Fighting the cabal on your kids' behalf

The Links x "Conspiracy, She Wrote" reading guide to America’s sex trafficking panic

Late last winter, a curious and highly specific panic washed over my region. A young white woman was assaulted outside her suburban home, and the Facebook commentariat immediately and confidently claimed that she had almost been trafficked. On its face, and without further details, that possibility seemed remote. Traffickers rarely target strangers like that, and trafficking victims are overwhelmingly people who are otherwise marginalized or vulnerable.

But you wouldn’t know that from the fast-ballooning Facebook narrative, which warned local women to stay vigilant everywhere they went. Would-be sex-traffickers lurked all around us: in the parking lot at Target; outside bars; inside gyms.

Such anxieties are common in the US now, in the aftermath of QAnon. As I wrote earlier this year, the foundational belief of that conspiracy movement — “that stranger sex-trafficking represents a rampant, secretive, ever-present threat” — became conventional, mainstream wisdom for millions of people during and since the pandemic. But where do these myths about trafficking come from? And how did they become so widespread? For this reading guide — the sixth in our series — I tackled those questions with Cristen Conger, a journalist and the host of the phenomenal Conspiracy, She Wrote podcast.

Each episode of Conspiracy, She Wrote touches on a different corner of the female conspiro-sphere, from historical convent attacks to modern “pregnancy truthers.” Cristen brings a real thoughtfulness and rigor to her work, and she explained to me that conspiracy theories, of all stripes, are essentially narratives of power and control. It makes sense, then, that women (… and gendered frameworks of power) shape so many of these conspiracies, especially where health or parenting are involved.

“These online conspiracy spaces have provided a kind of alt-feminism to some women, giving them a sense of empowerment in their roles,” Cristen said. (It feels pretty bad-ass to fight the cabal on behalf of your kids.) At the same time, Cristen told me, conspiracy thinking is reaching a level of ubiquity it never has before: “We have an innate human instinct toward conspiracy beliefs. The difference now is how completely unavoidable they are.”

For this reading guide, Cristen and I each dug deep into our respective archives and reading lists. From there, we came up with this list of 25 articles, podcasts and interviews — a syllabus, if you will, for untangling the sex-trafficking panic.

This is the sixth in a series of monthly round-ups where I dig into the archives and partner with experts to bring you the best reading around a topic or theme. Previous installments covered Gamergate, internet scams, online dating, the mania around teen social media use and infamous viral essays.

If you’d like to nominate a future theme or flag a story that we missed, please let me know in the comments. And if any of this remotely interests you, please be sure to check out Cristen’s podcast (!!).

🌟 CLICK HERE to view all our recommendations in a quick, clickable format.🌟

The Links x “Conspiracy, She Wrote” Guide to the Sex Trafficking Panic

“The Destructive Conspiracy Theory that Victoria Unleashed Upon the World,” by Jen Gerson for Capital Daily (2020) 

The roots of today’s sex trafficking conspiracies arguably go back much further than the Satanic Panic: You could, if you wanted to, look to medieval blood libel or early witch hunts for early omens of all this. But if you want to get through this in one newsletter, you might as well start in 1980 — the year that Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient/future wife, Michelle Smith, published a shocking book claiming that Pazder helped Smith recover repressed memories of the ritual Satanic abuse she suffered in early childhood. That book, Michelle Remembers, and its therapeutic methods have since been thoroughly discredited … but not before they kicked off a massive moral panic around “Satanic abuse” that ultimately ruined lives, families and businesses across Canada, Europe and the U.S.

• Why Cristen recommends it: Reporter Jen Gerson didn’t just dig into the history of Michelle Remembers; she also looked at the myriad surprising ways that authority figures — including well-credentialed therapists, investigators and a Catholic bishop — legitimized and fueled the emerging Satanic Panic. “What is so stunning to me — and what I’m still kind of making sense of — is how many institutions and experts and very renowned psychologists initially cosigned these ideas. We think of the Satanic Panic, and moral panics in general, as wackos. But no: Here you had very credible people who were supporting it and trying to get ‘justice’ for these children.”

• If you like this, you might also like … Brandy Zadrozny’s 2022 investigation into the “the current obsession with Satan,” as evidenced by QAnon, right-wing media and conservative politicians.  

