1215: Human Trafficking | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday.

I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell.

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Today on the show, you might have seen a claim online such as there are 800,000 missing kids in America today with the implication that they've been trafficked for some nefarious purpose ranging from sex to an adrenochrome factory.

If you're old enough to remember the satanic panic from the 80s, some of this is going to look really familiar to you.

Influencer videos, rallies to save the children, parents panicking about their kids in the IKEA parking lot.

Now, I've seen these online, and as a parent and just somebody who cares about other people and kids generally, I'm concerned.

But they also have my BS detector going off.

800,000 kids, that sounds like a lot.

And while I know bad things can happen without them becoming international news, I just feel like somebody at CNN or Fox News maybe would have noticed 800,000 missing kids.

Is there any truth to the claim that tons of kids have just disappeared?

And if so, is the reason for it in line with whatever QAnon or your crazy, but maybe still lovable uncle happens to think?

Here today to help me unpack this disappearing act is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

Nick, let's just address the question up front.

Is there some kind of massive child trafficking issue going on that the mainstream media refuses to report on?

Well, it's complicated, as are most of the topics we do here.

Yeah, there's tons of kids getting trafficked, but the problem is not whatever people on Facebook are posting about it.

I think it's really important that people are informed about what's actually going on, who's actually at risk,

how to protect yourself and your kids, and why panicking and creating folk demons is actually counterproductive.

Okay, so before we get too deep in the weeds about the human trafficking that's actually going on, I think we should define terms because when we say trafficking, people might have a lot of ideas in their head about what that means.

So, what exactly are you talking about?

What are you referring to when you say trafficking?

I'm going to use the definition that law enforcement uses, and that is using force, fraud, or coercion to move someone around for the purpose of commercial sex or other labor.

So that's a very dry and cold definition.

Right.

But I think we need to be clear.

And sure, let's throw in kidnapping children for meat or whatever it is that QAnon and QAnon adjacent types think is going on for good measure.

But the important thing is that these words mean things and we have to be very specific about what we mean by trafficking and what we don't.

What would your definition not include?

Consensual human smuggling.

So is that like when people hire a coyote to help them and their family get across the Mexican border or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, this exactly.

This is a whole other issue.

It has nothing to do with trafficking.

It also doesn't include kidnapping per se.

Why not though?

It sounds like your definition from earlier is basically kind of kidnapping adjacent.

Some but not all kidnapping is trafficking.

Remember, we're saying that there's some purpose other than just taking the kid or the adult.

Kidnapping is rare.

It's almost never tied to trafficking.

North of 90% of all kidnapping is done by a non-custodial parent.

One parent who doesn't have custody takes their own kid or goes across state lines without permission, or there's just an attempt to weaponize the courts against one.

parent or the other, this gets reported as kidnapping.

A lot of the times it's not even what we would think of as kidnapping.

Most missing persons are runaways, about 95% of them, actually.

Stranger abductions are 1% of all kidnapping cases.

We talked about this on the Sextortion episode.

After Johnny Gosh and Adam Walsh happened in the early 80s, kids just getting, you know, randomly grabbed off the street or from a park by a creepy man in a van.

This is an absolute black swan event.

It just doesn't happen anymore.

Right.

I remember that.

For anybody who doubts what Nick is saying here, I mean, we always come with receipts.

You can find those in the show notes.

But yeah, you're right.

The 80s was like kids were getting kidnapped randomly.

And then now we've got America's Most Wanted.

And it kind of doesn't really.

Yes.

It's very, very rare.

Very rare.

Part of it, it's kind of like a chicken egg thing because like, it's never been safer to be a kid, but how true is that?

Because parents are, you know, helicopter-y.

We go into all this on this extortion episode, so I won't rehash it here.

That's right.

The last thing that traffic isn't going to include for our purposes is consensual transactional sex or even necessarily survival sex.

What do those terms mean?

Transactional sex is any sex act you're engaged in for some kind of remuneration, be it money, drugs, whatever.

Survival sex is when you're sleeping with someone for a place to stay or food to eat or something like that.

Survival sex is starting to sound a little like trafficking.

Because there's kind of coercion there, right?

Like, oh, you don't want to be homeless?

Yeah.

Let's go.

And I think that's a fair analysis.

And I I don't mean to like poo-poo this as like, oh, it's fine, whatever.

But what I am trying to do is avoid gray areas for the purpose of this episode.

Okay.

I think we, we need to keep this episode as black and white as possible and to talk about it thoughtfully and seriously.

So I'm going to exclude it for those purposes.

I mean, it's basically coercion by circumstance, but I think for the purposes of this episode, we need to exclude it.

