Social media rumors claiming mass child abductions are occurring in Virginia are fake, the Virginia State Police explained this week.
“Virginia State Police is aware of multiple social media posts raising concerns about missing children across the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia State Police is not investigating any reports of mass abductions in Virginia, nor is there evidence of mass abductions occurring in Virginia,” police said Wednesday in a release.
Last week, 88 names were listed in a state database of missing children, lower than the weekly average of 98, police said. Of the 3,274 children reported missing in Virginia between Jan. 1 and Wednesday, 141 are still missing, 4.3% of the total.
While the weekly average seems like a lot, the Virginia State Police said the numbers are high in part because of broad guidelines for declaring a child missing, because the police report every case and because of a high number of runaways who return home — but whose cases are not immediately cleared from databases.
Comments on viral TikTok videos showing children who went missing from various parts of Virginia on the same day, however, allege that the disappearances are not coincidental. Those theories, police said, are false.
“Social media can be an absolute double-edged sword. We received a lot of phone calls asking about a mass abductor in the state of Virginia. We have no information to support that,” John Bischoff, vice president of the Missing Children Division at the center, told WTOP-FM.
The AWARE Foundation, which also helps families find missing loved ones, concurred.
“The problem is that we have kids that we know were on that list that are located and safe but they’re still showing up. Of course, that adds to the conspiracy theory that we have a mass kidnapping because the kids are not removed in a timely fashion,” AWARE Foundation President Kenny Jarels told the Hampton Roads area’s WAVY-TV.
