\n\n\n\nI really don\u2019t know how common human trafficking is.
I\u2019ve read a lot of stories on Reddit about people narrowly avoiding being abducted by strangers (like this one).
And I\u2019ve also read a lot of people saying the worry is overblown, and human trafficking numbers are mostly counting things like\u00a0\u201cillegal immigration\u201d, and most of this category of crimes are committed by family, not strangers, and that \u201cstranger danger\u201d is mostly complete bullshit.
And these are sort of difficult to reconcile. I suppose the real answer is\u00a0\u201cit does happen, but rarely, so both sides are correct.\u201d But does this mean that the anti-stranger-danger side is understating the risk? Maybe we should\u00a0teach children to be wary of strangers?
Or maybe being wary of strangers has small benefits, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2026 maybe that\u2019s at least partially because most women do not in fact go out alone at night in high-crime areas?
It sucks that I haven\u2019t read anything analyzing what the correct level of caution should be. It\u2019s all people saying\u00a0\u201cmy emotions say this happens all the time and facts are irrelevant!\u201d and people saying\u00a0\u201cthe facts say this usually doesn\u2019t happen so it\u2019s irrational to act like it ever happens at all!\u201d
1) You have to compare like to like. A bit of digging into\u00a0cototudelam\u2019s post history reveals they grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. What was the stranger kidnapping risk in communist (and early post-communist)\u00a0\n\nCzechoslovakia? Heck if I know. But someone in the US or UK shouldn\u2019t be making decisions based on the rate of stranger kidnapping in Czechoslovakia (and, contrawise, if you\u2019re not in the US, you shouldn\u2019t 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” \u2013 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.
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