It just starts blurring the lines.

Again, it's not an attempt to hand wave it and make it okay.

I just want to keep our definitions bottled and tight.

Got it.

Okay.

So you mentioned earlier that children are not just getting abducted from the local park.

Doesn't that kind of just give the game away?

I mean, aren't you basically saying that the child sex trafficking thing is a myth at that point?

Child sex trafficking is absolutely not a myth, but the idea that children are being abducted into sex slavery is mostly a myth.

Okay.

Largely.

I mean, we live in a world with eight plus billion people.

So if you say, if you make a statement about people, it's probably going to be troop somebody somewhere.

Right.

Just the law of large numbers.

Okay.

So thread the needle from me here.

If kids are not getting kidnapped for sex trafficking, but kids are getting sex trafficked, what is going on?

Most of these kids who are being trafficked are being groomed or blackmailed or otherwise exploited.

I mean, if you can stomach it, read the gory details of what happened with grooming gangs in the UK.

The kind of PG version of it is they found lonely girls pretended to be their boyfriends, which you need to teach your daughters that a 35-year-old man does not want to be her boyfriend when she's 10 years old.

And then getting them hooked on drugs or getting compromising photos of them or something like that.

That is deeply unpleasant for a lot of reasons, but I suppose it's important to know because that's how it actually is working in practice, right?

It's not some weirdo stalking the park and throwing your girl into the back of a van.

It's a creepy guy who befriends your child and then takes his time acclimating her to the idea of sexual exploitation, which is just gross.

Yuck.

Right.

It's a boiled frog kind of thing.

You have to get the child to feel as if they're a participant in the crime so that they won't report you.

The Children's Commissioner found over 2,400 confirmed victims of group-based child exploitation in over a year, with over 16,500 identified as being at risk during the same period.

The J report about Rotherham alone documented at least 1,400 children abused over 16 years.

Was this confined to Rotherham then?

No, Rochdale and Oldham, which were close to Rotherham, are sometimes kind of lumped together in the public imagination.

Rotherham is just this shorthand term for the entire scandal.

Huntersfield in West Yorkshire found dozens of men running a sex ring with girls who were already on the radar of social services.

But there's Halifax and Bradford.

Bradford is like right outside of Leeds.

Keeley, Derby, it was pretty concentrated in the north, which is one of the poorer parts of the country.

Okay, so, right.

So the million figure is almost certainly an exaggeration from political activists.

What's that actual number?

It's honestly hard to say.

Much of the data we have comes from government commissioned reviews, which I just think we should be extremely skeptical anytime the government is investigating their own failures.

Official figures are far lower than the million sometimes claimed, but we do have a good reason to think that, you know, even the official numbers are undercounted.

And why is that?

I know you personally just don't trust government officials, but do we have any evidence that their numbers are off?

So Sue Berelowitz, I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing her name incorrectly, was a former deputy children's commissioner.

She called the 2,409 confirmed victims in 14 months the tip of the iceberg.

She led a commission that filed another report in November 2012, which is very sadly called, I thought I was the only one in the world.

It's a government report that, if that's important to you, there's a link in the show notes for anybody who wants to read it, but I will warn you that it is grim reading.

There are other reports questioning the numbers, such as the report of the independent inquiry into child child sex abuse, which is separate from the Jay report, despite the fact that both were chaired by Alexis Jay.

Professor Liz Kelly from the London Metropolitan University has an extensive body of work showing that there were serious gaps in child services and police response.

I've heard wildly larger numbers for this phenomenon, by the way, which are also almost certainly inaccurate.

People were, for example, talking about taking the 1,400 from Rotherham specifically and trying to extrapolate that number into every hamlet and village in the UK.

And that's just obviously not the case.

Yeah, I've seen it estimated between 250,000 and a million, which no, but it's more than 1,400 or 2,400.

These girls weren't missing.

They were going home every night.

In fact, there were tons of police reports about it from the girls or the parents, and nothing was done.

The official...

report from the children's commissioner was called If Only Someone Had Listen.

More to the point for us, it shows us how large-scale child trafficking works in reality.

You know, it's not some random woman or girl getting grabbed out of the Walmart parking lot.

The UK had a series of high-profile scandals involving groups of men exploiting vulnerable girls.

And while the exact numbers are highly disputed, the pattern is clear.

The girls weren't missing.

They were still living at home or in care.

They were going to school.

They were going about their lives.

They were groomed over time.

They were manipulated into thinking that they were making choices.

And in many cases, were made to feel complicit in their own abuse.

Parents and victims often reported what was happening, but the authorities were quite slow to act, if indeed they did.

