April 27, 2021 • 28 mins
Odds are, you’re probably not going to be kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking in a Target parking lot in broad daylight. On the fantastic podcast You’re Wrong About, Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall debunk the thinking that leads to moral panics.
Michael explains what we’re all getting wrong about trafficking and why it matters.
Listen to You’re Wrong About: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/human-trafficking/id1380008439?i=1000465289965
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There are
No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. Bad guys
are coming. They're coming for you, and they're coming for
your kids. If you spent any time on social media
in the last few years, you've probably heard some version
of a story like that. Strangers are waiting, lurking, generally
(00:26):
in the parking lot or the aisles of a big
box store like Target, and they're hunting down women and
their children to snatch them up in broad daylight for trafficking.
This is not new at all. I definitely grew up
hearing horror stories like the one about the woman driver
terrified by a man tailgating or and flashing her high
beams at night, but he's actually just trying to warn
her that a man is in her back seat waiting
(00:47):
to strike. Those stories definitely made a big impression on me.
But instead of them just being passed around in home room,
add in social media and stories like this can spread
to peak virality online. Stories like these are especially common
on social media. Just search the hashtag sex traffic and
awareness on TikTok and you will find thousands of women
making videos about how traffickers tied a ribbon or a
(01:08):
zip tied to their car to mark them as a victim,
or how a van parked too close to them in
a parking lot and it was a near miss for
a trafficking attempt. The only issue is this kind of trafficking,
where someone is snatched by a stranger in a public place,
is exceedingly rare. Yet videos like these often go viral
and social media, leading the impression that women should be
(01:28):
afraid anytime they leave their homes to go to the store.
In this two part episode, we'll explore the roots of
online panics around trafficking, why they're so dangerous, and here
from two people who are fighting back with facts. The
podcast You're Wrong About is kind of a gold standard
for revisiting moral panics and debunking the commonly held beliefs
(01:48):
that led to them. Hosts Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall
have found that in many ways, we're basically just doing
a mad Lives where the blank is filled with some
kind of boogeyman society can blame at times when people
are feeling anxious are scared, like the Satanic panic of
the eighties and nineties, where parents were horrified that satanic
cults were ritualistically abusing children. Only that was never really happening. Basically,
(02:11):
there was always some big scary threat that we need
to be watching out for. My name is Michael Hobbs.
I'm the co host of a podcast called You're Wrong
About and another podcast called Maintenance Phase So Online. I
find that so many conversations about big complex issues, things
like trafficking or homelessness, are really dominated by people who
don't really know what they're talking about and who were
(02:31):
either spreading bad information intentionally or unintentionally. When you started
making You're Wrong About, where you all setting out to
give people the tools to push back against this kind
of bad information. No, like this, this was completely accidental.
We had no idea when we started that we would
find out that America keeps having the same moral panic
over and over again. This was not something that we thought,
(02:54):
you know, it's all the same thing. It's like a
tide that comes in and out. You know, the satanic
panic is always with us, queuing on is always with us.
We had no idea that we would come up with that.
It's just sort of we we research, sort of debunkable
episodes in history, and when you start to bunking them,
you're like an hour or two into the research and
you're like, oh, it's this one again. Oh, we're gonna
(03:14):
do the thing where they're like strangers coming to get
your kids, right, or there's some societal out group right
like homeless people, like trans people, like sex offenders that
we don't like, and we're going to project this extreme
power onto them. We're going to project this extreme rapaciousness
onto them. There's millions of them, you know, they're coming
(03:35):
to the border. They're trying to steal your kids and
get them into street gangs. I mean, it's it's like
this mad libs where you can just throw in like, Okay,
which societal outgroup is it going to be? What are
they doing to our kids today? Like it's it's over
and over again the same thing. So we've both me
and my co host Sarah Marshall have become these like
accidental insufferable debunkers or we're like, nope, same one. We're
(03:57):
doing this again, guys, Like let's calm it down. We've
done this seven times before. So in my research around disinformation,
particularly like false panics, around things that are rooted in
people's identity. So whether it's trans folks, queer folks, you know, immigrants,
it is always sort of the same thing. Like I
feel right now we're seeing all of the legislations would
(04:19):
have meant to make you think as if trans children
are like running the world, Like trans children are the
biggest threat to your kids, totally and there and and
it's the same tropes, right, So they're coming for your kids,
they're recruiting your kids, Like this is the same thing
that Anita Bryant said about gay people in the seventies
and the nine eighties, Like we're just running exactly the
same playbook. Anita Bryant was a singer and beauty queen
(04:40):
who famously led the Save Our Children campaign that attempted
to save children by cracking down on gay people having rights.
And we're just mad living in a new societal outgroup.
So I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I
read a bunch of books about the Black plague, just
out of like more, just out of like morbid curiosity.
And you know what you find in these old panics,
(05:01):
You know, these times of societal anxiety, you had some
of the biggest pogroms against Jews in Europe in history, right,
it was like, there's this big thing we can't explain.
There's all of these anxieties, people are dying all around me.
Who can we blame? Like, we don't want to look
at any existing societal structures. We don't want to look
at something that's just difficult for us to explain. It's
sort of out of our scientific knowledge. So, uh, there's
(05:23):
this group here that seems sort of shifting and we
don't really like them. Let's blame them and kill a
bunch of them. It's like these things are old, ancient
human impulses and they're very difficult to see at the time.
But zooming out a little bit, you're like, oh no,
this is just what happens during times of anxiety, and
isn't the perfect recipe for a very anxious society a
(05:45):
global pandemic. It's probably not a coincidence that has COVID worsened.
We saw more and more content about Q and on
and Save the Children, purporting to save kids from some
perceived danger lurking out in the world. Why do you
think right now the specific moment in politics and culture,
why are we seeing this resurgence of panic around sex
trafficking and trafficking dowsing. I mean, it's hard to say exactly.
(06:09):
I think you know this this really hit its peak
last summer, all of this q and on hashtag save
the Children's Stuff, and it really seems like there was
a moment where, you know, we're in the middle of
a pandemic. Information was all over the place, right like, remember,
we didn't like, are we wearing masks? Are we not
wearing masks? Some states are in lockdown, some states are
aggressively not in lockdown. It was just this time where
(06:31):
nobody really knew what was going on. And there's some
research that indicates that sort of at times when you're
really angry, you search for information that reinforces your worldview,
and at times when you're really anxious, you are more
open to information that doesn't reinforce your worldview. So all so,
all summer, everybody's inside, we're all on our phones, there's
(06:52):
nothing else to do, We're looking at the internet, and
all of a sudden you have people whose minds are
a little bit more open to things like, well, maybe
the real danger to children isn't COVID, maybe it's actually
these you know, white van driving traffickers who come from
other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and
take them abroad or these these these narratives that just
make no sense, right, and you know, at the heart
(07:15):
of it, the little seed in the middle of it
was this insane q and on stuff right where it's
like a dren of chrome and like Hillary Clinton is
like cutting the faces off a baby, like completely nuts stuff.
