaurant.

[Annie Brown]

The story gets picked up by Alex Jones at Infowars and the Epoch Times. Protesters show up outside the pizza place, death threats start pouring in.

[News Reporter]

The owner and staff at Comet Ping Pong have been getting plenty of those threats and now it is spreading to other nearby businesses.

[Annie Brown]

And it really escalated a few weeks later.

[Paul Renfro]

It spurred an individual to drive up from North Carolina to the Comet Ping Pong parlor and try to liberate the children who were ostensibly being enslaved and held hostage in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong. And of course he arrived armed. He was ready to die for this cause. He fired several rounds and thankfully didn't strike anybody. But soon learn that there is no basement to the Comet Ping Pong.

[Annie Brown]

And of course there were no kids in the non existent basement.

[Paul Renfro]

I think Pizzagate and the shooting incident really encapsulates, I think, a lot of the fears and anxieties that led to the development of the milk carton campaign, the child safety campaign around it, a lot of the legislation that grew out of that movement and these broader fears of human trafficking and sex trafficking, and the supposedly debaucherous acts of certain political elites in the United States.

[Annie Brown]

But unfortunately, as we all know, political elites have indeed been committing debaucherous acts. I mean, this all gets complicated by the fact that as we start learning more about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in it kind of confirms this sense of a cabal of these elites of a child sex abuse ring, right?

[Paul Renfro]

I think so. In many ways, yes, it does confirm the existence of a cabal that is invested in abusing young people. But a lot of the discourse surrounding the Epstein files seeks to weaponize those files in the service of a political project and specifically a partisan project. And I think this is true on either side of the political aisle. So instead of focusing on victims or focusing on the eradication of abuse and exploitation, it's being used to score petty partisan points.

[Annie Brown]

Here's the thing. The Epstein files document real abuse that deserves to be taken seriously. The perpetrators should be held accountable but that's not the only reason the story has consumed the American imagination in the way that it has. It's also that the files seem to confirm our stickiest conspiracy theories and our worst fears. But they paint a picture that is very different than what actually threatens most American children, which is something much more mundane.

[Paul Renfro]

There's a tension, clearly, between the Epstein files and everything they seem to verify and the reality that children are far more likely to be exploited by people they know, by family members. The Epstein files and the discourse surrounding them, I think, will only sort of exacerbate the misunderstanding and exacerbate the confusion around these sorts of matters, and they will not contribute or will deter from the actual sort of naming of child sexual abuse and a deeper understanding of child sexual abuse.

[Roman Mars]

Mr. Speaker. Domestic child trafficking is a serious problem. Sadly, in the United States in the

[Annie Brown]

last few decades, one statistic about child sex trafficking has taken hold.

[Roman Mars]

Around 300,000American youth are at risk of sexual commercial exploitation and trafficking each year.

[Annie Brown]

It's in the neighborhood of 300,000 children domestically that are being trafficked every day that 300,000American children are at risk of being trafficked for sex. Studies suggest that over 290,000 youth, almost 300,000American children, are at risk.

[Noreen Gosch]

There are estimates between 100,000 to 300.

[Annie Brown]

The statistic is cited by lawmakers, more than 300 by celebrities, by nonprofits.

[Morgan & Morgan Representative]

Furthermore, the FBI has estimated that over 300,000American children are at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking annually.

[Annie Brown]

And it stuck with the public. A survey done by a University of Miami political scientist found that over half of the country believes that the number of kids who are trafficked each year is 300,000 or more.

[Noreen Gosch]

The more we talk about it, the more we can change it and stop it.

[Annie Brown]

Thank you so much for your information and for educating me about this, too. I appreciate it. But this number is incredibly wrong. It comes from a study back in 2001, a study that wasn't calculating the number of victims of child sex trafficking, but how many kids might be at risk. And that meant kids in foster homes or public housing, kids who lived near borders or had access to a car. Child sex trafficking is a real problem, just not at this scale. The nature of these crimes is that they're underreported. But the statistics we do have tell a very different story. In 2021, FBI agents working on child sex trafficking cases identified just over 500 victims who are underage. Not 300,000, but 500. And some data suggests that for nearly half of all cases, the child is trafficked not by a stranger, but by someone close to them.

[Paul Renfro]

In the United States, it most clearly is a serious, a grave problem, but it's one that we would rather distort through these larger, more fantastical narratives. I think it's far more comforting to say it's nefarious strangers rather than a larger kind of structural problem.

[Annie Brown]

I guess my question is, like, why do you think that we gravitate towards these fantastical narratives of what is actually dangerous for children? Like, what feels good about that?

[Paul Renfro]

Right. It's comforting to refuse to interrogate the actual relationships that do spawn this sort of abuse. And it's easier to localize that threat within forces that we already find dangerous or we already find suspicious. Yes, it is strangely comforting to say it's actually individuals who are holding children hostage in a pizza parlor, or individuals who were flying all over the world, snatching children and taking them to an island, then to really kind of question oneself and the sorts of commitments they have to the family, to these religious institutions or political and social institutions that they hold dear.

[Annie Brown]

Nothing delivered this strange comfort in a more lasting way than the milk carton. For a few short years, 5 billion milk cartons sat in every kitchen in America telling the same story that the threat is out there.

[Roman Mars]

After the milk carton campaign ended, pictures of missing children started showing up on all kinds of other things. Pizza boxes, plastic grocery bags, utility bills. Actually, the utility bill campaign went on for much longer than the milk cartons, but most of us haven't even heard of it. It just didn't stick. There was something different about seeing a face on the side of a milk carton.

[Unidentified Expert/Commentator]

There is a sense of familial unity that I think milk helps to author this sense of maternal nurturance and also being this kind of item around which people gather around the breakfast table. So putting missing kids faces on that item was quite deliberate and perhaps the reason why that lives on.

[Roman Mars]

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Dahldorf and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell, mixing by Charlie Brandon King, Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real from 99% Invisible. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu from BBC Studios. Our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shann Pillay and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stephen Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the Sirius XM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful white city, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at 100objects99pi.org.

[Bonnie Bullock]

Foreign.

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