And police frequently dismissed complaints.

Social services underestimated the degree to which these girls were in danger, and the abuse carried on for years in plain sight.

So yeah, it's a process of grooming, coercion, institutional neglect.

These things all kind of work in concert to allow predators to operate even when warning signs are right in front of them.

You know, it wasn't just girls getting grabbed in the Aldi parking lot.

It's not like the movie Take It.

The reality is that most of the girls being trafficked both domestically and abroad.

First of all, they're not girls who came out of central casting for a new CW show about high school cheerleaders.

The communities most impacted by trafficking in the United States are African-American girls, Native American girls, Hispanic girls, and then internationally, yeah, this is happening to the poorest people on earth who, as you may or may not know, are generally speaking not white.

But that doesn't mean white people aren't at risk, right?

Oh, of course it doesn't, but it does tell us a lot about how trafficking works in practice.

Gay teens are often at risk for, I think, a lot of complicated reasons, but one that's worth mentioning is, you know, you're from a house where your parents aren't supportive and they either throw you out or you run away because it's not a super cool environment for you.

And you move in with some older creep that you think is a supportive adult.

It's not some guy with zip ties in a van.

And if you're telling kids to watch out for that sort of thing, you're really doing them a disservice because that's not what they need to be on the lookout for.

It's definitely a gross thing to think about, but check the show notes for anybody out there who doubts this.

The whole kid or adult getting grabbed out of the safeway and forced into sexual slavery thing, that's always been one part of this that has just kind of always set off my BS detector.

I mean, we live in an age where cameras are everywhere.

I just don't see how this could be happening on any kind of mass scale.

It just doesn't make sense.

It's not happening on any kind of mass scale.

No Vlad or whatever in a panel van is not waiting at the Walmart to hogtie your kids.

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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

What about gangs, though?

I did read somewhere that they're involved in trafficking rings a lot of the time, or maybe that's human smuggling, or maybe it's both.

Sometimes

specifically, I think it was gangs from other countries that were preying on the immigrant communities from their respective home countries.

Kind of like old-timey, you know, Italian mafia used to extort Italian businesses in New York, for example.

Yeah, so they're not like, you know, transnational criminal gangs are not coming up here to abduct your daughters and send them to Venezuela or whatever.

Trafficking, especially sex trafficking, is a very serious concern for people who aren't in this country legally.

It isn't necessarily or even primarily people are getting kidnapped and sent north of the border for slavery, sexual or otherwise, though that does happen.

So it's not about international trafficking in the way people think of it so much as it is preying on the local community.

I think the analogy with the mafia and Italian businesses is pretty good.

So how does that work?

What's the process where they exploit their national community?

Sometimes it'll be underage girls who aren't in this country legally, and the gangs will offer protection or threaten their family back in the country of origin.

Right.

And these girls may not want to talk because they're afraid of what will happen if they go to the police, right?

That's true in a lot of cases.

In some cases, the girls or women or even men or whoever it is have a legitimate fear of any engagement with law enforcement.

In other cases, the traffickers just convince them that they can't go to the police.

You know, it's kind of all the same thing from the victim's perspective, if you think about it.

Yeah, and this is probably why why law enforcement interventions can be a problem in the first place, I suppose.

Yes, because even when law enforcement shows up, they can be viewing victims as criminals, particularly with the current administration and its focus on remigration and deportation.

I think that language barriers must be an issue, right?

A cop who speaks Spanish, sure, there's a dime a dozen, but a cop who speaks the right local dialect of Chinese or Vietnamese or something more niche like.

Hmong, which we have in Michigan a lot, but maybe probably not anywhere else.

I mean, I see it in the Bay Area.

Oh, we had that where I grew up, too.

Oh, you do?

Okay.

So, yeah, I see the, which is, by the way, for people who are wondering what we're talking about, they're like a mountain-dwelling minority from Laos and Vietnam, I think.

Is that accurate?

And I think also Cambodia.

And Cambodia.

We had tons of, we had a very large Cambodian population where I grew up.

They basically, a bunch of them left during and after the Vietnam War because they were aiding the United States.

And so Cambodia, Vietnam, and that whole area, well, not a great place to live if you were, especially if you were on the wrong side of that thing.

So a lot of them came to Michigan and stuff like that, and they live in that movie, Gran Torino.

Remember that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the ethnic minority in that.

And they have a lot of issues just with crime because I think one of the sayings that I remember hearing growing up and that I heard from that movie was in the Hmong population, the girls go to college and the boys go to jail or prison or something.

And it's like,

really dark.

are not doing well, those guys in the United States for whatever reason, in at least in small part.