But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that that
you can very easily say, well, I care about children,
and so what's the harm of sharing this little mean like,
what's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook
(07:38):
that says, you know, infamously there was one that said
that children are thousands of times more likely to die
of trafficking than of COVID And so it feels, you know,
and it was in like the the Instagram aesthetic right
where it's got like the little logo and it's in
pink and it's very share able, and it's like, well,
what's the harm, Like I might as well share that,
you know, if it helps save a kid or two,
then I'm doing something good and up some sort of
(08:01):
that's a feeling of certainty in the world, right, But
nobody thinks about what it does to reinforce these just
deranged myths that aren't helping children, they're not helping non children,
they're not helping anybody. But it's it's easy to forget
that when you're like, well, what's the harm of sharing this?
And then all of a sudden these bananas memes start
just bouncing around the internet for months. Yeah, I think
(08:23):
list honestly listening to your wrong about with something that
really helped make that transition for me, because you know,
for a while, I'd be like, well, if this person
thinks it's going to do some good to share this
unstrewn meme on their Facebook page about traffic younger, about children,
who is it hurting? Now I've come to see that, Okay, Well,
if we over emphasize the risks of little kids being
(08:44):
like snatched up or things like that, what are we
under what are we under emphasizing you know, kids like
youth who are facing homelessness, youth who are are put
in precarious or you know, bad or dangerous situations, things
that are much more common, Like if we focus on
this big scary thing that isn't happening. All of the
things that actually are happening, we're just taking attention away
(09:05):
from that, right. And there's also this retributive aspect to
where a lot of those memes that went around we're
about sort of catching the pedophiles, catching the traffickers. You know,
we have to find the evil people and we have
to root them out of our society. And that's not
where the threats to children come from. The threats to
children are primarily in the family. A lot of it
is things like homelessness. There's very few youth homeless shelters
in most cities in America. There's also a completely broken
(09:28):
foster care system. So when you look at things like
the sort of Missing and Exploited Child hotline, of the
calls are coming from foster care. So when we talk
about trafficking, we're mostly talking about runaways. We're mostly talking
about kids who are abused at home, abused in foster care.
They're queer, they're trans they need a place to stay,
they don't need somebody else to go to jail forever.
(09:49):
And when we're sharing these means that are sort of
blaming all of these societal problems on these societal others
that we already don't like or a little bit wary of. Anyway,
all we're really doing is contributing to these retributive solutions
which do not make children safer. Yeah, and I also
think it does kind of come down to what you
were talking about before, this idea of like wanting to
catch the bad guys. That's so much more exciting and fun. Then, Oh,
(10:12):
we need to confront some of these systemic ills in
our society that allow for already marginalized people fault through
the cracks. That's boring. It's so much more fun to
be like, Yeah, I'm gonna track down these bad guys.
Let's take a quick break. Our back on Instagram video
(10:40):
made by mom influencer Katie Sorenson, where she said that
two strangers tried to kidnap her kids and a Michael's
craft store in California, got over two million views Monday
of this week. My children were the targets of attempted kidnap,
which is such a weird thing to even vocalize. Um,
but it happened, um. And I want to share that
(11:00):
story with you in an effort to raise awareness as
to what signs to look for and to just encourage
parents to be more aware of their surroundings and what
is going on around them. Sorenson said that she overheard
the couple making comments about her kid's appearance, and the
man even tried to grab at her child stroller. But
when the couple saw their picture being posted on saved
the children forms online in connection with an attempted kidnapping,
(11:23):
they came forward to deny any wrongdoing and cooperated with
the police investigation. Grandparents themselves, they said they had just
been discussing their own grandkids, not Sorenson's kids. Their daughter
says Sorenson's allegations were racially motivated because their parents are Latino.
Police cleared the couple of any wrongdoing and closed the case,
and Sorenson says that she shared her story just to
(11:45):
warn other parents to remain vigilant. But this is a
great example of why sharing stories just for awareness is
not always a helpful thing to do. It also over
emphasizes the idea that white kids are at risk for
being kidnapped by strangers from public places and affluent suburbs,
which when it comes to trafficking, is exceedingly rare, while
de emphasizing that the existing threats out there are much
(12:05):
more likely to be family members, are trusted community members
praying on vulnerable people, and that those targeted are more
often than not marginalized youth, queer kids, or trans kids,
or kids facing poverty or homelessness. Like someone who's kidnapping
children and taking them across state lines and keeping them
in motel rooms and forcing them to have sex with people,
which almost doesn't exist. I mean, then the number of
(12:27):
confirmed cases of that you can almost count on one
or two hands. It's extremely rare. Kids are running away
from home, they don't have a place to stay, they
don't feel safe where they're sleeping. They end up sleeping
on the streets. Somebody pulls up in a car and says,
I'll give you a place to stay tonight if you
have sex with me Like that is something. It's called
survival sex. It is a very well known phenomenon. It
(12:48):
is a huge problem. And the way that you solve
it isn't by putting anybody in jail. It's having a
phone number for those kids to call and a van
comes and picks them up and takes them somewhere safe.
And we've known this forever and we're not doing anything
about it, and so that's less memable, that's less sort
of satisfying to share online. But it's like we just
need more places for kids to go. Who needs somewhere
(13:08):
to sleep? Like that's it, absolutely, And I think you
make a good point that the people who are often
targeted for this kind of thing are queer kids, trans kids,
youth of color, black youth. And I think it's so
interesting that if you spend any time scrolled in TikTok,
the people who are taking up the most space in
terms of talking about the risk that trafficking poses are
(13:32):
white women, you know, suburban white women. And so I
can't help but see this real disconnect in terms of
who is actually the target and the actual person who
is harmed by this and the people who are talking
about it and making the most content about it and
sort of like scarrying people about it. What what do
you think is going on there? I will just say
for the record, no one is doing zip ties on
(13:52):
your car a target. No one is hiding under your
car to cut your ankle with a razor blade. I mean,
the minute you google or even like you don't even
have to google, you just have to think about these things.
