Kontextmaschine

19th March 2021

Post reblogged from Fnord with 48 notes

serinemolecule:
I really don’t know how common human trafficking is.
I’ve read a lot of stories on Reddit about people narrowly avoiding being abducted by strangers (like this one).
And I’ve also read a lot of people saying the worry is overblown, and human trafficking numbers are mostly counting things like “illegal immigration”, and most of this category of crimes are committed by family, not strangers, and that “stranger danger” is mostly complete bullshit.
And these are sort of difficult to reconcile. I suppose the real answer is “it does happen, but rarely, so both sides are correct.” But does this mean that the anti-stranger-danger side is understating the risk? Maybe we should teach children to be wary of strangers?
Or maybe being wary of strangers has small benefits, but it’s outweighed by other factors like how strangers are way more likely to be in a position to help save a child than be a child trafficker.
And then there’s the related question of, as a woman, how afraid of walking alone at night in high-crime areas should I be? On one hand, the vast majority of sexual assaults and other assaults are from friends/family. On the other hand… maybe that’s at least partially because most women do not in fact go out alone at night in high-crime areas?
It sucks that I haven’t read anything analyzing what the correct level of caution should be. It’s all people saying “my emotions say this happens all the time and facts are irrelevant!” and people saying “the facts say this usually doesn’t happen so it’s irrational to act like it ever happens at all!”
1) You have to compare like to like. A bit of digging into cototudelam’s post history reveals they grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. What was the stranger kidnapping risk in communist (and early post-communist) Czechoslovakia? Heck if I know. But someone in the US or UK shouldn’t be making decisions based on the rate of stranger kidnapping in Czechoslovakia (and, contrawise, if you’re not in the US, you shouldn’t necessarily be basing your decision-making on US crime statistics).
2) Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes people just make shit up on the internet.

Yeah the kidnapping-for-commercial-use thing is basically not real. Some of the stuff called “human trafficking” is like people-smuggling or visa fraud some of which might be for commercial use.

But most is what as recently as the 2000s we’d call “pimping” – a charismatic and controlling figure charms a dissatisfied woman, forms a relationship with her, and takes her away to a life of prostitution for his profit, in a city or on tour.

This is nothing new, there are English folk ballads hundreds of years old warning girls about the same way it happens today.