Bruce Schneier has a term, "movie-plot threat", which he mainly uses to talk about terrorism but which I think applies perfectly to the current trafficking mythos.
https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=movie-plot%20threat%20contests&__mode=tag&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=10&page=1 https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1295382177606066177

The idea is that, rather than apply general security principles, or doing anything to reduce the things that make threats more likely, you simply imagine what the plot of a movie featuring that threat would be, and come up with a plan to counter that imaginary movie's villain.

Now, if you actually cared about Saving The Children™, you might look at some of the threats they face, the underlying causes for those threats, and what strategies you could implement to either reduce the causes directly, or make the children more resilient against the threats.

But if you were caught up in the romanticism of Saving The Children™, you might instead invent movie plots in your head and share them on social media.

You can stop traffickers by watching for furniture websites with weird prices! Or white kids with suspiciously tanned parents!

Of course, human trafficking isn't international cartels snatching blonde, blue-eyed children in the street and selling them to a furniture warehouse.

Teaching randos to call the cops whenever they decide a kid doesn't look enough like their mother isn't going to help anyone.

Indeed, the things that make human trafficking -- including child sex trafficking -- more likely are the politics of most Save The Children™ types.

Punitive immigration laws. Lack of support for homeless people. Deference to parental authority for gay and/or trans kids.

How does trafficking happen? The popular image from "Taken" is crap. Generally, the victim is someone who has no choice but to agree to a trafficker's offer. A migrant labourer whose passport is taken by their employer; a homeless kid who agrees to trade sex for shelter.

So we know the sort of societal problems that make it more likely to become a victim. We know, broadly, the people who take advantage of these victims. If we cared about trafficking, we could end it relatively easily.

Instead, we chase furniture prices.

In fighting trafficking, we end up creating the conditions that make it more likely.

For example, FOSTA/SESTA infamously used trafficking hysteria to justify its passage, but actually made everyone -- both consenting sex workers and trafficking victims -- much more at risk.

There IS an international market for trafficked children -- but not blonde and blue-eyed little white kids taken for paedophiles.

It's the adoption market. And I don't mean taking in orphans from a third world country that legit is grateful to the new parents. I mean kidnapping.

After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Evangelical Christians descended on the country, intent on kidnapping as many children as possible, to take back to America and raise with white Christian families.

After ICE instituted Trump's policy of separating children from their parents,

they, ahem, "lost" the paperwork detailing which kids belonged to which parents. Some families have been reunited -- after intervention from the Federal Court -- others haven't, and can't be. They're often in foster care -- ready to be adopted by white Evangelical Christians.

Pizzagate and QAnon started because Trump was so loathsome that the only way some conservatives could justify supporting him was to imagine he was taking up arms against a sea of paedophiles, because child trafficking is so awful even Trump looks good by comparison.

And yet ...