Does it make sense to lie down underneath somebody's car
for hours and wait for them with like a racer
blade in your hand and then slice their achilles heel?
Like that's not a fun or smart thing to do
for somebody who wants to try to kill you, Right, So,
(14:15):
all of these kinds of stories, it's just it's very
important to just say, like on their face, stuff like
this really doesn't happen very much. We know that the
primary risks to women are from their partners and from
their dad's And if you're somebody younger, it's like a
soccer coach or somebody in power. Right, it's like a
weird scout leader who's asking you to stay over at
his house the night before one of these camping trips.
(14:37):
Like these are these are the threats to people and
to children, and they're mostly from people who have enough
societal power that you don't trust your gut. So one
of the things you find in a lot of these stories,
his parents will say, well, you know, we thought it
was a little bit weird that, you know, the priest
asked our son to sleep over, but you know, he's
a priest. How could he ever? You know, how could
(14:58):
he ever harm our son? He's a like this felt
weird to us, but you know he has this sort
of societally bestowed power that makes us not trust our gut,
Like this is what power does. And so the thing
that we need to look for our places where we
have power in society and we don't have accountability, and
we already have so much accountability, Like I don't want
to imply that, Like there's no such thing as somebody
(15:20):
in a white van who's kidnapping kids, whatever, But it's
much more common for someone to abuse the trust of children,
and and especially abuse the trust of marginalized children. Right,
because if you don't feel safe at home, you might
turn to a soccer coach as somebody to talk to,
as somebody who feels safe even though they aren't. Right.
(15:41):
This is the process of sort of making somebody unsafe
and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking
them and looking for these elements of marginalization that and
looking for these aspects of marginalization that make them easier
to trick. So at every level, it's of vulnerable kids.
It's finding the vulnerable kids and giving them actual safe
(16:03):
places to go and safe adults to actually talk to
you about this stuff. So again boring, but like that's
that's not something that you can see in target, but
it's this is what society needs, and it's what we've
needed for decades. We're just not doing more. After a
quick break, let's get right back into it. When women
(16:33):
make videos on social media about them or their kids
narrowly escaping being hunted by would be traffickers, they often
go viral. That's because we've deemed it okay to talk
about the perceived threat of strangers or the other. But
what about when women talk about people they know of
using their power, people in their communities or in their
own homes, even though the actual threat is much more
(16:53):
likely to be someone you know, not a stranger in
a van. Women are not always supported when we speak
up about it. I do think as a society it's
okay for women and families to call out like, quote
unquote bad guys if they're scary monsters showing up at
a van, But if it's somebody that lives with, somebody
in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, Like,
(17:16):
we're pretty uncomfortable with women, you know, calling out people
in those positions who abuse their power. But if it somehow,
it's like totally fine, if you're thinking of it as
like calling out a bad guy in a van. And
that's also that's another aspect of marginalization, right that if
it's a poor mother, maybe she's a single mom, maybe
she's working two jobs, and she doesn't see her kids
that much, and she goes to some authority and she says,
(17:38):
you know, I feel a little bit weird about the
soccer coach. People might not believe her. They're like, isn't
she a bad mother anyway? Right, So, at every level,
marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems
because that just gives you know, the priest is going
to have a lot more credibility than the single mom
who's not home as much as she'd like to be.
So at every level, these are the things that we
have to address and setting up formal systems to investigate
(17:59):
these things and act will accountability mechanisms. So I I
keep saying, I only have one argument on the show,
but like we just need to do the boring stuff,
Like I wish it was more interesting than that. No,
it's so true, and you know, you talk a little bit.
You talked a bit about like zip ties on your
car and people hiding under your car, Like what role
(18:19):
do you think that local media and also law enforcement
has to play in this? Because I I've read articles
where on its face it would appear that a police
officer or somebody in law enforcement has confirmed, yes, we
saw this zip ti on the cars and this is
a trafficking thing. But actually when you like dig dig,
dig a little deeper into it, you're like, Okay, this
police officer is confirming that this person called the police
(18:42):
and they came for this reason, but it's not actually
there's not actually any proof that like this was tied
to a trafficking attempt. What role do you think that
journalists and law enforcement should play and making sure that
these panics don't spin out of control. If one of
the ones I think it was last summer maybe last fall,
was these poor people had their wedding and they had
some flowers left over from their wedding, and they thought
(19:04):
it would be cute to put them on people's car
in a parking lot. And then people came out to
their cars and found a flower and they freaked out
there like it's traffickers. I marked the traffickers are after me,
and these poor people who are just trying to do
something nice or like all of a sudden sort of
smeared as traffickers. And what was amazing was the cops
sort of like reinforced this. It's like, oh, you know,
(19:25):
we've we've had threats recently of trafficking, and you know,
we've we've heard rumors of trafficking, and of course the
local media reinforces this too, that you know, trafficking is
a huge problem in this area and it could happen
to anyone, but not in this particular case. And there's
no sort of attempt to debunk the meta myth here
that people are staking you out in parking lots to
kidnap you like that even even for like truly evil people,
(19:48):
that doesn't make that much sense. Parking lots are really
really public and it's like broad daylight, And why would
you leave a flower to like communicate with the other traffickers,
like just text the other traffickers, Like it doesn't make
sense on any level, But we get this weird credulity,
especially around this issue that you know, one of the
tenets of journalism is you're supposed to do sort of
(20:09):
both sides. Right. We saw this for climate change for years, right,
Like there's the people that say the climate change is
real and then there's the whack jobs who say that
it's not. But we have to put both of them
on the air. Right. But then, weirdly, when it comes
to trafficking and these other stranger danger myths, there's no
need to speak to like actual sex workers who are like, uh,
this is not how sex work works. There's no need
to talk to actual child advocates or social workers. There's
(20:31):
no need to talk to anybody who's skeptical of this.
It's just like, well, cops say there's a bunch of
trafficking out there, so let's just tell people that. So
it's just really frustrating that there isn't the same level
of scrutiny and the same journalistic standards applied to these
kinds of stories that hits something like really deep within
us of like, oh, this is the danger I have
to worry about. Yeah, I think I haven't even thought
(20:51):
about that. But it's a good point, and I part
of me wonders if it's a little bit of hesitation
because and I've trugled with this as well. You don't
want to feel like you're invalidating somebody's experience, right, Like,
if somebody feels like like they were targeted or they
were like something sketchy was going on, I want people
to feel like that experience is okay to talk about.
