Just a quick heads up, today's episode talks about trafficking.

Just enjoy this kind of like straw man enemy instead of dealing with the rot within their own circles.

There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

The Human Trafficking Hotline has identified 82,301 cases of human trafficking since its inception back in 2007.

And as important of an issue as trafficking is, it's also true that it's become a moral panic

completely untethered from the reality of what trafficking actually looks like.

To the point where Carly Russell, the 25-year-old woman in Alabama, who lied about being

abducted by traffickers, repeated a pretty well-worn urban legend that traffickers use babies

to lure women as part of her hoax. Traffickers are probably not using babies or strollers to lure women into being

trafficked. And no one is probably putting anything on your car to mark you for being trafficked.

And no, your child is not likely to be snatched from a target parking lot by a stranger and

souls into an underground trafficking network. Yet, viral conspiracy theories online would have us all believe that this isn't just a common

occurrence, but that the most powerful people in the country are also involved, and that the

only person who can stop it is a rugged white man coming to save the day.

In the new film, Sound of Freedom, Jim Cavazelle,

who you might remember as Christ from Passion of the Christ, stars as a fictionalized version of Tim

Ballard, formerly of the kind of anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad.

The movie has become popular in part because of the moral panic around

trafficking. And rather than showing a realistic portrayal of what trafficking and the work that

goes into preventing it looks like, it leans on the same kind of misrepresentations that fuel the

online moral panic around trafficking, turning the whole thing into a big hero fantasy.

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