This is of course the new moral panic. The ridiculous and bizarre Q-Anon phenomenon has some number of millions of people believing that there is a global conspiracy of prominent Democratic politicians, Hollywood stars and rich people that kidnaps and rapes children, then murders them and extracts a substance from their blood that gives people eternal youth, or something like that; and that God Emperor Ronald T. Dump is going to blow the lid off the whole thing any day now. (Gee I wonder what he's been waiting for.)
While that is generally not given credence by sane people, the perpetrators have been trying to mainstream it by the backdoor of ginning up a crusade against what they tell people is a massive epidemic of child sex trafficking, without mentioning the Q-Anon conspiracy. Since it's possible that many people who are paying only casual attention, I expect the belief that this is a big problem is widespread.
Actually it isn't. As Michael Hobbes explains, the actual story is complicated, but it isn't what people think. The number of children who are literally kidnapped and sexually exploited in the U.S. is not exactly known, but it's probably in the low hundreds at the most. And this has nothing to do with shadowy international cartels, it's done by plain old American criminals.
Yet we hear numbers bandied about in the hundreds of thousands. What these numbers actually refer to is kids who are runaways or "throwaways," whose home environments are so bad that they wind up on the streets, although even most of them return home after a short time. In fact, often they were being sexually abused, but by a parent or caretaker. Some runaway kids sell their bodies for survival, but nobody is actually trafficking them. A lot of child "kidnappings," if not the majority, are actually custody disputes.
So the bigger problem is not sex trafficking, but hundreds of thousands of children who do not have a safe and nurturing home environment. Yes, we should all be for saving the children, but we need to knw what we're actually talking about.
1 comment:
Oh, I think they know something. I'm speculating that they're aware of children leaving, voluntarily or involuntarily, the homes of people in their own tribe. Since tribal membership defines the parents as being 'good parents', it can't be their fault. Neither can it be the kids' faults for the same reason. Also, they're just children.
So it must be caused by deviant members of an alien tribe, because deviants are welcomed there. Its sorta like group projection; accusing others of being the owners of your own flaws.
By a nice bit of circular reasoning it also proves that the alien tribe welcomes deviants. That works like a charm as long as you're careful not to make both claims in the same diatribe.
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