In the early 1980s, missing children became a prominent social problem; their faces appeared on milk cartons, and their stories were featured on television specials. Advocates coupled fright¬ening examples of murdered or vanished children with disturb¬ing statistics: strangers, they claimed, kidnapped 50,000 children each year. In 1985, reporters at the Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize for pointing out that the movement's statistics were exag¬gerated: they identi11ed a "numbers gap between the 50,000 estimate and the roughly 70 child kidnappings investigated annually by the FBI. In response, one activist testified before Congress: "I don't think anything has surprised me more than this preoccupation with numbers,
and the ... 'only 67 or 68 or only 69: ...What is it with the 'only: sir?" A movement that had promoted big numbers now argued that smaller, more accurate numbers were irrelevant