This again?
Yeah, I know: “trans women are women” “sex work is work” and “child sexual abuse is a moral panic.”
Give it up. We aren’t buying it.
Too many of us have direct experience of being sexual exploited as kids.
There is nothing valid about “sex work” because it’s an umbrella term that includes pimps and “cam girls” and erases the suffering of the most vulnerable victims of sexual exploitation; the poor, the young, and the disabled. “Sex work is work” is an extreme Luxury Belief that has no place in a compassionate society.
Also, child sexual exploitation is a horrific problem, whether it’s 5 children or 5 million children.
Yes, like me, most children are abused and trafficked by a close family member.
However, just because your friend Bridget Carr never met a trafficking victim who was abducted by a stranger doesn’t mean stranger abductions don’t happen. They clearly do (and those abducted by strangers are probably less likely to live to tell the tale – to Bridget or anyone else).
Are we a paranoid and isolated society?
Yes.
Are we too concerned about child sex trafficking (or adult sex trafficking)?
Oh, hell no.
We aren’t nearly concerned enough.

For this I blame Australia. Migration to Australian cities and increased opulence, resulted in a number of suburban newspapers in addition to the related development of three commercial TV networks in the 1960s.

Because Australia is awful big, there was a newsroom for each TV channel, in each state. That’s twenty TV newsrooms (three for each mainland state and the federal capital territory, the small state of Tasmania meriting only two.)

More if you add the government-run Australian Broadcasting Commission (sort of a knock-off of the BBC.) Even more if you add New Zealand, which has similar demographics and free movement making it easy for the citizens of either to live and work in the other.
The only trouble with this is that not much happens in suburban Australia.
I mean, very little. It’s seriously quiet. Like a grave (joke.) NZ even more so.
A newspaper edition every week might be overdoing it.
When something finally did happen, in 1966, it was an abduction, three children from an Adelaide beach, known as the Disappearance of the Beaumont Children.
The country was transfixed. The proprietor who owned those suburban newspapers? One Rupert Keith Murdoch.

The trope of child abduction in otherwise sleepy suburbia, became a staple of tabloid newspaper-dom and commercial TV, first in Australia, then wherever else the Murdochs operated, or under-employed Australian media staff emigrated to work.

Also big was the related topic of child murder, as in the Azaria Chamberlain case.

Paradoxically, real Australian child abduction, ie the indigenous ‘Stolen Generations’, as implemented by governments, or by cults embedded within state hierarchies eg, ‘The Family’ in the creepy, neo-gothic state of Victoria, generated little or no media interest whatsoever.

In the 1970s in the UK at least, child abduction was a big enough issue that children were bombarded with government adverts about stranger-danger eg “Charley says – Don’t talk to strangers” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3FnCiRpdQ4
The perception of threats to children was also heightened by the high-profile of child murders in the news, to which you add the high-profile child abuse cases and institutional scandals, and the rise in prosecutions for child-porn, often involving networks of offenders. With all this taught fear over decades, it’s not surprising that stories of child-trafficking touch a nerve (and it doesn’t help when children seem to be being sexualised in schools and stores). Media and fiction always exaggerates reality, but it’s replaying a folk narrative that has a long dark history.

An estimated 60,000 Ukrainian children since the beginning of the war are missing. Untold numbers of children who have (been) crossed illegally into the US have disappeared into the ether. As Tim Ballard points out, you can only sell a bag of cocaine once, but you can sell a child for sex 5-10 times a day.
I’d say that’s a genuine reason to be very, very wary.

This doesn’t appear to be anything new. Previously we had the “white slave” trade panic which had women running in fear over Chinese laundries. Then there is alien abduction. Did similar panics lead to the lynching of black men in the south?

Interestingly kidnapping seems to feature quite strongly in female sexual fantasy and fantasy literature (Bound for Algiers and the rest). Could we have to do here with some sort of psycho-sexual phenomena? Do we need to be a bit more Freudian to understand these phenomena?

Is this largely a female phenomena? Or do men also live in fear of abduction. I’ve noticed that women tend to exaggerate, to themselves as well as others, the risks that they face in a way that men generally do not. And there seem to be plenty of people willing to play on those fears for political as well as financial reasons.

Tell that to Lisa McVey, Colleen Stan, the girls Ariel Castro held captive for years or the thousands who’ve suffered a similar fate that such crimes are simply a “moral panic” whipped up by overactive doom sayers. While most violent crimes against women are committed by someone they know, government statistics show that 40% of crimes against women are by strangers. That’s no small amount. Almost half. So women and children have a right to be wary.

One country where child abduction does happen more frequently is China, on account of the one-child policy.

The tell-tale of child abduction going on in the real world, is of course, its being under rather than over-reported.

“The #MeToo movement, though it did an enormous amount of good, also led to a heightened sense of vulnerability among women … ”
It also led to the legitimation of vigilantism–bypassing the courts and due process that the law requires.

How abduction panic became big business
Obviously we need some sort of snappy sobriquet for this sort of sensationalist kidnapping-panic industry. I’d recommend “Big Snatch”, but I think that’s already taken.

All of this correlates with the quasi-open US border policy of the last 5 years, if not pre-dating Biden. It is a particular social phenomenon linked to clear ideological policy-making, as is the Fentanyl tragedy.