So anyway, yeah, so you got cops and they can't really talk to the victims, or they don't really know what's going on, and they're not integrated in the community because they're not from there.

And that would be a problem to solve.

To root this out, it's going to be very difficult.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption.

I mean, any language you can't find a decent interpreter for, you're going to have to overcome that barrier before you even start establishing the trust that's going to be necessary to help these victims.

Kind of the weirdest form of coercion that I came across is in West Africa, I guess they make women think they've put a curse on them and bad things will happen if they don't cooperate.

Oh, God, they fall for this?

Yeah, it's called a Juju ritual.

Look it up.

Okay.

I will look in the show notes where you've hopefully provided a helpful link, but that sort of makes me sad that someone can be like, I've got a magic spell on you.

And you're like, well, guess I have to do whatever you want me to do forever.

Like, okay.

Yeah.

The common denominator here, though, is that it's easy to exploit people.

with a shared background from a common place in a strange new land.

It's definitely a lot easier than jacking someone from the parking lot.

Another common denominator is your mom goes missing.

There's going to be tons of people looking for her.

A teenage girl here illegally who is potentially running around and only coming home half the time who's going to miss her.

Oh, man, that's cold.

I really don't mean it to be.

And I honestly feel bad for someone whose parents wouldn't even notice or care enough to call the cops if she just went missing.

The point I'm trying to make is there are some teenagers who could just disappear because they don't have the best parents and no one's going to say anything.

And to get out in front of this, like, no, I'm not like, oh, it serves them right for not watching their kids because somebody is putting that together in their head right now.

But it's like, no, I don't think that at all.

It's just a reality.

So not everybody, if you're listening to the show, you know, you're intelligent, educated, and thus you probably came from a good family.

Lots of people did not.

Lots of people listening to this show know what I'm talking about.

You just came from a home.

We're like, where's my kid?

I don't know.

I don't care.

No, I think that's a fair point.

In artful way, you're trying to draw attention to the fact that people in marginalized communities are the biggest victims and probably the easiest targets.

Exactly.

But we've talked a lot about sex here, and it's another myth that's worth addressing that trafficking necessarily means sex, and sex necessarily means trafficking.

Didn't you include that, though, in your definition of trafficking?

I said sex or commercial labor.

Or is the important word here because and the slavery episode is a good point of reference to dig deeper into this?

A lot of people aren't being trafficked for sex.

There might be sexual violence happening to trafficked labor, but that's not the purpose of their trafficking.

The purpose of their trafficking is not sexual exploitation.

It's financial exploitation.

And conversely, in a lot of sexual exploitation, there's a financial element as well.

But not everyone.

being trafficked is being trafficked for sex.

Does that really make it any better?

Well, in one sense, no, but I think most societies have established that there's something extra bad about sexual offenses, and I think that's correct.

So I know that the Sound of Freedom movie was a big hit, especially in red states.

For those of you who aren't aware, this is a film that supposedly details the exploits of a network of government agencies rescuing small children from sexual slavery.

How accurate is stuff like that?

I mean, it's not a documentary, nor does it purport to be.

But it does claim to be sort of based on real events, right?

You know, man, based on is doing a hell of a lot of work here.

People are calling this the most important movie ever made.

Okay.

And honestly, it's not.

This was this huge, quote-unquote, red pill moment for a lot of people where they just became convinced that guys were like, you know, leaving elite units of the federal government to embark on one-man rescue missions in Colombia.

I haven't.

seen the movie, but I believe that even in the movie, it's not, you know, the head cheerleader gets hogtied and thrown in the the back of a van at the mall parking lot.

No.

I think it was kids getting taken in through some bogus child modeling scene, which honestly, there's kind of a little kernel of truth to that, but even that's silly.

Why is that silly, though?

Because a total stranger is like, hey, your kids should be models.

And you're going to be like, oh, yeah, take them.

In reality, the person doing this, this is one of the problems with stranger danger is like, who victimizes kids?

Is it strangers?

No, it's going to be a trusted friend, a neighbor, a family member, a teacher, a clergyman.

It's going to be somebody that you know.

What else in it is less than fully truthful slash totally fiction?

Oh, there's this, you know, dramatic rescue scenes of children with gunfights and everything.

This is America, after all.

We do love a good gunfight and a good explosion, myself included.

There have been some rescue attempts in reality, but you're usually botched, as you could imagine.

They traumatize the victims.

They often violate international law.

The other thing is there's just not some jungle compound where they're keeping child sex slaves.

Again, this cannot be repeated enough.

This is not what trafficking looks like.

It looks a lot more like a farm staffed by people in debt bondage.

or a runaway teenager with no other options who trusted the wrong person or someone who's been coerced through poverty and or addiction.

