With the ongoing mainstreaming of the Qanon mega-conspiracy, panic around global sex trafficking has reached new heights. Thanks to everyone from yoga moms who want to vaccinate their children with reiki to your local smooth-brained anti-masker, nonsensical memes about fighting trafficking are proliferating through social media faster than a Wayfair cabinet containing a human child can be delivered to your torture dungeon.
While the latest version of this panic is uniquely hell world in its details, the panic itself is nothing new. The satanic panic of the ‘80s featured similar claims of nonexistent tunnels and abuse cults, and ideas of deviants targeting innocent Christian children with their sinful ways stretch back to Jewish “blood libel” conspiracies.
But it’s not just the conspiracy-minded who are buying into this: most debunkings of Qanon include caveats assuring us that sex trafficking is indeed a global crisis that needs to be addressed. And why not? Most of us have heard about trafficking for decades, in news reports and fictional depictions in television and film. As journalist Ruth Graham wrote in a 2015 piece in Slate on the ongoing Evangelical Christian obsession with sex trafficking: “Who could possibly dispute the travesty of helpless women and children forcibly sold into sexual bondage?“
There’s just one slight problem, which is that the kind of trafficking that these NGOs purport to be fighting doesn’t actually exist, as two brilliant episodes of the podcast You’re Wrong About break down in excruciating detail.
As host Michael Hobbes outlines, sex trafficking as it is portrayed in media is not, in fact, an international crisis. There are no shadowy networks of criminals catching children on the street and selling them into slavery. (Not even Jeffrey Epstein qualifies—his vulnerable victims were coerced, not kidnapped.) Anti-trafficking NGOs—which are overwhelmingly Christian, conservative, anti-sex work, and uncomfortably colonialist in their approach abroad—use flimsy, easily refuted numbers to back up their claims. These wildly exaggerated statistics almost always include all trafficking victims, the vast majority of which are migrant laborers who are subject to wage theft and coercion due to inhumane immigration policy. The statistics also often count every single child who has been reported missing for any reason in the US during a given year, whether or not there’s the remotest suggestion of that child having been “trafficked”: the overwhelming majority are found safe and sound, usually with one of their parents.
As Hobbes and his co-host Sarah Marshall repeatedly point out, true instances of sex trafficking are much, much more likely to take the form of a marginalized person doing what’s called survival sex work than a Pizzagate-like satanic cult. These situations occur due to the plain old boring conspiracy of capitalism (along with racism, homophobia and transphobia), which puts young vulnerable people in situations where their options are extremely limited and they’re forced to do whatever they can to get by.
So why are people pouring billions of dollars into combating a problem that doesn’t exist? It starts to make sense when you realize that stamping out sex work is not incidental to these anti-trafficking efforts—it’s their entire purpose. These campaigns are doing real damage, helping to pass laws like SESTA/FOSTA which make life harder and more dangerous for sex workers.
Graham points out this is nothing new, but a repeat of a nearly identical moral panic from the 19th century, which had similar results:
Many of the new anti-trafficking advocates compare their work to the 19th-century abolitionist movement against chattel slavery—with some leaders in the movement referring to themselves (and, apparently, Jesus) as “abolitionists.” But, according to Gretchen Soderlund, author of the 2013 book Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917, the better comparison may be to the “white slavery” panic of the late 19th century. Like the current rhetoric around anti-trafficking, “white slavery” engaged both feminist and Christian activists. It also focused primarily on protecting female virtue—often depicting prostitution as “slavery.” The phenomenon of women being forced into selling themselves on a widespread scale was mostly malarkey, as it turned out. But the movement was triumphant anyway: The 1910 White Slave Traffic Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” effectively ended an era of commercialized prostitution (and criminalized plenty of consensual sex along the way).
Ultimately, conspiracies like Qanon and Christian anti-trafficking efforts both arise out of a rejection of the confusing, messy reality of the modern world. Just like in the 19th century, many people today still seem to find it hard to wrap their minds around the idea that women would ever sell sex for money without being forced into it. There must be an evil, organized force underlying this—what else could be causing the degradation of all we hold dear?!
I’ve been obsessing over all of this in the context of the reaction to the new Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion song “WAP". As a piece of marketing, the instantly viral song is brilliant, designed flawlessly to elicit the outrage and disgust of the professionally outraged segments of the media ecosystem, like a guided missile directed at Ben Shapiro’s amygdala. The song is first and foremost, however, an extremely fun, outrageous and sex-positive celebration of fucking, performed by two black women, one of whom is a former sex worker.
The reaction in some corners to the song—the tut-tutting, the concern for influence it may have on young minds—is very much in the tradition of efforts to save women (and their children) from falling into the mire of sexual impurity. Even some feminists apparently still can’t believe that women can be the protagonist of their own stories when it comes to sexual choice and expression. It’s more comforting for some people to think, like the Evangelicals and the 19th century abolitionists, that these women are pawns played in a game by men—just like the hundreds of thousands of non-existent children kidnapped from America’s streets EVERY YEAR.
Some women, those people seem to believe, need to be saved from themselves. And if it’s too late for wretched souls like Cardi and Megan, already destroyed by the corrupting forces of oral sex and sexy outfits, they insist we must stamp out this sin before it infects the next generation, who, god forbid, might end up like them. Think of the children.