No, there hasn’t been a sudden spike in missing girls in D.C.

The rumors were alarming, delivered to huge audiences by influencers and regular users of TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms who were both enraged and incredulous.

“How is it possible that I am in Athens, Greece and I have seen more news about the 34 girls missing from D.C. within 24 hours than I have seen from any legacy media? They’re purposefully not reporting it. There’s no other conclusion,” one outraged TikTok user with more than 18,000 followers said at the end of last month. 

“Thirty-four girls have just up and vanished in Washington, D.C. You’re not talking about it, the news is not talking about it, why isn’t anyone talking about it?” asked another influencer, whose Instagram post was viewed 1.7 million times.

The only problem: It wasn’t at all true. On June 28, the Metropolitan Police Department posted a response on X, saying that the city wasn’t seeing an increase in missing persons cases. Some of the initial social media posters eventually retracted the claim, but their apologies received a fraction of the online engagement. One influencer’s initial video was shared 7,300 times; her follow-up got six shares.

You could easily brush this aside as another case of online misinformation; there’s no shortage of it, after all. But experts and advocates for missing kids say that the misinformation about D.C. both clouds and clarifies what remains a problem the public should focus on: kids, many of them Black, who do go missing. 

And the issue is even more relevant this week: Friday is Relisha Rudd Remembrance Day, when community members stop to commemorate the eight-year-old girl who disappeared from a D.C. homeless shelter in 2014. 

How did this new rumor about the missing girls get started?

I delved into the depths of social media to try to find the initial source of the spurious claim that 34 girls went missing from D.C. in a 24-hour period, to no avail. But that it went viral isn’t particularly shocking: There was a jaw-dropping number, righteous indignation that legacy media wasn’t covering it, and a collective sense that social media could help. 

It also gained credibility when some users started sharing a TV news clip on the apparent disappearances, though the clip only mentioned a dozen teenagers. But anyone local would have noticed a problem: The clip featured a chief of police who left D.C. four years ago and a Ward 8 councilmember who hasn’t been in office since earlier this year. How come? Because that TV clip was from 2017.

If you recall, that was the year when there was a similar (and complicated) controversy over an apparent uptick in missing kids in D.C., many of them Black girls. The source there was the police department itself, which had implemented a new policy to publicize every missing child case on social media – making it seem like there was a sudden deluge.

Somehow, 2017 just repeated itself, but with the additional fuel of TikTok.

OK, so it was a badly sourced rumor. But kids are going missing in D.C., right?

Yes. But experts told me that misinformation can actually make the job of finding missing kids harder, not easier.

“It’s like the car alarm: You hear the alarm going off, and at first you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ The 20th time you could care less,” says John Bischoff, the vice-president for the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We don’t want to desensitize the public to missing child information.”

Henderson Long, a private detective who leads D.C.’s Missing Voice, which works with residents and police to help find missing children, says he’s used to seeing social media rumors on alleged spikes in the numbers of missing kids. He sees both sides of it: social media can be an incredible tool to spread damaging misinformation, or to more quickly spread awareness of actual cases of missing people.

“Where their hearts were, I don’t know,” he says of the people who spread the recent rumor about D.C. “I don’t want to turn people away from using their platforms. It was great we were talking about missing people, period. But you have to be careful because social media is so powerful.”

What is the state of missing kids in D.C.?

Per MPD, there have been 1,341 total cases of missing people in D.C. so far this year – 958 of those being kids. As of this week, 33 total missing-persons cases remain open (the profiles of currently missing people are here, and they are regularly shared on MPD’s X account.) The department says it closes more than 99% of the cases that are brought to its attention.

The challenge, say experts, is that people might go missing for different reasons and under different circumstances, and law enforcement and organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are constantly adjusting lags in information.

“Missing persons cases are very fluid,” according to Long. “A child can leave home and come back and be reported found and leave again.” Or, he adds, the disappearance can be much longer; just this week, MPD found a 14-year-old Black girl who had been missing since April.

“You don’t know what the case is initially, whether they are dead or alive. Every one of them could be a Relisha Rudd. Thank God it’s not, they just ran away from home and true enough they’ll return,” Long says, noting that the majority come back relatively shortly, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t still vulnerable. “Could they be abused or trafficked? Yes they can. Are they committing felony activity? Yes they can. Just because they were found doesn’t mean they didn’t experience trauma.”

Bischoff says that there are about 360,000 reported cases of missing children across the country each year. His organization helps with roughly 30,000 of those, of which 91% are what are known as endangered runaways. (Some 6% are family abductions, 1% are non-family abductions, and 1% are lost or otherwise missing.)

“Those kids face so many endangerments while they are missing: drugs, gang involvement, child sex trafficking, how are they surviving. All these things come into play and they get glossed over by the general public because they think, ‘They’re troubled youth, they just wanted to be out on their own.’ Totally false,” he says. “Those kids need our help quite a bit…  That’s when the public is really needed to step in with a caring heart and say ‘We need to find the child first.’”

In D.C., the additional truth is most of the kids who go missing are Black and brown. 

“The reality is… children of color are going missing at an alarming rate. We do applaud MPD for using social media to bring awareness. There are far too many kids of color that are disappearing,” says Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black & Missing Foundation. 

One of the absolute worst-case scenarios – one whose trauma still reverberates 11 years later – is Relisha Rudd’s. Her disappearance wasn’t reported until 18 days after it happened, a product of significant institutional failings. Her case remains unsolved to this day. (For the fullest version of what happened, we recommend listening to the podcast “Through the Cracks.”)

What can we do to help find missing kids in D.C.?

Long says the first critical step is for children to be reported missing right away. He stresses that there’s no waiting period to file a missing-persons report (for anyone), and the longer someone waits, the harder the investigation can get.

“When kids go missing, time is of the essence,” he says. “Once you let a certain amount of time lapse, you’re behind.”

Long commends MPD for sharing and publicizing every case of a missing person in D.C., as does Bischoff. 

“We appreciated what D.C. was doing back in 2017 when they said we’re going to share everything. That was a big change,” Bischoff says. “It was very scary for the community initially, as in, ‘Are we dealing with some type of huge problem that’s just impacted our community?’ When really that problem was always there. This is actually happening daily.”

Additionally – and this offers a moment of self-reflection – experts say the media can do more to publicize cases of missing people, especially those considered critical – kids 15 and under and adults over 65, for example. And that can just mean sharing verified information as it comes across social media.

“It takes one set of eyes to be a hero, somebody steps forward and says, ‘I think I recognize that kid,’ and it leads to a recovery,” says Bischoff. 

But he and Wilson stress that people should rely on trusted sources for information, and not simply share the first thing that comes across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or X. 

“As an organization, we do not publicize or upload any case unless it is fully vetted, that there is a police report on file,” says Wilson, noting that people can come to their website to verify that a missing person’s report has been filed.  

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also has an online map showing the cases it is helping with, and users can zoom in on the area where they live to see all the active cases.