And it's important that people know the truth about this so that they're not attacking straw men or getting some wildly inaccurate Hollywood version of what trafficking looks like.

There's also this weird kind of savior fantasy involved in all this.

The movie, it's kind of not really about the kids who are getting trafficked.

It's about the guy saving them, which is kind of weird.

And I think it appeals to a very specific type of middle-class religious person, largely.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

This version of, you know, this Hollywood version of trafficking has become such a cause du jour among certain types of American evangelicals.

And I hate it because there's real people with real problems, including being trafficked.

And you could be throwing your time and energy at that rather than this artificial fantasy of what trafficking looks like.

What about the guy that this movie was supposedly based on?

Yeah, it's based on Tim Ballard and his authenticity is questionable.

He was on your show.

That's right.

He was on the show way back in episode 369, which was sort of weirdly, I didn't follow up much with it after that, but it was like basically right after he did my show, he was just totally exposed as kind of a phony who was misusing the donations to like take luxury travel and hire his family and do all kinds of weird.

semi-shady stuff and get reported you know he had to leave that organization that i think he started yeah uh he did.

So Tim Ballard is a former Department of Homeland Security operative.

And actually, you know what?

It would kind of be helpful if people revisited that episode.

Sorry if I'm directing people to like naked baby photos of you or something, but it's all good.

You know, to like listen to this guy spew his nonsense.

will give you a probably a pretty good idea of what trafficking is not and who's not actually helping but uh the group is called operation underground railroad i actually did an art fundraiser for them well i participated in.

I didn't organize an art fundraiser for them maybe three years ago.

And it was to allegedly free kids from trafficking.

He's testified before Congress.

He's on all kinds of anti-trafficking councils or was anyway.

The point here isn't to drag him personally.

There's allegations against him.

I have no idea if they're true or not, but I do think that they're worth mentioning.

There's sexual harassment allegations, which usually grain of salt, but there's like civil suits and stuff and police reports.

People aren't just trying to smear him in the media, which makes it, in my opinion, significantly more credible.

He was telling women to pose as his wife or girlfriend as part of a cover for getting them to share a bed with him, allegedly.

Ah, smooth.

Yeah, allegedly.

We got to make it look real, okay?

Be really loud during our totally not real sex

when the door locks.

Yeah, I'm imagining them like jumping up and down on the bed and making like animal noises to convince people.

Yeah.

He allegedly had women model underwear for him to show how far they're willing to go to save the children.

I mean, I love that.

Oh my God.

I'm sorry to laugh, but it's just like, it's such a ridiculous, like, not because people did it because he had, you know, power over them, but allegedly.

But it's, you know, that this is his like, this is where his mind goes with all this power.

I, I'm only laughing because I'm like, one, I got to remember that line, but two, it can't be so cut and dry.

Like, hey, I want to see you in lingerie.

What?

That's totally inappropriate.

How far are you willing to go to save the children?

I mean, it's just, there's no way that it went down like that.

So I'm like, what are the other missing elements of what happened here where we got from let's kick down some doors and beat up some human traffickers to like you're putting on a hotel room runway show with Victoria's secret lingerie for this Shmo.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, come on.

Yeah.

The whole thing is really bizarre.

And again, like, there's police reports at a civil suit.

So I tend to take that stuff a lot more seriously than I do, just like, you know, filing a brief with the court of public opinion.

Also worth noting, not a smoking gun, but a lot of people who supported him abandoned him.

The Church of Latter-day Saints dished him.

I don't know that he was a member, but they like stopped their support of him.

Glenn Beck and Ballard himself was forced to step down from his own organization.

So it was pretty serious.

Yeah.

But like you said, he hasn't been convicted of anything.

So at this point, it's just on the level of accusation, got to be fair there.

And even if he is guilty, what does that have anything to do with whether or not Operation Underground Railroad was actually saving children, right?

Because it was the organization wasn't just him, right?

That's true.

I think it matters because the way the whole trafficking moral panic is presented to people who believe in it, it's just so ripe for exploitation.

You create this lurid image of trafficking that's just not accurate.

You make it some kind of life or death struggle between good and and evil, and you have power over these people who are very emotionally invested in your cause.

It does not surprise me that among the accusations against Ballard are that he was spiritually manipulating people.

For the people among us who are not religious, what does spiritual manipulation even mean?

He was setting himself up as some kind of religious or spiritual authority on a mission from God.

which, you know, I'm a religious person and I don't think that's okay.

If someone tells you that they're on a mission from God, you should be extremely skeptical of that.

And I find it very cynical on his part that he's exploiting these people in this way.

