[keepamovin]

Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; that the numbers on this in the United States are in the order of 100,000s per year (at least of missing/unaccounted I think). How can it be like this?

I just can't conceive it - how is this even a thing? What is the psychology of these adults doing this? How is the morality of this lacking? And how can there be so many people involved? Where is all this insanity coming from? How did it develop? How did it slip through the idea of safety in the neighborhood we used to have?

I don't understand how this is real, the scale is inconceivable (how can so many people be so totally demented) it's the craziest thing I cannot comprehend.

[jaboostin]

100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.

[keepamovin]

OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.

[jaboostin]

Makes sense! Thanks for the follow up.

[monster_truck]

Consider the many millions who are unable to call the cops when this happens. Please don't make me explain why

[TylerE]

The vast majority of child sexual abuse is committed by family members, not strangers.

[breezybottom]

Well yeah, but that's just selection bias. We shouldn't take precautions around strangers because it's more likely that daddy will rape you?

[keepamovin]

That’s terrible: that there are bad people in the world and sometimes they’re in your own family.

A bit of searching suggests that it’s more often acquaintances than family, but you have to consider what goes unreported to LE I guess, tho hard to be sure: https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/...

What drives people to do this? It’s so crazy.

Anecdotally it seems a lot of teachers are involved in this.

But strangers definitely seem the minority.

[paulryanrogers]

There will be many sick people in a nation of hundreds of millions.

Stigmatizing mental help drives a lot of problems underground. So does our awkward immigration system that keeps all kinds of migrants in precarious positions, even legal agricultural laborers.

Our president has the strongest personal ties to the most prolific sex trafficker in recent decades, second only to Gladwell. Yet he has suffered no legal consequences for his association, nor even serious investigation. Epstein himself seemed afraid to name him under oath, and yet privately called him "the dog that hasn't barked". This leader of the nation bragged to journalists of sexually assauting people, and over 20 victims say it's true. And roughly half of the voting public still checks the box with his name on it.

[jolmg]

> second only to Gladwell

Ghislaine Maxwell, I suppose you meant.

[paulryanrogers]

Yes, sorry, it was late

[keepamovin]

At one point everyone would have believed Johnny Depp was a creeper too, but it turns out that some people just lie, they make stuff up, that's how they seek power, money, revenge. You can see this in the corporate world, you can see it in friend groups, and you can see it here, too. And when powerful interests are at stake, there can be coordinated lying: solicited, organized, deliberately propagated fabrications.

I don't see any power to those claims about Trump - and 'association', guilt by association? It's like people want the guy to be bad and are seeing stuff that's weak in support of that. And how he talked? You mean "grab them by the pussy" - have you heard how ladies talk? Grabbed him by the dick can just mean you have a the guy wrapped around your little finger, as in "I use sex to control my husband" - another common admission.

It's just those who despise the guy/the policy, make their interpretation match what they want to see there, but if they were more neutral, they'd see it in a mroe balanced way.

[paulryanrogers]

Most adult men I've known would never joke about grabbing strange women by their genitals, certainly not while being recorded. Nor would they go on public radio and declare they'd date girls as young as 13 whilst being a man in their 40s. Nor have they been found liable for sexual assault. Nor walked in on teen girls in dressing rooms. Nor have they faced women publicly accusing them of acosting or pouring drinks down their dresses.

If accusations against Trump are lies then he can sue them for defamation and win in court. Sadly most of the people victimized by him cannot seek remedy in court because of the passage of time. And in the era they were assaulted it was dangerous to accuse rich, powerful, and litigious men with mafia connections.