Read on Twitter
#SaveTheChildren? Well, can I ask, do you know what you're saving them from?
Twitter claims about "800K kids per year" are, first of all, wildly out of date: According to the FBI, in 2019 there were 421,394 reports of missing children. (1/)
Twitter claims about "800K kids per year" are, first of all, wildly out of date: According to the FBI, in 2019 there were 421,394 reports of missing children. (1/)
Per to the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, 91 percent of these are runaways. Four percent are family abductions, and only a combined two percent are non-family abductions or chronically missing lost children. (2/)
The remainder of reports are actually not missing kids at all but instead "missing youths" age 18 to 20. Almost all missing kids return home shortly, and there are only a few hundred cases of suspected long-term stranger abduction annually. (3/) https://www.missingkids.org/footer/media/keyfacts
(If you search for these statistics, "missing children 2020" is a top suggestion. The fact that so many people are looking for a statistic about a year that's not over yet is a pretty strong indicator of the poor research skills employed by the general public on this issue.) (4/)
BTW, a content warning for discussions about sexual assault and child sexual abuse in the rest of this thread. (5/)
The idea of a network of powerful predators conspiring against children and infiltrating toy companies just isn't substantiated. The CDC-funded National Survey of Children's Exposure To Violence in 2015 reaffirmed what all past research has shown: (6/)
That when kids are victimized, it's almost always by friends and family members rather than strangers. Overall, 6.1 percent of kids surveyed reported suffering some form of sexual violence in their lifetime (7/)
But just 0.5 percent reported assault by a stranger, versus more than twice as many who reported being assaulted by a "known adult."
However, by far the most common form of assault was not from a stranger or from a known adult, but by an age peer. (8/)
However, by far the most common form of assault was not from a stranger or from a known adult, but by an age peer. (8/)
More than 60 percent of those who reported assault said they were assaulted by a minor within or close to their own age bracket. (9/)
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf
Not gonna lie, this fact freaked me out: According to Elizabeth Letourneau, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, "peak age for engaging a child in harmful or illegal sexual behavior is 14." Fucking hell. (10/) https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2018/spring/children-who-are-child-sexual-abusers/
Twitter will also mischaracterize the nature of abuse: Fewer than one in six kids who reported an assault said that they were raped, whereas the most common form of abuse (well over two-thirds of all cases) was sexual harassment. (11/)
And rather than very young children, the kids most likely to be victimized are teenagers ages 14 to 17. So the nature of sexual violence against children is, sadly, much like what it is for adults. (12/)
The perpetrator is probably someone the victim knows, likely a peer; girls are the most likely victims, and the most common forms of assault are harassment and casual abuse. (13/)
Now, what about trafficking? A 2019 State Department report tallied over 85,000 trafficking victims identified in over 11,000 prosecutions the previous year. That's 85K worldwide--contrast with the 800K that conspiracy Twitter pushes just for the US. (14/)
Of course, this is not a comprehensive worldwide survey, but the degree of magnitude in the difference seems, ah, significant nonetheless. (15/)
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019-Trafficking-in-Persons-Report.pdf
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019-Trafficking-in-Persons-Report.pdf
Those stats encompass all forms of trafficking, including the exploitative labor practices that conspiracy Twitter shows no particular interest in but which remain a significant driver in trafficking worldwide. (16/)
The non-profit Polaris Project's 2017 report examined 32,000 trafficking cases between 2007 and 2016, most of which broke down into 25 distinct categories. Of these, nearly one third were labor-related. (17/)
In cases of escort work, 43 percent of victims were minors. For illicit massage, 12 percent. For "outdoor solicitation" and brothels, about half. In porn creation--of which there were only 616 cases--it was 61 percent. (18/)
https://polarisproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Polaris-Typology-of-Modern-Slavery-1.pdf
https://polarisproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Polaris-Typology-of-Modern-Slavery-1.pdf
These figures are far less than Twitter pushers would have you believe, but still very disturbing. That being the case, fans of the current White House would be confused to learn that prosecutions for trafficking children have plummeted since 2016. (19/)
https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/565/
https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/565/
The sort of people who tweet #SaveTheChildren don't seem much interested in any of these facts. Instead they're prodding at the bottom of troll dolls. This is because most of the monkey chatter about "the children" on social media these days is driven by conspiracists. (20/)
Their motivations are transparently political, part of a push to frame conspiracy kookery like Qult 45 as child welfare campaigns rather than political death cults predicated on science fiction. (21/)
Political agenda aside, these people are in the grip of what sociologist Jeffrey Victor calls a rumor panic." In his 2003 book "Satanic Panic," Victor notes that rumors about violence against children are "a persistent tradition in folklore." (22/)
These fears are “symbols for worries about our children’s future” and, by extension, society’s future, and are much more common at times of great social anxiety. (You'll remember the old stories about needles in Halloween candy and the killer with a hook for a hand.) (23/)
lurking around teenager's cars.)
When rumor-panics happen, they relieve the social pressures of these anxieties. People see evidence of a vast conspiracy because they WANT it to be there. They need for the panic to happen to provide the catharsis they're looking for. (24/1)
When rumor-panics happen, they relieve the social pressures of these anxieties. People see evidence of a vast conspiracy because they WANT it to be there. They need for the panic to happen to provide the catharsis they're looking for. (24/1)
And this is why what you read on Twitter is so different from the realities of the problem: It's the difference between folklore and fact. (25/END)
Oh, I tell a lie, that's not quite the end: One last note from Polaris about why stupid Twitter histrionics are so damaging on this: (26/REALLY THE END) https://polarisproject.org/blog/2020/07/how-unproven-trafficking-stories-spread-online-and-why-stopping-them-matters/
