Leading global youth charity, Save The Children, was this week forced to distance itself from a conversation about child trafficking that's currently surging on social media.
"We have been protecting children around the world for over 100 years," the not-for-profit tweeted on Monday.
"While many people may choose to use our organisation’s name as a hashtag to make their point on different issues, we are not affiliated or associated with any of these campaigns."
The biggest #savethechildren claims.
The most common subject of #savethechildren posts centres around the claim that "800,000 children go missing each year in the United States".
This is often followed by claims that the media are deliberately ignoring the issue to shield powerful child traffickers and abusers who are alleged to be driving that number.
In some posts, it's even claimed that 800,000 American children are trafficked annually.
Either way, it's misinformation.
The 800,000 number seems to have been plucked from old data and twisted to bolster the narrative.
In 2012, the US's National Center for Missing and Exploited Children stated that more than 800,000 missing children's cases are reported annually (important to note, too, is that more than 99 per cent of those missing children returned home).
In 2019, meanwhile, there were 421,394 missing children's cases according to the FBI. And that includes multiple reports for the same child.
As for the number trafficked... Of the 29,000 cases the NCMEC assisted with, 91 per cent were endangered runaways and it was estimated that one in six of those (or 4,365) were likely sex-trafficking victims.
That's an abhorrent figure. But when it comes to issues as serious as this, it's important not to cloud the issue with falsehoods.
Another, of the persistent (and false) child trafficking theories doing the rounds implicated an American furniture brand called Wayfair.
In mid-June, a prominent QAnon influencer pointed out via Twitter that storage cabinets sold by the online retailer were listed at 'suspiciously' high prices and all using girls' names. This was interpreted as a sign that the cabinets contained trafficked children.
The theory that went viral courtesy of a discussion on the "/conspiracy" Reddit forum in July. Among this discussion was a claim that Wayfair's President of Operations — a 'Bill Hutcherson' — had once been photographed with Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been charged with recruiting underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
Only, Wayfair has never had a 'President of Operations' nor has it ever had an employee named Bill Hutcherson. And the man in the photograph is actually a British businessman who founded a watch design company.
Harm to genuine anti-human trafficking movements.
The misinformation and disinformation currently circulating about child trafficking undermines the genuine, meaningful, frontline work that legitimate anti-trafficking organisations are doing to curb the problem.
It ignores and distracts from the reality of the situation; for example, that most child trafficking doesn't involve kidnapping. According to the United Nations, most victims are trafficked by someone they know, such as a friend, family member or romantic partner. In the US alone, less than one per cent of missing children's cases are the result of a non-family abduction.
It also overlooks the fact that child trafficking also includes those placed into forced labour, domestic servitude and militias.
So, if you truly want to "save the children", support organisations like Save The Children, UNICEF, The Anti-Slavery Project, which are using robust research and decades of experience to actually work to that end.
Feature Image: Getty.
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