00:03:57.940I'm the co-host of a podcast called You're Wrong About
00:04:00.600and another podcast called Maintenance Phase.
00:04:03.360So online, I find that so many conversations about big complex issues,
00:04:07.180things like trafficking or homelessness, are really dominated by people who don't really know
00:04:11.740what they're talking about and who are either spreading bad information intentionally or
00:04:15.900unintentionally. When you started making your wrong about, were y'all setting out to give
00:04:20.260people the tools to push back against this kind of bad information? No, like this was completely
00:04:26.260accidental. We had no idea when we started that we would find out that America keeps having the
00:04:31.780same moral panic over and over again. This was not something that we thought, you know, it's all the
00:04:37.060same thing. It's like a tide that comes in and out. You know, the satanic panic is always with
00:04:41.320us. QAnon is always with us. We had no idea that we would come up with that. It's just sort of we
00:04:46.180research sort of debunkable episodes in history. And when you start debunking them, you're like an
00:04:52.720hour or two into the research and you're like, oh, it's this one again. Oh, we're going to do the
00:04:56.840thing where they're like strangers coming to get your kids, right? Or there's some societal out
00:05:02.140group, right? Like homeless people, like trans people, like sex offenders that we don't like.1.00
00:05:08.380And we're going to project this extreme power onto them. We're going to project this extreme1.00
00:05:13.960rapaciousness onto them. There's millions of them, you know, they're coming to the border.
00:05:18.100They're trying to steal your kids and get them into street gangs. I mean, it's like this Mad
00:05:22.560Libs where you can just throw in like, okay, which societal out group is it going to be?
00:05:26.740What are they doing to our kids today? Like it's over and over again, the same thing.
00:05:31.340So we've both, me and my co-host Sarah Marshall, have become these like accidental insufferable debunkers where we're like, nope, same one.
00:05:43.680So in my research around disinformation, particularly like false panics around things that are rooted in people's identity.0.58
00:05:51.880So whether it's trans folks, queer folks, you know, immigrants, it is always sort of the same thing.
00:05:57.220Like, I feel right now we're seeing all of this legislation sort of meant to make you think as if trans children are, like, running the world.0.98
00:06:05.560Like, trans children are the biggest threat to your kids.0.99
00:06:07.700Totally. And it's the same tropes, right?1.00
00:07:17.740But zooming out a little bit, you're like, oh, no, this is just what happens during times of anxiety.
00:07:23.420And isn't the perfect recipe for a very anxious society a global pandemic?
00:07:28.800It's probably not a coincidence that as COVID worsened, we saw more and more content about QAnon and Save the Children,
00:07:35.020purporting to save kids from some perceived danger lurking out in the world.
00:07:39.400Why do you think right now, this specific moment in politics and culture, why are we seeing this resurgence of panic around sex trafficking and trafficking, do you think?
00:07:49.480I mean, it's hard to say exactly. I think, you know, this really hit its peak last summer.
00:07:55.080All of this QAnon, hashtag save the children stuff.
00:07:58.560And it really seems like there was a moment where, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic.
00:08:03.880Information was all over the place, right?
00:08:35.240We're looking at the internet and all of a sudden you have people whose minds are a little bit more open to things like, well, maybe the real danger to children isn't COVID.