(21:14):
But I also don't want someone to use that experience
to fuel something that's just not true that's going for
a result in more harm. Right. And there's also there
are real cases of this happening. I mean, this is
one of the challenges with moral panics is that most
moral panics, they never come from nothing. Right. We had
this massive panic in the nineteen eighties and nines about
quote unquote stranger danger that you know, kids were gonna
(21:34):
come and steal your kids, and like, there were some
truly horrific, awful, heartbreaking cases where this really did happen.
This is why, this is how we got all of
these you know, Jacob's Law and Megan's Law and all
these laws that are named after kids and things like
the Amber alerts. So there were real cases. But the
problems that these these very small number of truly heartbreaking,
true cases get expanded into this massive national problem that
(21:58):
we all need to be worried about, and very quickly
becomes this thing of like, well, if it saves one child, right,
we can sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarceerate a
bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if it
saves one child and one thing, you know, as somebody
who is a urban cyclist and somebody who takes like
urban safety very seriously. This is not a standard that
(22:20):
we apply to the lives of children in other contexts. Right,
if you if you want to save the life of
one child, you'd crack down on guns. Guns kill three
thousand kids a year. Cars kill six thousand kids a year. Right,
you could make the speed limit in every single city
fifteen miles an hour throughout the country, and you would
literally save the lives of kids, because most kids are
(22:40):
killed by speeding cars. But that's not a sacrifice that
we're willing to make, because that's something that I would
have to sacrifice. I would have to I would have
to drive slower. Whereas whenever it comes to these you know,
if it saves a life of one child, these kinds
of sacrifices, it's always somebody else who's going to make
the sacrifice, it's somebody else who's gonna go to jail
that the effects of this are going to be in
did on a societal out group. So this this entire
(23:03):
logic of like, you know, we must do this to
save one child. That's great logic, but it's not a
logic that we applied to any other social problem. That's
so true, and I think, yeah, I think the idea
that the people who are going to be further criminalized
harmed by this by like when we make laws, you know,
kind of quickly as long as it's not like me
(23:25):
feeling that repercussion, you know, as long as that someone
else dealing with it, I think that we're much more
comfortable with that. What can we do to avoid falling
into moral panics, even ones that are like well intentioned,
you know, how can we avoid this on a on
a wider scale. I mean, I want to say, like
be careful with what you share, but like I'm not
all that careful with what I share. Like there's a
(23:46):
lot of information out there. It's really hard like people,
you know, we shouldn't all be having to read the
nutrition label on every single piece of information. I will say,
just on these kinds of things. It's it's never strangers.
It's never like these kinds of mono myths. Anything that
looks like the sort of remember the flashing your high
beams gang initiation stuff, Those are totally bunk. Anything involving
(24:09):
like random targeting of civilians, it's that really never happens.
Anything the stranger is kidnapping you in broad daylight. I
think there's like certain categories of anecdotes that are just
like these ones never turned out to be true, so
we should just stop sharing them. Like, don't don't feel
like you have to warn people about anything involving a
parking lot. If a parking lot is involved, people are safe.
(24:32):
I mean, they're all like videotaped at this point exactly
like people are safe and parking lots just like, leave
the parking lots alone. It's fine. It's so funny because
I went back and listened to the episode that y'all
did about sex trafficking and the list of things that
they tell young people to look out for that could
be signs of trafficking, things like if somebody is moody,
or if somebody all of a sudden starts dressing different
(24:53):
or wearing different clothes, or if they get a bar
code tattoo as somebody who grew up kind of you know,
gothy goth Jason Alti adjacent. I knew two different people
who had bar colde tattoos. Right, all of the warning
signs of trafficking are like teenage stuff. It's like, oh,
she's moody or like like her taste in music changes.
You're like, that's not a sign of trafficking. That's a
(25:15):
sign of teenager nous. That's a side a side of
adolessis Yeah. So another I mean another like rule of
thumb that just don't share anything involving trafficking basically, like
I think this, this word, this whole field is so
tainted at this point that it's just not useful to
share any of the viral post statistics like until we
know more, just like hold off on the trafficking stuff. Gang, Yeah,
(25:38):
that's that's great advice. I would also say, like, not
that I think that any celebrities listen to this, listen
to my podcast, but when well meeting celebrities get involved
in a trafficking campaign, shut it down, right, Like, I'm
sure you're a good guy, don't use you don't It
sets me when I see celebrities who I'm sure like
their hardest in the right place, but like getting involved
(26:00):
in trafficking campaigns that are tied to specific legislation like
Sesta Fasta. It's like, oh, like it's just does such
a bad look on such a complicated issue. Yeah. I
think the biggest thing is that, you know, the trafficking
field right now is this weird, unholy alliance between very
well meaning celebrities and anythink well meaning people and not
(26:22):
well meaning, mostly Republican legislatures who want to use this
as an excuse to crackdown on immigration, to crack down
on sex work, to crack down on children, anything that
they perceive as posing a threat to children, which is
mostly like trans people. So I think any time we
have any bills being pushed by these super Republican legislators,
(26:44):
I think, just like be careful with that stuff. Like
any time you have the religious right and the Republican
Party pushing one of these bills, like just slow down
and like ask actual sex workers, like what is in
this bill and are you in support of it? Like
over and over again, we end up talking over the
groups that actually get affected by this and just like, know,
(27:05):
some sex workers follow a bunch of sex workers online
and see what they're mad about, and like, they are
not mad about this kind of stuff. They're mad about
the legislators that are trying to take their rights away again.
There is so much to say about how we talk
about trafficking online, especially on TikTok, where so many viral
claims about trafficking take off. Next we'll hear from Jessica,
(27:26):
who goes by blood Bath and Beyond on TikTok, about
her use of TikTok to spread accurate information about trafficking.
When we start drowning out that conversation, we're we're not
only are we not letting that get the spotlight where
it really needs to be the forefront of this conversation,
we are also hurting the actual victims directly themselves, because
(27:46):
we're creating this idea and this culture around what trafficking
looks like and what the average victim looks like. So
when a victim comes forward and says I think I
was sex trafficked or I need help, people are less
inclined to believe them because we've created this narrative that
most trafficking victims are innocent, upper middle class white women
getting kidnapped from Target. If you enjoyed this podcast, please
(28:12):
help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an
interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi,
We'd love to hear from you at Hello at tango
dot com. Dis Informed is brought to you by There
Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of
iHeart Radio and Unbust Creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer.