I think that all of this kind of save the children from trafficking stuff, the like kids are getting grabbed and sent to the secret pedophile island.

I think that really lends itself to QAnon type conspiracies, the nonsense like the Wayfair furniture company is shipping children and advertising them as couches.

I remember that.

Yeah, I mean, this is a real thing for anybody who's mercifully unaware.

Ballard did push the Wayfair conspiracy.

He talked about baby farms.

There are no baby farms.

People are not breeding children to be sex slaves or any other thing for shadowy.

pedophile elites.

Yeah.

And this isn't some extremely stupid but innocuous belief.

This takes attention off real child trafficking and discredits the credible accounts and makes them seem fantastical and frivolous.

But, you know, America loves a good moral panic.

Speaking of grooming and coercion, let's hear from the amazing sponsors that support this show.

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Now, for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

That's a good point.

I suppose at the point where organizations that are maybe not really doing anything are you're starting to get a bunch of donations, and so they're not donating to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children or whatever other charity.

I don't think that's a charity, actually, but like other organizations that are doing real work in this area that is maybe less sexy.

Like, oh, I stopped donating to the place that runs a safe shelter for gay runaway kids because I donated to the ones where they go and kick down the door at this place, but it's like, well, they're not actually doing that in the center with all the gay kids now can't afford to stay open.

So like, ugh.

And yeah, then somebody reports that they've been trafficked and it's like, oh, whatever.

I saw a sound of freedom.

It's a bunch of BS.

It's not really happening.

And it's like, no, no, no, my parents are doing it to me.

And it's like, come on, kid, get out of here.

So that's what I worry about with this stuff.

We've talked a lot about what child trafficking is not, though.

What does it look like?

How widespread is it?

Most of it is debt peonage or kids who fell through the cracks.

The debt peonage is more of a global phenomenon, but you know, and here in America, in your backyard, kids are falling through the cracks every day.

Traffickers do not need to grab kids off the street.

They just find kids who are hungry or homeless or neglected or even just scared.

And they offer them what they're lacking.

And a very disturbingly common scenario is parents exploiting their own children, like you just said, which a lot of times drugs and drug addiction are involved in that.

So, mom's an addict and she's got a 13-year-old daughter she can use to get drugs.

And it's morally outrageous.

It's also very, very sad.

How widespread is it?

5,000 cases tops in the United States, which is absolutely 5,000 too many.

Yeah.

But it is just not what is being claimed by these hysterical people claiming that there's a groomer behind every door.

There's not.

These numbers come from Polaris project reports.

They collect hotline tips and NGO referrals.

You know, the point isn't, oh, yeah, it's not that big of a deal.

It is.

It's just not the same big deal that your weird uncle, your weird but lovable uncle's Facebook memes say that it is.

Yeah.

You know, police bus where they find a bunch of trafficked kids, these are super rare.

It's usually the victims reach out for help or.

Social workers notice something is not quite on the up and up.

And that's when, you know, something happens.

That's true.

That was one of the big critiques that we got on our homeschooling episode was that it's harder for stuff to get reported because when kids go to school and they're acting weird or they got bruises or whatever it is, it tends to come out faster.

But when kids are homeschooled, there can be all this kind of hidden abusive stuff.

It's not that the majority of homeschooled kids are abused or anything, but it's like.

People who abuse their kids certainly are going to try and play the homeschool card because it just keeps prying eyes away from them.

I remember we got a lot of emails about that.

We actually talked about that on the episode.

Oh, we did.

Okay, good.

Well, I only remember the things people hated about my show.

You say something nice.

It's in one ear and out the other.

You tell me how much you hate the show.

I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

All right.

So what about, I wish I were lying.

What about outside the United States?

Because I'm willing to bet that this is a much bigger issue in parts of the world without such a strong rule of law.

And you'd be right.

As we discussed on the slavery episode, which people should go listen to, 50 million people worldwide are modern slaves.

12 million of them are children.

17 million people are in forced labor.

6 million of them are being sexually exploited.

And that includes 1.7 million children.

These are horrifying numbers.

It is a comparatively small amount of people in a world of 8 billion.

And they're mostly concentrated in places other than suburban Minneapolis.

So the chances of you or your child being trafficked are extremely low.

And neither one of you is getting grabbed at Waffle House and shipped to Cambodia.

Do you think these are accurate numbers?

Are they under or over-reported?

It's complicated.

On the one hand, there's pressure to under-report.

These are just the ones we know about.

It's like roaches.

You see one, you can bet there's probably more.

On the other hand, this is just conjecture on my part, but I do think it's worth bringing up as a reasonable postulate.