00:08:44.800Maybe it's actually these, you know, white van driving traffickers who come from other countries and they're going to kidnap my kids and take them abroad or these narratives that just make no sense, right?0.95
00:08:55.840And, you know, at the heart of it, the little seed in the middle of it was this insane QAnon stuff, right?0.71
00:09:00.440where it's like adrenochrome and like Hillary Clinton is like cutting the faces off a baby,0.97
00:09:04.280like completely nuts stuff. But there's enough sort of plausible deniability around that,0.75
00:09:10.600that you can very easily say, well, I care about children. And so what's the harm of sharing this
00:09:15.840little meme? Like what's the harm of taking this little thing on Facebook that says, you know,
00:09:20.900infamously, there was one that said that children are thousands of times more likely to die of
00:09:25.580trafficking than of COVID. And so it was in like the Instagram aesthetic, right? Where it's got
00:09:32.880like the little logo and it's in pink and it's very shareable. And it's like, well, what's the
00:09:36.480harm? Like I might as well share that. You know, if it helps save a kid or two, then I'm doing
00:09:40.560something good. And that's a feeling of certainty in the world, right? But nobody thinks about what
00:09:46.680it does to reinforce these just deranged myths that aren't helping children. They're not helping
00:09:52.800non-children, they're not helping anybody. But it's easy to forget that when you're like, well,
00:09:57.800what's the harm of sharing this? And then all of a sudden, these bananas memes start just bouncing
00:10:01.780around the internet for months. Yeah, I think, honestly, listening to You're Wrong About was
00:10:07.280something that really helped make that transition for me. Because, you know, for a while, I'd be
00:10:12.140like, well, if this person thinks it's going to do some good to share this untrue meme on their
00:10:17.100Facebook page about trafficking or about children, who is it hurting? Now I've come to see that,
00:10:21.260okay, well, if we overemphasize the risks of little kids being like snatched up or things
00:10:27.300like that, what are we under, what are we under emphasizing? You know, kids like youth who are
00:10:32.400facing homelessness, youth who are put in precarious or, you know, bad or dangerous
00:10:37.820situations, things that are much more common. Like if we focus on this big, scary thing that
00:10:43.000isn't happening, all of the things that actually are happening, we're just taking attention away
00:10:47.180from that. Right. And there's also this retributive aspect, too, where a lot of those memes that went
00:10:51.640around were about sort of catching the pedophiles, catching the traffickers. You know, we have to
00:10:55.540find the evil people and we have to root them out of our society. And that's not where the threats
00:10:59.600to children come from. The threats to children are primarily in the family. A lot of it is things
00:11:04.260like homelessness. There's very few youth homeless shelters in most cities in America. There's also
00:11:08.840a completely broken foster care system. So when you look at things like the sort of missing and
00:11:14.040exploited child hotline, 80% of the calls are coming from foster care. So when we talk about
00:11:19.680trafficking, we're mostly talking about runaways. We're mostly talking about kids who are abused at
00:11:23.840home, abused in foster care. They're queer. They're trans. They need a place to stay. They don't need1.00
00:11:29.200somebody else to go to jail forever. And when we're sharing these memes that are sort of blaming all
00:11:33.940of these societal problems on these societal others that we already don't like or a little bit wary of
00:11:38.260anyway, all we're really doing is contributing to these retributive solutions which do not make
00:11:42.660children safer. Yeah. And I also think it does kind of come down to what you were talking about
00:11:47.500before, this idea of like wanting to catch the bad guys. That's so much more exciting and fun
00:11:53.060than, oh, we need to confront some of these systemic ills in our society that allow for
00:11:58.260already marginalized people to fall through the cracks. That's boring. It's so much more fun to
00:12:02.420be like, yeah, I'm going to track down these bad guys. Let's take a quick break.
00:15:21.320An Instagram video made by mom influencer Katie Sorensen, where she said that two strangers tried to kidnap her kids in a Michaels Craft store in California, got over 2 million views.
00:15:31.220Monday of this week, my children were the targets of attempted kidnap,
00:15:36.440which is such a weird thing to even vocalize, but it happened.
00:15:41.680And I want to share that story with you in an effort to raise awareness
00:15:45.040as to what signs to look for and to just encourage parents
00:15:48.620to be more aware of their surroundings and what is going on around them.
00:15:52.920Sorenson said that she overheard the couple making comments about her kid's appearance
00:15:56.480and the man even tried to grab at her child's stroller.