Try Harrison is our supervising producer, and engineer. Michael Lamato
(28:36):
is our contributing producer. I'm your host Bridget tod. For
more great podcasts, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There are
No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. Bad guys
are coming. They're coming for you, and they're coming for
your kids. If you spent any time on social media
in the last few years, you've probably heard some version
of a story like that. Strangers are waiting, lurking, generally
(00:26):
in the parking lot or the aisles of a big
box store like Target, and they're hunting down women and
their children to snatch them up in broad daylight for trafficking.
This is not new at all. I definitely grew up
hearing horror stories like the one about the woman driver
terrified by a man tailgating or and flashing her high
beams at night, but he's actually just trying to warn
her that a man is in her back seat waiting
(00:47):
to strike. Those stories definitely made a big impression on me.
But instead of them just being passed around in home room,
add in social media and stories like this can spread
to peak virality online. Stories like these are especially common
on social media. Just search the hashtag sex traffic and
awareness on TikTok and you will find thousands of women
making videos about how traffickers tied a ribbon or a
(01:08):
zip tied to their car to mark them as a victim,
or how a van parked too close to them in
a parking lot and it was a near miss for
a trafficking attempt. The only issue is this kind of trafficking,
where someone is snatched by a stranger in a public place,
is exceedingly rare. Yet videos like these often go viral
and social media, leading the impression that women should be
(01:28):
afraid anytime they leave their homes to go to the store.
In this two part episode, we'll explore the roots of
online panics around trafficking, why they're so dangerous, and here
from two people who are fighting back with facts. The
podcast You're Wrong About is kind of a gold standard
for revisiting moral panics and debunking the commonly held beliefs
(01:48):
that led to them. Hosts Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall
have found that in many ways, we're basically just doing
a mad Lives where the blank is filled with some
kind of boogeyman society can blame at times when people
are feeling anxious are scared, like the Satanic panic of
the eighties and nineties, where parents were horrified that satanic
cults were ritualistically abusing children. Only that was never really happening. Basically,
(02:11):
there was always some big scary threat that we need
to be watching out for. My name is Michael Hobbs.
I'm the co host of a podcast called You're Wrong
About and another podcast called Maintenance Phase So Online. I
find that so many conversations about big complex issues, things
like trafficking or homelessness, are really dominated by people who
don't really know what they're talking about and who were
(02:31):
either spreading bad information intentionally or unintentionally. When you started
making You're Wrong About, where you all setting out to
give people the tools to push back against this kind
of bad information. No, like this, this was completely accidental.
We had no idea when we started that we would
find out that America keeps having the same moral panic
over and over again. This was not something that we thought,
(02:54):
you know, it's all the same thing. It's like a
tide that comes in and out. You know, the satanic
panic is always with us, queuing on is always with us.
We had no idea that we would come up with that.
It's just sort of we we research, sort of debunkable
episodes in history, and when you start to bunking them,
you're like an hour or two into the research and
you're like, oh, it's this one again. Oh, we're gonna
(03:14):
do the thing where they're like strangers coming to get
your kids, right, or there's some societal out group right
like homeless people, like trans people, like sex offenders that
we don't like, and we're going to project this extreme
power onto them. We're going to project this extreme rapaciousness
onto them. There's millions of them, you know, they're coming
(03:35):
to the border. They're trying to steal your kids and
get them into street gangs. I mean, it's it's like
this mad libs where you can just throw in like, Okay,
which societal outgroup is it going to be? What are
they doing to our kids today? Like it's it's over
and over again the same thing. So we've both me
and my co host Sarah Marshall have become these like
accidental insufferable debunkers or we're like, nope, same one. We're
(03:57):
doing this again, guys, Like let's calm it down. We've
done this seven times before. So in my research around disinformation,
particularly like false panics, around things that are rooted in
people's identity. So whether it's trans folks, queer folks, you know, immigrants,
it is always sort of the same thing. Like I
feel right now we're seeing all of the legislations would
(04:19):
have meant to make you think as if trans children
are like running the world, Like trans children are the
biggest threat to your kids, totally and there and and
it's the same tropes, right, So they're coming for your kids,
they're recruiting your kids, Like this is the same thing
that Anita Bryant said about gay people in the seventies
and the nine eighties, Like we're just running exactly the
same playbook. Anita Bryant was a singer and beauty queen
(04:40):
who famously led the Save Our Children campaign that attempted
to save children by cracking down on gay people having rights.
And we're just mad living in a new societal outgroup.
So I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, I
read a bunch of books about the Black plague, just
out of like more, just out of like morbid curiosity.
And you know what you find in these old panics,
(05:01):
You know, these times of societal anxiety, you had some
of the biggest pogroms against Jews in Europe in history, right,
it was like, there's this big thing we can't explain.
There's all of these anxieties, people are dying all around me.
Who can we blame? Like, we don't want to look
at any existing societal structures. We don't want to look
at something that's just difficult for us to explain. It's
sort of out of our scientific knowledge. So, uh, there's
(05:23):
this group here that seems sort of shifting and we
don't really like them. Let's blame them and kill a
bunch of them. It's like these things are old, ancient
human impulses and they're very difficult to see at the time.
But zooming out a little bit, you're like, oh no,
this is just what happens during times of anxiety, and
isn't the perfect recipe for a very anxious society a
(05:45):
global pandemic. It's probably not a coincidence that has COVID worsened.
We saw more and more content about Q and on
and Save the Children, purporting to save kids from some
perceived danger lurking out in the world. Why do you
think right now the specific moment in politics and culture,
why are we seeing this resurgence of panic around sex
trafficking and trafficking dowsing. I mean, it's hard to say exactly.
(06:09):
I think you know this this really hit its peak
last summer, all of this q and on hashtag save
the Children's Stuff, and it really seems like there was
a moment where, you know, we're in the middle of
a pandemic. Information was all over the place, right like, remember,
we didn't like, are we wearing masks? Are we not
wearing masks? Some states are in lockdown, some states are
aggressively not in lockdown. It was just this time where
(06:31):
nobody really knew what was going on. And there's some
research that indicates that sort of at times when you're
really angry, you search for information that reinforces your worldview,
and at times when you're really anxious, you are more
open to information that doesn't reinforce your worldview. So all so,
all summer, everybody's inside, we're all on our phones, there's
(06:52):
nothing else to do, We're looking at the internet, and
all of a sudden you have people whose minds are
a little bit more open to things like, well, maybe
the real danger to children isn't COVID, maybe it's actually
these you know, white van driving traffickers who come from
other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and
take them abroad or these these these narratives that just
make no sense, right, and you know, at the heart
(07:15):
of it, the little seed in the middle of it
was this insane q and on stuff right where it's
like a dren of chrome and like Hillary Clinton is
like cutting the faces off a baby, like completely nuts stuff.
