Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a programme that scrutinises

and interrogates numbers in the media, on social media and all around us, and I'm Tim

Halfard. This week we resurrect one of our favourite phrases, zombie statistics. This refers

to numbers that regularly get debunked but keep coming back anyway. And this time we're looking

at numbers collected to missing children in the United States. We've tackled the topic before

on the show but these numbers have resurfaced, in part due to conspiracy theorists following

QAnon, a fringe right-wing group whose central belief seems to be that a satanic circle of

pedophiles is running a global child-sex trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump.

In the past few months they've inspired protests under the banner, save our children. Meanwhile,

claims circulate on social media with lurid claims and terrifying statistics about an epidemic

of child kidnapping and child sex trafficking. Because kidnapping and sex trafficking are,

of course, illegal, it is hard to be sure what the true scale of the problem is, but some people

have tried to wade through some of the false numbers to get a better estimate of the truth.

One such person is Michael Hobbs, a reporter for Huffpost and the co-host of a podcast called

Your Wrong About. The last three months have been a weird panic about child sex trafficking,

and it's interesting because it's almost a word-for-word recapitulation of the moral panic around

stranger danger that we had for a decade in the 1990s. It is men coming to kidnap your sons and

daughters. They are in white vans. They are patrolling the suburbs, and then they're going to

snatch these kids away and they're going to move them across state lines or maybe overseas,

and they're going to force these kids into the sex trade. That is basically the myth that we've

been hearing over and over again for the last four or five months now. And why has it come back

recently, given that, I mean, this is, as you say, something that has been said before.

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