00:15:59.920But when the couple saw their picture being posted on Save the Children forums online,
00:16:04.120in connection with an attempted kidnapping,
00:16:06.280they came forward to deny any wrongdoing and cooperated with the police investigation.
00:16:11.060Grandparents themselves, they said they had just been discussing their own grandkids,
00:16:21.700Police cleared the couple of any wrongdoing and closed the case,
00:16:24.580And Sorensen says that she shared her story just to warn other parents to remain vigilant.
00:16:29.380But this is a great example of why sharing stories just for awareness is not always a helpful thing to do.
00:16:35.140It also overemphasizes the idea that white kids are at risk for being kidnapped by strangers from public places in affluent suburbs,
00:16:42.560which when it comes to trafficking is exceedingly rare,
00:16:45.440while de-emphasizing that the existing threats out there are much more likely to be family members or trusted community members preying on vulnerable people.
00:16:52.420and that those targeted are more often than not marginalized youth,
00:16:56.640queer kids or trans kids or kids facing poverty or homelessness.
00:17:00.320Like someone who's kidnapping children and taking them across state lines1.00
00:17:03.460and keeping them in motel rooms and forcing them to have sex with people,0.79
00:19:50.360And so the thing that we need to look for are places where we have power in society and we don't have accountability.
00:19:57.160And we already have so much accountability.
00:19:59.680Like, I don't want to imply that, like, there's no such thing as somebody in a white van who's kidnapping kids, whatever.
00:20:05.340But it's much more common for someone to abuse the trust of children and especially abuse the trust of marginalized children, right?
00:20:15.460Because if you don't feel safe at home, you might turn to a soccer coach as somebody to talk to, as somebody who feels safe even though they aren't, right?
00:20:23.960This is the process of sort of making somebody unsafe and physically threatening somebody often does come down to tricking them and looking for these elements of marginalization and looking for these aspects of marginalization that make them easier to trick.
00:20:40.940So at every level, it's the vulnerable kids.
00:20:43.360It's finding the vulnerable kids and giving them actual safe places to go and safe adults to actually talk to about this stuff.
00:20:48.840So again, boring, but that's not something that you can see in Target, but this is what society needs and it's what we've needed for decades and we're just not doing.
00:22:08.920If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:22:14.860This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:22:27.340I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:22:34.440I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:22:37.580From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:22:43.980It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:22:51.880Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:23:01.060Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:15.540When women make videos on social media about them or their kids narrowly escaping being hunted by would-be traffickers, they often go viral.
00:24:23.160That's because we've deemed it okay to talk about the perceived threat of strangers or the other.
00:24:28.580But what about when women talk about people they know abusing their power, people in their0.97
00:24:34.700Even though the actual threat is much more likely to be someone you know, not a stranger0.84
00:24:38.960in a van, women are not always supported when we speak up about it.
00:24:43.440I do think as a society, it's okay for women and families to call out like quote unquote0.84
00:24:50.940bad guys if they're scary monsters showing up in a van.0.99
00:24:54.600But if it's somebody that lives with somebody in your family, somebody in your church, somebody in your community, like we're pretty uncomfortable with women, you know, calling out people in those positions who abuse their power.
00:25:05.760But if somehow it's like totally fine if you're thinking of it as like calling out a bad guy in a van.
00:25:12.520And that's also that's another aspect of marginalization, right?
00:25:14.320That if it's a poor mother, maybe she's a single mom, maybe she's working two jobs and she doesn't see her kids that much.
00:25:19.320And she goes to some authority and she says, you know, I feel a little bit weird about this soccer coach.