But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that that
you can very easily say, well, I care about children,
and so what's the harm of sharing this little mean like,
what's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook
(07:38):
that says, you know, infamously there was one that said
that children are thousands of times more likely to die
of trafficking than of COVID And so it feels, you know,
and it was in like the the Instagram aesthetic right
where it's got like the little logo and it's in
pink and it's very share able, and it's like, well,
what's the harm, Like I might as well share that,
you know, if it helps save a kid or two,
then I'm doing something good and up some sort of
(08:01):
that's a feeling of certainty in the world, right, But
nobody thinks about what it does to reinforce these just
deranged myths that aren't helping children, they're not helping non children,
they're not helping anybody. But it's it's easy to forget
that when you're like, well, what's the harm of sharing this?
And then all of a sudden these bananas memes start
just bouncing around the internet for months. Yeah, I think
(08:23):
list honestly listening to your wrong about with something that
really helped make that transition for me, because you know,
for a while, I'd be like, well, if this person
thinks it's going to do some good to share this
unstrewn meme on their Facebook page about traffic younger, about children,
who is it hurting? Now I've come to see that, Okay, Well,
if we over emphasize the risks of little kids being
(08:44):
like snatched up or things like that, what are we
under what are we under emphasizing you know, kids like
youth who are facing homelessness, youth who are are put
in precarious or you know, bad or dangerous situations, things
that are much more common, Like if we focus on
this big scary thing that isn't happening. All of the
things that actually are happening, we're just taking attention away
(09:05):
from that, right. And there's also this retributive aspect to
where a lot of those memes that went around we're
about sort of catching the pedophiles, catching the traffickers. You know,
we have to find the evil people and we have
to root them out of our society. And that's not
where the threats to children come from. The threats to
children are primarily in the family. A lot of it
is things like homelessness. There's very few youth homeless shelters
in most cities in America. There's also a completely broken
(09:28):
foster care system. So when you look at things like
the sort of Missing and Exploited Child hotline, of the
calls are coming from foster care. So when we talk
about trafficking, we're mostly talking about runaways. We're mostly talking
about kids who are abused at home, abused in foster care.
They're queer, they're trans they need a place to stay,
they don't need somebody else to go to jail forever.
(09:49):
And when we're sharing these means that are sort of
blaming all of these societal problems on these societal others
that we already don't like or a little bit wary of. Anyway,
all we're really doing is contributing to these retributive solutions
which do not make children safer. Yeah, and I also
think it does kind of come down to what you
were talking about before, this idea of like wanting to
catch the bad guys. That's so much more exciting and fun. Then, Oh,
(10:12):
we need to confront some of these systemic ills in
our society that allow for already marginalized people fault through
the cracks. That's boring. It's so much more fun to
be like, Yeah, I'm gonna track down these bad guys.
Let's take a quick break. Our back on Instagram video
(10:40):
made by mom influencer Katie Sorenson, where she said that
two strangers tried to kidnap her kids and a Michael's
craft store in California, got over two million views Monday
of this week. My children were the targets of attempted kidnap,
which is such a weird thing to even vocalize. Um,
but it happened, um. And I want to share that
(11:00):
story with you in an effort to raise awareness as
to what signs to look for and to just encourage
parents to be more aware of their surroundings and what
is going on around them. Sorenson said that she overheard
the couple making comments about her kid's appearance, and the
man even tried to grab at her child stroller. But
when the couple saw their picture being posted on saved
the children forms online in connection with an attempted kidnapping,
(11:23):
they came forward to deny any wrongdoing and cooperated with
the police investigation. Grandparents themselves, they said they had just
been discussing their own grandkids, not Sorenson's kids. Their daughter
says Sorenson's allegations were racially motivated because their parents are Latino.
Police cleared the couple of any wrongdoing and closed the case,
and Sorenson says that she shared her story just to
(11:45):
warn other parents to remain vigilant. But this is a
great example of why sharing stories just for awareness is
not always a helpful thing to do. It also over
emphasizes the idea that white kids are at risk for
being kidnapped by strangers from public places and affluent suburbs,
which when it comes to trafficking, is exceedingly rare, while
de emphasizing that the existing threats out there are much
(12:05):
more likely to be family members, are trusted community members
praying on vulnerable people, and that those targeted are more
often than not marginalized youth, queer kids, or trans kids,
or kids facing poverty or homelessness. Like someone who's kidnapping
children and taking them across state lines and keeping them
in motel rooms and forcing them to have sex with people,
which almost doesn't exist. I mean, then the number of
(12:27):
confirmed cases of that you can almost count on one
or two hands. It's extremely rare. Kids are running away
from home, they don't have a place to stay, they
don't feel safe where they're sleeping. They end up sleeping
on the streets. Somebody pulls up in a car and says,
I'll give you a place to stay tonight if you
have sex with me Like that is something. It's called
survival sex. It is a very well known phenomenon. It
(12:48):
is a huge problem. And the way that you solve
it isn't by putting anybody in jail. It's having a
phone number for those kids to call and a van
comes and picks them up and takes them somewhere safe.
And we've known this forever and we're not doing anything
about it, and so that's less memable, that's less sort
of satisfying to share online. But it's like we just
need more places for kids to go. Who needs somewhere
(13:08):
to sleep? Like that's it, absolutely, And I think you
make a good point that the people who are often
targeted for this kind of thing are queer kids, trans kids,
youth of color, black youth. And I think it's so
interesting that if you spend any time scrolled in TikTok,
the people who are taking up the most space in
terms of talking about the risk that trafficking poses are
(13:32):
white women, you know, suburban white women. And so I
can't help but see this real disconnect in terms of
who is actually the target and the actual person who
is harmed by this and the people who are talking
about it and making the most content about it and
sort of like scarrying people about it. What what do
you think is going on there? I will just say
for the record, no one is doing zip ties on
(13:52):
your car a target. No one is hiding under your
car to cut your ankle with a razor blade. I mean,
the minute you google or even like you don't even
have to google, you just have to think about these things.
Does it make sense to lie down underneath somebody's car
for hours and wait for them with like a racer
blade in your hand and then slice their achilles heel?