There's a lot of pressure, I think, on NGOs to over-report.

because they are going to get more funding for an exaggerated problem.

It's a hard thing to accurately measure for a lot of reasons, underreporting, over-reporting, fear of law enforcement, the blurry line between consent and coercion.

I think, though, that ultimately we can, you know, we can use these numbers and kind of price in that they're fuzzy.

I see.

Okay.

You talked earlier about how you think panic does more harm than good.

Why is that?

I think in general, panic does more harm than good.

Every bad law is based on one emotionally driven premise.

If we don't do something, a kid might get hurt.

Okay, so devil's advocate, what's wrong with that, right?

We don't want kids to get hurt.

Well, no, we don't, but I think at a philosophical level, it's just a very silly guide to law.

But specifically with regard to children and other people getting trafficked, what's the issue?

Okay, so let's look at bad law in practice.

Congress passed two laws in tandem in 2018, SESTA and FOSTA.

SESTA stands for Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, and FOSTA stands for Fight Online Sex Trafficking.

I'm instantly suspicious of any law with a name like Save the Puppies or Everyone Loves Ice Cream.

Yeah, okay, I know, but what about these laws specifically?

Sure.

So basically, this was during the golden age of Craigslist as a platform for commercial sex.

It made platforms that enabled sex trafficking criminally liable.

And that sounds great, right?

Yeah, sure.

I don't really know enough about it, but yeah, okay.

So the unintended consequences for these specific laws were that these platforms either shut down entirely or else banned commercial sex from the platform.

And that might sound great, but the issue is that a lot of these platforms allowed people to vet their clients and communicate with each other about who to avoid.

It also helped them to avoid street work, which is very, very dangerous.

Yeah.

It helped them to maintain financial independence, i.e.

not work for a pimp.

This was sold as a way to end sex trafficking and save the children.

The reality was that it just pushed the sex trade underground, which makes it harder to keep an eye on.

And it did nothing to address the core issues.

It was just a moral panic law.

And like most moral panic laws, it was not written in an intelligent and thoughtful way.

Sure, but isn't sex trafficking kind of something to get panicky about?

Well, I don't think so.

I think it's awful, but I just don't think.

panic ever helps.

And I think it can also, you know, panic can enable bad actors looking to take advantage of the situation, like these bogus rescue organizations we talked about.

They're good at PR.

They don't seem to be very good at actually helping victims.

I'm not aware of any evidence that they are anyway.

I think that there are victim-centered support organizations that help, but the savior organizations, I'm unaware of any evidence that they're helpful, though I'm sure the comments section will correct me.

We need to start with talking about what the reality of trafficking actually looks like and not some hollywood slash q anon fantasy about what's happening we know that the person shopping at target after dark is not at risk so who is we mentioned marginalized communities speak to that trafficking actually looks like migrant farm workers in california who have their visas manipulated it looks like young gay kids who felt like they had to run away from home and now they're living with some creep who's doing whatever to them.

It also looks like a nanny from the Philippines who had her passport confiscated.

Debt bondage, threat of deportation, coercion through family threats, these are called invisible chains.

These are all factors.

The risk factors are real and identifiable.

It's not just random people getting grabbed off the street because they're cute or pretty.

People at risk are homeless or at risk of being homeless.

They're addicted to drugs.

They're in the foster care system.

They're extremely poor or they lack proper paperwork or ID.

It seems almost like the human trafficking anxiety people have, it's like a semi-sophisticated version of Stranger Danger.

All the risks that you're talking about are failures of the system in general combined with a heaping dose of human frailty.

Yes, this is stranger danger for adults.

There's also a kind of way that trafficking gets hijacked by far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists.

It takes the focus off of real victims and real perpetrators and puts it onto drag queens or gay people in general or maybe immigrants or something.

And there's this whole panic about how groomers are everywhere.

Remember okay groomer instead of okay boomer for a few months there.

Like, oh, they're everywhere.

And it just, it doesn't match up with reality.

It seems like this would lead to allocating resources in the wrong spot, perhaps, if everybody sort of fell for this.

I think that's very well put.

I mean, I make no bones about the fact that I'm politically on the right.

Well, yeah,

I had no idea, Nick.

Didn't notice.

Obviously, but I just, I hate internet influencers in general.

Well, let me, let me stop you right there, pal.

Yeah, let me finish.

I hate influencers who are just grifting by hopping onto the latest and greatest outrage.

That's fair.

I hate outrage porn because even if there's some truth to what they're saying, and in this case, yeah, there is, people get trafficked.

But what they're doing is not, even if it was neutral, it would be like, who cares?

It's not.