00:25:23.420people might not believe her. They're like, isn't she a bad mother anyway? Right. So at every level
00:25:28.320of marginalization makes it so much harder to address these problems because that just gives,
00:25:32.420you know, the priest is going to have a lot more credibility than the single mom who's not home as
00:25:36.060much as she'd like to be. So at every level, these are the things that we have to address and setting
00:25:39.780up formal systems to investigate these things and actual accountability mechanisms. So I keep saying
00:25:46.740it. I only have one argument on the show, but like we just need to do the boring stuff. Like
00:25:50.340i wish it was more interesting than that no it's so true and you know you talk a little bit you
00:25:56.240talked a bit about like zip ties on your car and people hiding under your car like what role do
00:26:02.600you think that local media and also law enforcement has to play in this because i i've read articles
00:26:08.980where on its face it would appear that a police officer or somebody in law enforcement has
00:26:14.580confirmed yes we saw this zip tie on the cars and this is a trafficking thing but actually when you
00:26:19.820dig a little deeper into it. You're like, okay, this police officer is confirming that this person
00:26:24.320called the police and they came for this reason. But it's not actually any proof that this was
00:26:30.260tied to a trafficking attempt. What role do you think that journalists and law enforcement should
00:26:34.960play in making sure that these panics don't spin out of control?0.98
00:26:39.040One of the ones, I think it was last summer, maybe last fall, was these poor people had their
00:26:44.100wedding and they had some flowers left over from their wedding and they thought it would be cute
00:26:47.980to put them on people's car in a parking lot and then people came out to their cars and found a
00:26:52.520flower and they freaked out they're like it's traffickers i marked the traffickers are after me
00:26:57.520and these poor people who are just trying to do something nice are like all of a sudden sort of
00:27:01.900smeared as traffickers and what was amazing was the cops sort of like reinforced this it's like
00:27:08.440oh you know we've we've had threats recently of trafficking you know we've we've heard rumors of
00:27:12.300trafficking and of course the local media reinforces this too that you know trafficking
00:27:15.680is a huge problem in this area and it could happen to anyone, but not in this particular
00:27:19.660case. And there's no sort of attempt to debunk the meta myth here that people are staking
00:27:26.540you out in parking lots to kidnap you. Like that, even for like truly evil people, that
00:27:32.100doesn't make that much sense. Parking lots are really, really public and it's like broad
00:27:35.460daylight. And why would you leave a flower to like communicate with the other traffickers?
00:27:40.620Like just text the other traffickers. Like it doesn't make any sense on any level. But
00:27:44.800But we get this weird credulity, especially around this issue, that, you know, one of the tenets of journalism is you're supposed to do sort of both sides, right?
00:27:53.620We saw this for climate change for years, right?
00:27:55.340Like there's the people that say that climate change is real, and then there's the whack jobs who say that it's not, but we have to put both of them on the air, right?
00:28:02.360But then weirdly, when it comes to trafficking and these other stranger danger myths, there's no need to speak to like actual sex workers who are like, uh, this is not how sex work works.
00:28:11.160There's no need to talk to actual child advocates or social workers.
00:28:14.380There's no need to talk to anybody who's skeptical of this. It's just like, well,
00:28:17.260cops say there's a bunch of trafficking out there, so let's just tell people that.
00:28:21.000So it's just really frustrating that there isn't the same level of scrutiny and the same
00:28:25.460journalistic standards applied to these kinds of stories that hit something like really deep
00:28:29.960within us of like, oh, this is the danger I have to worry about. Yeah, I think I hadn't even thought
00:28:34.760about that, but it's a good point. And I, part of me wonders if it's a little bit of hesitation
00:28:41.360because, and I struggle with this as well, you don't want to feel like you're invalidating
00:28:45.920somebody's experience, right? Like if somebody feels like they were targeted or they were like
00:28:51.340something sketchy was going on, I want people to feel like that experience is okay to talk about.