Like that's not a fun or smart thing to do
for somebody who wants to try to kill you, Right, So,
(14:15):
all of these kinds of stories, it's just it's very
important to just say, like on their face, stuff like
this really doesn't happen very much. We know that the
primary risks to women are from their partners and from
their dad's And if you're somebody younger, it's like a
soccer coach or somebody in power. Right, it's like a
weird scout leader who's asking you to stay over at
his house the night before one of these camping trips.
(14:37):
Like these are these are the threats to people and
to children, and they're mostly from people who have enough
societal power that you don't trust your gut. So one
of the things you find in a lot of these stories,
his parents will say, well, you know, we thought it
was a little bit weird that, you know, the priest
asked our son to sleep over, but you know, he's
a priest. How could he ever? You know, how could
(14:58):
he ever harm our son? He's a like this felt
weird to us, but you know he has this sort
of societally bestowed power that makes us not trust our gut,
Like this is what power does. And so the thing
that we need to look for our places where we
have power in society and we don't have accountability, and
we already have so much accountability, Like I don't want
to imply that, Like there's no such thing as somebody
(15:20):
in a white van who's kidnapping kids, whatever, But it's
much more common for someone to abuse the trust of children,
and and especially abuse the trust of marginalized children. Right,
because if you don't feel safe at home, you might
turn to a soccer coach as somebody to talk to,
as somebody who feels safe even though they aren't. Right.
(15:41):
This is the process of sort of making somebody unsafe
and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking
them and looking for these elements of marginalization that and
looking for these aspects of marginalization that make them easier
to trick. So at every level, it's of vulnerable kids.
It's finding the vulnerable kids and giving them actual safe
(16:03):
places to go and safe adults to actually talk to
you about this stuff. So again boring, but like that's
that's not something that you can see in target, but
it's this is what society needs, and it's what we've
needed for decades. We're just not doing more. After a
quick break, let's get right back into it. When women
(16:33):
make videos on social media about them or their kids
narrowly escaping being hunted by would be traffickers, they often
go viral. That's because we've deemed it okay to talk
about the perceived threat of strangers or the other. But
what about when women talk about people they know of
using their power, people in their communities or in their
own homes, even though the actual threat is much more
(16:53):
likely to be someone you know, not a stranger in
a van. Women are not always supported when we speak
up about it. I do think as a society it's
okay for women and families to call out like, quote
unquote bad guys if they're scary monsters showing up at
a van, But if it's somebody that lives with, somebody
in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, Like,
(17:16):
we're pretty uncomfortable with women, you know, calling out people
in those positions who abuse their power. But if it somehow,
it's like totally fine, if you're thinking of it as
like calling out a bad guy in a van. And
that's also that's another aspect of marginalization, right that if
it's a poor mother, maybe she's a single mom, maybe
she's working two jobs, and she doesn't see her kids
that much, and she goes to some authority and she says,
(17:38):
you know, I feel a little bit weird about the
soccer coach. People might not believe her. They're like, isn't
she a bad mother anyway? Right, So, at every level,
marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems
because that just gives you know, the priest is going
to have a lot more credibility than the single mom
who's not home as much as she'd like to be.
So at every level, these are the things that we
have to address and setting up formal systems to investigate
(17:59):
these things and act will accountability mechanisms. So I I
keep saying, I only have one argument on the show,
but like we just need to do the boring stuff,
Like I wish it was more interesting than that. No,
it's so true, and you know, you talk a little bit.
You talked a bit about like zip ties on your
car and people hiding under your car, Like what role
(18:19):
do you think that local media and also law enforcement
has to play in this? Because I I've read articles
where on its face it would appear that a police
officer or somebody in law enforcement has confirmed, yes, we
saw this zip ti on the cars and this is
a trafficking thing. But actually when you like dig dig,
dig a little deeper into it, you're like, Okay, this
police officer is confirming that this person called the police
(18:42):
and they came for this reason, but it's not actually
there's not actually any proof that like this was tied
to a trafficking attempt. What role do you think that
journalists and law enforcement should play and making sure that
these panics don't spin out of control. If one of
the ones I think it was last summer maybe last fall,
was these poor people had their wedding and they had
some flowers left over from their wedding, and they thought
(19:04):
it would be cute to put them on people's car
in a parking lot. And then people came out to
their cars and found a flower and they freaked out
there like it's traffickers. I marked the traffickers are after me,
and these poor people who are just trying to do
something nice or like all of a sudden sort of
smeared as traffickers. And what was amazing was the cops
sort of like reinforced this. It's like, oh, you know,
(19:25):
we've we've had threats recently of trafficking, and you know,
we've we've heard rumors of trafficking, and of course the
local media reinforces this too, that you know, trafficking is
a huge problem in this area and it could happen
to anyone, but not in this particular case. And there's
no sort of attempt to debunk the meta myth here
that people are staking you out in parking lots to
kidnap you like that even even for like truly evil people,
(19:48):
that doesn't make that much sense. Parking lots are really
really public and it's like broad daylight, And why would
you leave a flower to like communicate with the other traffickers,
like just text the other traffickers, Like it doesn't make
sense on any level, But we get this weird credulity,
especially around this issue that you know, one of the
tenets of journalism is you're supposed to do sort of
(20:09):
both sides. Right. We saw this for climate change for years, right,
Like there's the people that say the climate change is
real and then there's the whack jobs who say that
it's not. But we have to put both of them
on the air. Right. But then, weirdly, when it comes
to trafficking and these other stranger danger myths, there's no
need to speak to like actual sex workers who are like, uh,
this is not how sex work works. There's no need
to talk to actual child advocates or social workers. There's
(20:31):
no need to talk to anybody who's skeptical of this.
It's just like, well, cops say there's a bunch of
trafficking out there, so let's just tell people that. So
it's just really frustrating that there isn't the same level
of scrutiny and the same journalistic standards applied to these
kinds of stories that hits something like really deep within
us of like, oh, this is the danger I have
to worry about. Yeah, I think I haven't even thought
(20:51):
about that. But it's a good point, and I part
of me wonders if it's a little bit of hesitation
because and I've trugled with this as well. You don't
want to feel like you're invalidating somebody's experience, right, Like,
if somebody feels like like they were targeted or they
were like something sketchy was going on, I want people
to feel like that experience is okay to talk about.
