The idea that sex traffickers are kidnapping random children off the streets and brainwashing them is pure conspiracy with one foot in antisemitism.
The vast, vast majority of child sex trafficking is done with the aid of a family member. Massive, organized child sex trafficking rings are a complete fantasy. Even epstein didn’t have fleets of kidnappers. He had bribes, and access to desperate young women.
The insistence that sex trafficking kidnapping gangs are a real and present danger is conspiratorial nonsene. It is a belief on par with being worried about serial killers.
This is one of the many reasons why that shitty sound of freedom movie was genuinely harmful in addition to just being bad. It whipped a bunch of weirdos who were already primed to accept misinformation into a frenzy about an issue that was portrayed with dangerous inaccuracy. It told them that there were rings of brown criminals in Central America behind it all and not so subtlety leads the viewer to the conclusion that the answer is to strengthen our borders, throw more money at law enforcement, and that we should also be giving those cops more impunity to operate outside of oversight so they can get the job done.
Meanwhile, none of the things that we know reduce trafficking, like comprehensive sex ed for kids, investing in low-income areas (affordable/public housing, access to quality education, addiction services, etc), and protecting the most marginalized and victimized demographics in our communities, are nowhere to be seen. It’s a complete refusal to tell the truth about the reality of the issue.
One of the worst things about combating this particular depiction of trafficking is how common it is for the people spreading the falsities to roll back on “spreading awareness” as being the only thing that matters even when genuine anti-trafficking orgs are begging them to stop making stuff up. This kind of stuff is grossly performative and designed nearly entirely for pearl-clutchers to be able to point the finger to immigrants (read: black and brown people) while pretending like they’re a part of the solution when they don’t even know what the problem looks like.