It's actively harmful to the people who are the actual victims.

It acts as a shield for the actual criminals behind it.

We talked about what doesn't work.

So what does.

And don't say nothing, please.

No, I think things work.

I also think you just kind of, you have to accept that there's a non-trivial portion of the population who are always going to make bad choices to the point where they feel like their own exploitation is consensual.

You can't help somebody who doesn't want your help.

Yeah.

It just doesn't seem rational to me that you can help somebody who doesn't think that there's a problem.

But for everyone else, You need to remember what we talked about in terms of what drives this kind of exploitation.

And then you have to heal the underlying underlying cause.

Housing for people, mental health care, trauma care, legal aid, vocational training.

These are the things that can actually benefit people being victimized by trafficking and help them out of the bad situations that they're in.

Are there any organizations that are actually out there helping?

Polaris, who I mentioned earlier, they run the national human trafficking hotline that connects people with services around the clock in a whole bunch of different languages.

They also have the largest database of information about trafficking in North America, and they train advocates.

They're doing something.

Cast LA, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, they offer direct services like legal advocacy, emergency shelter.

They help set people up with long-term housing.

They give them life skills training.

This addresses the problem.

SWOP, that helps people who are currently involved in commercial sex both in and out of prison.

And their kind of main cause is reducing prison recidivism.

The thing is, people want there to be just this magic wand that they can wave that's going to make everything better.

And that's just not what the situation looks like.

There's a lot of really unsexy grunt work, and you're helping one person at a time.

That's why people love this fantasy of kicking down a door and rescuing 40 kids, right, who are in some sort of warehouse.

I totally understand people wanting something done about this, right?

But I also get that you really do have to be realistic about what the situation actually is and what can be done about it.

The panic-driven version that we are often sold in the media and on the internet is not just false, it's actually counterproductive.

People aren't saved by these daring rescue missions in the jungle.

They're saved through long-term care and support.

And as unpleasant as it is to think about, some people don't actually want help and there's nothing you can really do.

in that situation.

For parents, there's no value really in trying to instill stranger danger in your kids.

Your time is going to be better spent teaching your kids how to protect themselves against adult weirdos pretending to be their friends or people in positions of authority who might be using their power in unethical and criminal ways.

Make sure you know what they're getting up to online and foster open lines of communication so that if they do get into a bad situation or the beginnings of one, they won't make it far worse for fear of how you are going to react.

Thanks again to writer and researcher Nick Pell for helping us rescue reality from the clutches of panic.

Nick, this is kind of a gross one.

You're my gross topic guy.

Did you know that?

Yeah, no, I've definitely noticed that, like, I don't get bananas or like, you know, the teddy bear industry.

I get the most depressing topics on human earth, but they also tend to be like, you know, things I know about because I actively seek out depressing information because I'm that kind of person.

It's funny.

I think we mentioned this before.

Like, you're never going to get the like, do aluminum cans really get recycled?

It's going to to be like how about fentanyl right or whatever it's like oh yeah thanks jordan are puppies cute yeah on the jordan harbinger show with nick powell that's right we unpack the truth behind whether or not puppies are cute exactly no you're out of luck man but i thank you for uh occupying that niche somebody's got to do it and thanks to everybody else for listening topic suggestions for future episodes of skeptical sunday to me jordan at jordanharbinger.com advertisers deals discounts and ways to support the show all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

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My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sulauskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own.

I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

Also, of course, we try to get these episodes as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, even if it might have been fact-checked.

So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being or that of others.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love.

If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

What happens when you speak out against Vladimir Putin and the KGB starts showing up in your life outside of Russia?

Konstantin Samoylov didn't just flee his homeland to avoid conscription.

He's now exposing the regime from abroad with a target on his back.

I was growing up on

None in Russia thought that we could invade Ukraine.

And then I was absolutely caught off guard.

It's unbelievable.

The Russian state didn't care about what was being said about it it on the outside.

All they cared was on the inside.

But now the focus has shifted on telling the truth about Russia, how things are.

And my YouTube channel started growing.

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And I think that I'm becoming a bigger and bigger danger to them.

So they're trying to neutralize me one way or another.

Knowing that I am a narrator is one thing, but when you see actually an agent in real life, that's a different ballgame.

I'm not stopping.

I keep on talking because I was silent for 15 years.

I was looking at my country going down to hell, and I wasn't doing anything about it.

So there's no way they're going to shut me up.

Even if I put myself into more danger, I think that's more important right now to tell the truth of what's really happening in Russia.

If not me, then who?

To hear more about life under dictatorship, the myths of Russian strength, and what it really costs to tell the truth, check out episode 1021 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

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