(21:14):
But I also don't want someone to use that experience
to fuel something that's just not true that's going for
a result in more harm. Right. And there's also there
are real cases of this happening. I mean, this is
one of the challenges with moral panics is that most
moral panics, they never come from nothing. Right. We had
this massive panic in the nineteen eighties and nines about
quote unquote stranger danger that you know, kids were gonna
(21:34):
come and steal your kids, and like, there were some
truly horrific, awful, heartbreaking cases where this really did happen.
This is why, this is how we got all of
these you know, Jacob's Law and Megan's Law and all
these laws that are named after kids and things like
the Amber alerts. So there were real cases. But the
problems that these these very small number of truly heartbreaking,
true cases get expanded into this massive national problem that
(21:58):
we all need to be worried about, and very quickly
becomes this thing of like, well, if it saves one child, right,
we can sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarceerate a
bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if it
saves one child and one thing, you know, as somebody
who is a urban cyclist and somebody who takes like
urban safety very seriously. This is not a standard that
(22:20):
we apply to the lives of children in other contexts. Right,
if you if you want to save the life of
one child, you'd crack down on guns. Guns kill three
thousand kids a year. Cars kill six thousand kids a year. Right,
you could make the speed limit in every single city
fifteen miles an hour throughout the country, and you would
literally save the lives of kids, because most kids are
(22:40):
killed by speeding cars. But that's not a sacrifice that
we're willing to make, because that's something that I would
have to sacrifice. I would have to I would have
to drive slower. Whereas whenever it comes to these you know,
if it saves a life of one child, these kinds
of sacrifices, it's always somebody else who's going to make
the sacrifice, it's somebody else who's gonna go to jail
that the effects of this are going to be in
did on a societal out group. So this this entire
(23:03):
logic of like, you know, we must do this to
save one child. That's great logic, but it's not a
logic that we applied to any other social problem. That's
so true, and I think, yeah, I think the idea
that the people who are going to be further criminalized
harmed by this by like when we make laws, you know,
kind of quickly as long as it's not like me
(23:25):
feeling that repercussion, you know, as long as that someone
else dealing with it, I think that we're much more
comfortable with that. What can we do to avoid falling
into moral panics, even ones that are like well intentioned,
you know, how can we avoid this on a on
a wider scale. I mean, I want to say, like
be careful with what you share, but like I'm not
all that careful with what I share. Like there's a
(23:46):
lot of information out there. It's really hard like people,
you know, we shouldn't all be having to read the
nutrition label on every single piece of information. I will say,
just on these kinds of things. It's it's never strangers.
It's never like these kinds of mono myths. Anything that
looks like the sort of remember the flashing your high
beams gang initiation stuff, Those are totally bunk. Anything involving
(24:09):
like random targeting of civilians, it's that really never happens.
Anything the stranger is kidnapping you in broad daylight. I
think there's like certain categories of anecdotes that are just
like these ones never turned out to be true, so
we should just stop sharing them. Like, don't don't feel
like you have to warn people about anything involving a
parking lot. If a parking lot is involved, people are safe.
(24:32):
I mean, they're all like videotaped at this point exactly
like people are safe and parking lots just like, leave
the parking lots alone. It's fine. It's so funny because
I went back and listened to the episode that y'all
did about sex trafficking and the list of things that
they tell young people to look out for that could
be signs of trafficking, things like if somebody is moody,
or if somebody all of a sudden starts dressing different
(24:53):
or wearing different clothes, or if they get a bar
code tattoo as somebody who grew up kind of you know,
gothy goth Jason Alti adjacent. I knew two different people
who had bar colde tattoos. Right, all of the warning
signs of trafficking are like teenage stuff. It's like, oh,
she's moody or like like her taste in music changes.
You're like, that's not a sign of trafficking. That's a
(25:15):
sign of teenager nous. That's a side a side of
adolessis Yeah. So another I mean another like rule of
thumb that just don't share anything involving trafficking basically, like
I think this, this word, this whole field is so
tainted at this point that it's just not useful to
share any of the viral post statistics like until we
know more, just like hold off on the trafficking stuff. Gang, Yeah,
(25:38):
that's that's great advice. I would also say, like, not
that I think that any celebrities listen to this, listen
to my podcast, but when well meeting celebrities get involved
in a trafficking campaign, shut it down, right, Like, I'm
sure you're a good guy, don't use you don't It
sets me when I see celebrities who I'm sure like
their hardest in the right place, but like getting involved
(26:00):
in trafficking campaigns that are tied to specific legislation like
Sesta Fasta. It's like, oh, like it's just does such
a bad look on such a complicated issue. Yeah. I
think the biggest thing is that, you know, the trafficking
field right now is this weird, unholy alliance between very
well meaning celebrities and anythink well meaning people and not
(26:22):
well meaning, mostly Republican legislatures who want to use this
as an excuse to crackdown on immigration, to crack down
on sex work, to crack down on children, anything that
they perceive as posing a threat to children, which is
mostly like trans people. So I think any time we
have any bills being pushed by these super Republican legislators,
(26:44):
I think, just like be careful with that stuff. Like
any time you have the religious right and the Republican
Party pushing one of these bills, like just slow down
and like ask actual sex workers, like what is in
this bill and are you in support of it? Like
over and over again, we end up talking over the
groups that actually get affected by this and just like, know,
(27:05):
some sex workers follow a bunch of sex workers online
and see what they're mad about, and like, they are
not mad about this kind of stuff. They're mad about
the legislators that are trying to take their rights away again.
There is so much to say about how we talk
about trafficking online, especially on TikTok, where so many viral
claims about trafficking take off. Next we'll hear from Jessica,
(27:26):
who goes by blood Bath and Beyond on TikTok, about
her use of TikTok to spread accurate information about trafficking.
When we start drowning out that conversation, we're we're not
only are we not letting that get the spotlight where
it really needs to be the forefront of this conversation,
we are also hurting the actual victims directly themselves, because
(27:46):
we're creating this idea and this culture around what trafficking
looks like and what the average victim looks like. So
when a victim comes forward and says I think I
was sex trafficked or I need help, people are less
inclined to believe them because we've created this narrative that
most trafficking victims are innocent, upper middle class white women
getting kidnapped from Target. If you enjoyed this podcast, please
(28:12):
help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an
interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi,
We'd love to hear from you at Hello at tango
dot com. Dis Informed is brought to you by There
Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of
iHeart Radio and Unbust Creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer.
Try Harrison is our supervising producer, and engineer. Michael Lamato
(28:36):
is our contributing producer. I'm your host Bridget tod. For
more great podcasts, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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