The recent scaremongering about Haitians in Springfield, OH arose from someone on Facebook passing on a fourth-hand rumor that turned out to be false. It illustrates how dangerous it can be to pass along rumors that can adversely affect identifiable groups pf people.
The neighborhood message board Nextdoor is one that I am a member of and even that I rarely read the posts. But yesterday I saw one that immediately brought the Springfield incident to mind.
It started when one person posted the following:
Hello everyone, I just wanted to ask if anyone has heard about people snatching up children? My daughter overheard a man on his phone telling the person on the other end to be on the lookout and to keep an eye on the children! This is very scary! Any thoughts on this?
It is also not clear what response the poster was seeking or what she was scared about. But the post spawned a variety of responses, with others responding that people should always be vigilant about their children. Then one person made the leap to sex trafficking and Mexico.
There should be more awareness about this but there isn’t. Monterey all of this area is very high in sex trafficking. We are a straight shot to the border and it happens all the time. You can never be too careful.
So now we have added the additional rumor that sex trafficking is widespread in this area, something that I had not heard of before. A ‘straight shot to the border’ also is stretching things. It is about a 10 hour drive to get to Mexico from Monterey. But we now have added the insinuation that large numbers of children in this area are being kidnapped and sex trafficked to Mexico.
Another person then added a scary statistic.
320,000+ children are missing after crossing our southern border. Over 100,000+ go missing every year that are citizens in this country. These are real numbers not “scare tactics by certain people relating to border control”
Taken at face value, these posts have taken what might have been a perfectly innocent overheard conversation and blown it up all out of proportion. It would not take much for creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance to seize on these posts, as they did with the false Facebook Haitian pet eating story, to claim that Mexican gangs are kidnapping large numbers of children in Monterey, taking them south across the border to Mexico, and selling them into sex slavery.
There were some who pushed back on the original poster, asking her what was so scary in what she heard. After all, there are many possible interpretations that could be placed on what the poster’s daughter relayed, assuming that she was repeating the words verbatim, although as we well know, when people relay a message, they frequently change things to fit with what they think they heard. As one responder said, “Man was talking to his babysitter reminding her to keep a close lookout for dogs and/or wildlife that could threaten their safety.”
I am not trying to minimize the problem of sex trafficking. I write this as a parent who kept a close watch on my children when they were small and we were out in public, and did not let them out of my sight. This was not for fear of kidnapping but because of more everyday risks such as getting lost or doing something dangerous or falling and hurting themselves or wandering into traffic. Fear of kidnapping was way down the list of concerns, if at all.
Adult kid/s are coming home from college, one spouse says to the other, “Watch out for the kids,” so that they don’t have to stand on the porch for 10 minutes because the doorbell has been finicky lately.
I mean, in the USA in any given year, how many kidnapped kids under 15 do you have vs. how many finicky doorbells?
More importantly, if you ACTUALLY care about your kids, why are you talking to people you don’t know on the internet instead of just calling the police non-emergency line and asking if there have been any kidnapped kids in the area lately?
The people on the internet you’re asking for information,
1) probably have no more info than you,
and
2) if there are kidnappers in the neighbourhood, taking neighbourhood kids, then they could easily be on that website giving out bad information to steer you into making your kids more vulnerable.
In either case, the person who actually cares about their kids calls the police non-emergency line.
I bet there are far more kids kidnapped in Mexico and trafficked into the US. This whole idea just doesn’t make sense if you think about it
The numbers one is particularly easy to dismiss. “320,000+” is near enough to 1% of the US population as to just call it that. Nevermind exclusively children. And let’s not talk about what percentage of US children actually cross our southern border.
And even if you uncritically believe everything in their statement, this magically started happening only a few years ago! What a coincidence it should match up with a particular presidential term. Surely kidnappers must talk to each other and caution each other to wait because it’s still Trump’s/Obama’s/Bush’s/Clinton’s/Bush’s/Reagan’s/etc term and they can’t kidnap anyone yet.
320K is not near enough to 1% to call it that. 1% of the US population would be closer to 3.14 million.
Probably good advice if you’re white, neurotypical, and at least middle class.
Unsure where would be best to turn otherwise … perhaps browse online for (reliable!) stats for the area, if published?
My experience with NextDoor in my neighborhood is that it attracts people with an agenda--usually, to stir up trouble. The people who are drawn to that are people who are in need of psychiatric help or supervision. I joined up before the pandemic to see about area meet-ups and to look for a new home for some old-but-still-good possessions. What I found were people like my elderly neighbor who lives on rightwing news all day, every day and apparently has hours of free time to post fear-mongering nonsense.
For a less-enraging example, there’s a young couple (maybe mid-to-late 20s?) of Korean heritage just a couple of doors down from me. They are rarely home, but when they are and they are outside, they smile and say hi. They keep their property tidy. In other words, good neighbors, right? The rumor the elderly neighbor was trying to spread on Next Door is that the American gov’t *had to* give them the house “because of the Korean war”. Why someone would get a free house in an anonymous semi-rural suburb because of a war in another country is never explained. This couple is far too young to have been alive during the Korean war. Their parents are likely far too young, and even their grandparents are too young to have been alive during the Korean war. There was an influx of people from Korea in this area in the 1960s and the county is about 2% Asian; there’s a good chance this couple is 3rd-generation American. I don’t know their story, because as I’ve said, they work long hours and are rarely home.
But she’s managed to stir up (at least online) bad feelings about this couple simply because of the brainwashing she’s been getting from her favorite news sources.
My mother often tells me that hearing fireworks means it’s a signal “from the drug dealers to tell the town that the drugs have arrived”. Presumably this applies to every day except November 5th (UK’s commemoration of Guy Fawkes being arrested for trying to blow up Parliament in 1605, or “fireworks night”.) Each time I express confusion about how this doesn’t sound practical. Each time I enquire if the police have received this intelligence, or perhaps it’s someone’s birthday. Each time she changes the subject. Next visit: rinse and repeat.
The salience of the nonsense story is just so strong that no application of thought can shift it.
Perhaps it’s the same for these other stories which circulate about chosen ‘others’ in our communities. We find our prejudice prodded, so we embellish a story, any story, to help us internally and outwardly justify our current emotional state.
They are likely saving that one up for the week before the election.
It would not take much for creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance to seize on these posts…
Once that happens, will our esteemed host launch a search-&-purge for the Trump Chumps among his readership?