00:28:56.980But I also don't want someone to use that experience to feel something that's just not
00:29:02.100true that's going to result in more harm. Right. And there's also, there are real cases
00:29:06.160of this happening. I mean, this is one of the challenges with moral panics is that
00:29:09.260most moral panics, they never come from nothing, right? We had this massive panic in the 1980s
00:29:14.380and 1990s about, quote unquote, stranger danger, that, you know, kids were going to come and steal
00:29:18.180your kids. And like, there were some truly horrific, awful, heartbreaking cases where
00:29:22.440this really did happen. This is why, this is how we got all of these, you know, Jacob's law and
00:29:27.020Megan's law and all these laws that are named after kids and things like the Amber Alerts.
00:29:30.980So there were real cases, but the problem is that these very small number of truly heartbreaking,
00:29:36.720true cases, get expanded into this massive national problem that we all need to be worried
00:29:42.320about. And it very quickly becomes this thing of like, well, if it saves one child, right? We can
00:29:47.160sacrifice our civil liberties. We can incarcerate a bunch of people on sort of spurious grounds if
00:29:53.420it saves one child. And one thing, you know, as somebody who is a urban cyclist and somebody who
00:29:59.180takes like urban safety very seriously, this is not a standard that we apply to the lives of
00:30:05.160children in other contexts, right? If you want to save the life of one child, you'd crack down on
00:30:11.180guns. Guns kill 3,000 kids a year. Cars kill 6,000 kids a year, right? You could make the speed limit0.77
00:30:17.280in every single city 15 miles an hour throughout the country and you would literally save the lives
00:30:21.860of like 1,500 kids because most kids are killed by speeding cars. But that's not a sacrifice that
00:30:26.220we're willing to make because that's something that I would have to sacrifice. I would have to
00:30:30.000I would have to drive slower. Whereas whenever it comes to these, you know, if it saves the life
00:30:34.680of one child, these kinds of sacrifices, it's always somebody else who's going to make the
00:30:38.080sacrifice. It's somebody else who's going to go to jail. The effects of this are going to be
00:30:42.780inflicted on a societal outgroup. So this entire logic of like, you know, we must do this to save
00:30:49.180one child, that's great logic, but it's not a logic that we apply to any other social problem.
00:30:54.580That's so true. And I think, yeah, I think the idea that the people who are going to be
00:30:59.240further criminalized harmed by this by like when we make laws you know kind of quickly as long as
00:31:07.120it's not like me feeling that repercussion you know as long as someone else dealing with it i
00:31:11.640think that we're much more comfortable with that what can we do to avoid falling into moral panics
00:31:17.720even ones that are like well-intentioned yeah you know how can we avoid this on a wider scale
00:31:23.180i i mean i want to say like be careful with what you share but like i'm not all that careful with
00:31:28.800what I share. Like, there's a lot of information out there. It's really hard. Like, people, you
00:31:32.640know, we shouldn't all be having to read the nutrition label on every single piece of
00:31:35.580information. I will say, just on these kinds of things, it's never strangers. It's never,
00:31:42.820like, these kinds of monomyths, anything that looks like the sort of, remember the flashing
00:31:47.420your high beams, gang initiation stuff? Those are totally bunk. Anything involving, like,
00:31:52.940random targeting of civilians, that really never happens. Anything with strangers kidnapping you
00:31:59.800in broad daylight. I think there's like certain categories of anecdotes that are just like,
00:32:04.460these ones never turn out to be true. So we should just stop sharing them. Like, don't feel
00:32:09.240like you have to warn people about anything involving a parking lot. If a parking lot is
00:32:13.140involved, people are safe. I mean, they're all like videotaped at this point. Exactly. Like,
00:32:19.260people are safe in parking lots. Just like leave the parking lots alone. It's fine.
00:32:22.940It's so funny because I went back and listened to the episode that y'all did about sex trafficking and the list of things that they tell young people to look out for that could be signs of trafficking.
00:32:32.300Things like if somebody is moody or if somebody all of a sudden starts dressing different or wearing different clothes or if they get a barcode tattoo.
00:32:40.340As somebody who grew up kind of, you know, gothy, goth adjacent, alty adjacent, I knew two different people who had barcode tattoos.