“How Sex Trafficking Became a Christian Cause Célèbre,” by Ruth Graham for Slate (2015)

Long before Sound of Freedom, the controversial “Christian thriller” that polarized moviegoers last year, American evangelicals were flocking to anti-trafficking ministries and “prayer weekends.” Their interest, starting in the late ‘90s and early aughts, arguably mainstreamed trafficking as a cultural and political issue. And it changed the tenor of what had been a largely feminist campaign: “You had innocent victims, and you had evildoers,” one researcher told Ruth Graham, “and it wasn’t as much about patriarchy.”

• Why Cristen recommends it: “This piece helped me understand why sex-trafficking myths and conspiracies became so prevalent: Churches — #notallchurches, but some particular churches — have really invested in that narrative. It’s an example of the twisted relationships that can happen when you find conservative Christian causes overlapping with causes that, on their face, are feminist ones.”

• Go deeper on this: In the late 1800s, proto-feminist and Christian reformers coalesced around a parallel scare: Thousands of white women had been kidnapped by immigrants and foreigners, they believed, and trafficked into prostitution. Some academics hesitate to label the “white slavery” phenomenon a moral panic, since some trafficking did undoubtedly occur. But Progressive Era reformers also used the exaggerated narrative around “white slavery” to stigmatize Jews, Catholics and sex workers and to scare a generation of increasingly empowered women into staying close to home.

“A Famed Anti-Sex Trafficking Group Has a Problem With the Truth,” by Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman for Vice (2020) 

Speaking of Sound of Freedom, this piece was my personal introduction to Tim Ballard and his anti-trafficking organization — a testosterone-fueled, risibly named outfit called Operation Underground Railroad. OUR was a darling among conservative pundits and politicians; in his first term, Donald Trump nominated Ballard to co-chair an anti-trafficking panel that recommended policies to the federal government. But many of the organization’s missions were exaggerated or mischaracterized, and Ballard himself was forced to leave OUR after multiple allegations of sexual assault.

• Why Cristen recommends it: “Something that really strikes me about Operation Underground Railroad — besides the name and the audacity there!! — is how much people truly wanted to believe that sex trafficking was happening, and that it happened exactly as OUR said it did. It’s weird, for lack of a better word. It just weirds me out. It really seemed like there was some kind of fetishization there, both in the rhetoric around ‘young girls in chains’ and the hero complex inherent in needing to ‘rescue’ them.” 

• The tip of the iceberg: Vice went on to publish more than a dozen OUR exposés, including stories about its blundering rescue operations, its wildly abusive volunteer environment and the eventual/thorough disgrace of Ballard, himself. Ballard left OUR in the summer of 2023 after multiple former employees and contractors claimed that he had sexually harassed, manipulated or groomed them. Just last month, six women sued Ballard for sex trafficking in federal court, arguing that he coerced them into situations where he could sexually exploit them. 

“The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic,” by Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic (2021)

Conspiracists commonly claim that hundreds of thousands of children are sex-trafficked in the U.S. But the actual number of kids abducted by strangers each year is — wait for it — roughly 100. Several things explain that gigantic discrepancy, including a certain carelessness with statistics and some very popular misunderstandings about which children are most vulnerable to exploitation. As Kaitlyn Tiffany untangles here, some of those myths date back to the 1980s “stranger danger” panic.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Regular readers know I’m a long-time Kaitlyn Tiffany stan, and sure enough — I love the way this piece combines deep historical and contextual research with her on-the-ground reporting from a (very strange!) anti-trafficking festival. As a child of the very late ‘80s/’90s, I was also shocked by the historical and contemporary data around “missing kids.” Milk cartons and some portion of my own upbringing absolutely convinced me that stranger-abduction is vastly more common than it is.

• If you like this, you might also like … You’re Wrong About’s 2019 episode on human trafficking, featuring George W. Bush and Liam Neeson. 

“The Birth of QAmom,” by EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone (2020)

Out of all these myths and misunderstandings, we eventually got Pizzagate: The ludicrous tale that a D.C. pizza shop was trafficking children from its basement. From Pizzagate, we got QAnon: a broader and shiftier conspiracy theory that claimed a larger cabal of elites engaged in Satanic rituals and child trafficking. And from QAnon, we get women like Jalynn Schroeder and Ciara Chanel Self — “prototypical” mom influencers who mainstreamed and pastel-washed the country’s most outlandish conspiracy.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: This, to me, is QAnon at its most psychologically and culturally interesting: the point at which it jumps from fringe 4chan nonsense to honest-to-God mainstream belief. It’s also the point at which Cristen and I began hearing about trafficking from women in our social circles, which was … surreal! To put it lightly.

