One of the things that happens to you when you become a parent and your kids get to be about school age (4 - 6) is you realize how precarious their safety is, actually.
I don't mean their safety as in playing on the playground, or visiting a friend's house.
I mean how trusting children are towards adults and how easy it is to trick them into dangerous situations.
Don't get me wrong: my 6 year old son is very cleaver for his age, but he is still entirely trusting of the adults around him.
This really came through to me a few months ago when he lost a tooth and I put a dollar under his pillow while he slept. He woke up the next morning, checked the pillow, and gasped in surprise, shouting "Look what the Tooth Fairy left me!"
While this is a benevolent deception, it is a deception all the same. And the ease with which a child comes to believe such things is impressive.
Think about it comparatively: how easy would it be to convince an adult of the Tooth Fairy vs a child? While I do admit that many adults are persuaded of many things that aren't true, a child will simply believe that the world is as you say it is because they have no other frame of reference. They must trust you, as a survival mechanism.
Children have no faculties to protect themselves from the deception of adults. They have no experience to compare to and do not have the mental faculties to process deceptive situations targeted at them.
This inability to protect themselves, accompanied with the fact that so many absolutely sick and evil people want to victimize them, make children a particularly popular target for abduction and trafficking.
800,000 children to missing per year
This is a statistic I've heard often when looking into child trafficking.
It's a terrifying number on the face of it. The very notion that so many children go missing every year is jaw-dropping. And although the statistics have many variables that go along with it, it's true.
This article from 2007, 800,000 Missing Kids? Really?, attempted to make sense of the number. And although I wanted to get into how the article breaks down the 800k number, there was one part in particular that immediately triggered my "wait a second..." switch:
Two boys abducted in Missouri were found in a St. Louis suburb last Friday, in the home of a pizza shop employee.
Pizza? Seriously?
This is from 2007, way before anyone really knew about the whole #pizzagate deal.
Here's a video where Ben Swan just scratches the surface of the FBI declassified secret symbols of pedophile trafficking rings and how they relate to "pizza":
And the story above is not that the employee was just a "pizza shop employee": he was a manager of 25 years, according to this story, Boy tries to reconnect with old life after 4 years
"He's worked for me for 25 years," Prosperi told reporters. "There's not too many people who stay in the same job for 25 years. He was my manager. He counted my money, and you just don't do that with someone you don't trust."
But Prosperi said he became suspicious of Devlin when he thought about his employee's white truck and the sick day he took the day Ben disappeared.
He told St. Louis television station KSDK that he reported that concern to a friend in the police department. The department said investigators were getting ready to look into the tip when Wagster and Nelson spotted the truck themselves.
"I just can't understand how all that time nobody knew," Prosperi said.
Breaking this down
Of the 800,000 number, not all of those are what we commonly would think of as abductions in the sense of a black van pulling up to a school and luring a random child in with candy.
As the Slate article points out:
For officials, the total number includes those who fall into several different categories: family abduction, nonfamily abduction, runaways, throwaways (abandoned children), or lost and "otherwise missing" children. Local police departments register missing children with the federal National Criminal Information Center database, specifying what type of abduction it is.
So it can, and does, include some relatively normal non-coercive activity like runaways.
Take the number 800,000: It's true that 797,500 people under 18 were reported missing in a one-year period, according to a 2002 study. But of those cases, 203,900 were family abductions, 58,200 were nonfamily abductions, and only 115 were "stereotypical kidnappings," defined in one study as "a nonfamily abduction perpetrated by a slight acquaintance or stranger in which a child is detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom or abducted with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed."
In other words, it's possible to missinterpret these statistics. However, it's also possible that this number is in fact an underrepresentation of the truth:
Many missing persons aren't reported at all—a 1997 study estimated that only 5 percent of nonfamily abductions (in which a nonfamily member detains a child using force for more than an hour) get reported to police. Some police departments may not even bother filing a report when a kid runs away from home for a few days. It's also easy to lose track of abduction cases, since some of them get filed away under associated crimes, like homicide or sexual assault.
Due to clerical practices, it's possible that many missing children cases are either not documented at all or are documented under other categories.
Family related abuse
While still terrible, it may seem like family related abuse might be a bit less terrible than being abducted and abused by a stranger, but in many cases it just means the abuse is more personal, emotionally damaging, and more endurant.
Statistics on human trafficking prevention efforts and identifying and protecting survivors –based on data released by The Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC), the world’s first human trafficking data portal to include such data contributed by multiple agencies – revealed that family involvement is up to four times higher than in cases of adult trafficking.
Children are also more cooperative when an adult family member is involved, a situation which has drastically increased in recent years.
Family members linked to nearly half of child trafficking cases, new UN-backed data reveals
There is one particular WIkiLeaks email that has struck me as exemplary of exactly this situation.
In this email we see a woman named Tamera Luzzatto at email address tluzzatto@pewtrusts.org describing a party to which Jon Leibowitz, Rima Sirota, John Podesta, David Leiter, Laurie Rubiner, and Chris Spanos were invited and responded with "we're in, thanks for the invite" :
With enormous gratitude to Advance Man Extraordinaire Haber, I am popping up again to share our excitement about the Reprise of Our Gang’s visit to the farm in Lovettsville. And I thought I’d share a couple more notes: We plan to heat the pool, so a swim is a possibility. Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in that pool for sure. And with the forecast showing prospects of some sun, and a cooler temp of lower 60s, I suggest you bring sweaters of whatever attire will enable us to use our outdoor table with a pergola overhead so we dine al fresco (and ideally not al-CHILLo).
Who is Tamera Luzzatto? Well, we can confirm from the email tluzzatto@pewtrusts.org that it is in fact this Tamera Luzzatto, leader of government relations for Pew Charitable Trust.
From her bio:
Luzzatto served as then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff from 2001 to 2009. Prior to her service with Senator Clinton, Luzzatto was on the staff of West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV for nearly 15 years, serving as legislative director and chief of staff. She was Senator Rockefeller’s primary liaison to two major advisory panels which he chaired, the National Commission on Children and the Pepper Commission on Health Care.
But, you say, it must be some misunderstanding, that whole thing about heating up the pool for the children to provide "further entertainment", right? I mean, there's no way she's pimping out her own grandkids... RIGHT?!?!?
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that way.
Here's an archived blog called Evie's Crib where Luzzatto is offering her granddaughter "for a limited time".
Here's her with her grandkids. You can clearly see it's the same woman.
And here's the headline of the blog.
Evelyn is growing up, soon she will be the Queen of the entire US of A, right now, for a limited time only, you can spend some time with her online, raw and uncut. Take advantage of this now, as in the future she will have the power of life and death over you.
What do you suppose this could mean?
Tell me what you think.
Probably one of the hardest topics to discuss, but arguably one of the most important.
Child trafficking is one of the greatest blights of human history. It is one of those things that I simply cannot tolerate and I want to see completely obliterated.
It's disgusting that 800,000 children go missing each year, and even more disgusting that 99% of that is due to family abuse. And then to see that people in high positions of power are pimping out their own children and grandchildren on blogs and through secret official channels is simply horrifying.
Share your thoughts in the comments below.