• If you like this, you might also like … “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful,” another Kaitlyn Tiffany jawn for The Atlantic (subhed: “How the domestic aesthetics of Instagram repackage QAnon for the masses”). In August, Cristen also hosted the QAnon researcher Annie Kelly to talk about how lifestyle influencers became so enmeshed in child trafficking myths.

“A QAnon Con: How the Viral Wayfair Sex Trafficking Lie Hurt Real Kids,” by Jessica Contrera for The Washington Post (2021)

Online conspiracies have real victims — and I’m not merely talking about the families that splinter over one member’s beliefs. In the summer of 2020, QAnon campaigners became convinced that the furniture retailer Wayfair was openly trafficking children, including a 13-year-old girl named Samara Duplessis. But Duplessis was home safe in Michigan, and the viral scrutiny of thousands of strangers caused her severe anxiety. Other children caught up in the “Wayfair” myth suffered similar consequences, while trafficking hotlines put real cases on hold in order to deal with their Wayfair callers.

• Why Cristen recommends it: “This was not a piece that leveraged the virality of the Wayfair story for a quick hit — Jessica Contera took it seriously, waited for enough time to pass, and was able to produce a piece of really excellent investigative journalism. Until I read this piece, I still sort of thought of these trafficking myths as an ‘internet thing.’ I didn’t realize the extent to which people were trying to identify children and how that upended real kids’ and their parents’ lives.”

• How this story came together: Contrera talked about her writing and reporting process in a 2022 interview with Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard. “The idea of child sex trafficking most people have — kidnapping, border crossings, physical chains — is almost never in line with reality, which is vulnerable kids groomed by someone they come to trust,” Contrera said. “That misunderstanding has been seized upon by individuals who want to scare people, especially women, for political gain.”

“How Q Became Everything,” by Ali Breland for Mother Jones (2024)

This piece captures the state of play as it stands right now: Sex-trafficking conspiracies — by QAnon or (more often!) any other name — are now widely diffused and accepted in mainstream politics and culture. “There is a sense in which QAnon won,” one researcher told Ali Breland. Case in point: One 2022 YouGov poll found that 30% Americans still believe that Democrats run some kind of sex trafficking operation.

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Just this week, tech billionaire and presidential “first buddy” Elon Musk posted a QAnon meme to his X account. Ironically, he did so in defense of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has been actually and credibly accused of having sex with a minor. But no one batted an eye over the Q reference or the naked hypocrisy — and I suspect that has quite a lot to do with the fact that Q is now suffused in “everything.”

• If you like this, you might also like … “QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right” (The New Republic, 2021); “Donald Trump Is Gone, But QAnon’s Sex Trafficking Conspiracies Are Here To Stay” (Buzzfeed, 2021).

“The Long, Sordid History of the Gay Conspiracy Theory,” by James Kirchick for New York (2022)

When I interviewed the researchers Bond Benton and Daniela Peterka-Benton for a piece about trafficking conspiracies last March, they told me that the homophobic mania around “grooming” represents the next phase in the myth’s evolution. But like every other thread in this messy-ass tapestry, “groomer” myths are nothing new. For more than a century, homophobic conspiracists have maintained that secretive cabals of LGBTQ+ people — typically, gay men — operate sinister, self-serving plots at various levels of culture and government. 

• Why Caitlin recommends it: Even before the far-right obsession with so-called groomers, many popular sex trafficking myths contained a distinct whiff of homophobia. Several of the women wrongly convicted of abuse at the height of the Satanic Panic were gay, and Pizzagate targeted a shop owned by a gay restaurateur. I was struck by this line in James Kirchick’s piece: “To comprehend America’s latest moral panic, it is necessary to recognize homophobia as not only a form of prejudice like any other but as a conspiracy theory.”

• Go deeper: Earlier this year, Benton and Peterka-Benton published an analysis of nearly 70,000 tweets involving Florida’s efforts to outlaw gender-identity instruction … and Disney’s efforts to oppose it. They concluded that the right-wing outcry against Disney, and the wider anti-LGBTQ panic, built on the influence (and influencers) of previous anti-trafficking conspiracy movements.

That’s it! Until the weekend. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin