Urban legends, like viruses, persist and mutate
This morning I came across this via Twitter: A Target Sex-Trafficking Hoax Is Going Viral on TikTok: A stranger-danger hoax is sweeping social media - but as one expert explains, the urban legend is “old wine in new bottles”: [M]any experts say they adhere to a familiar pattern of sex trafficking rumors and urban legends intended to spread hysteria while simultaneously misrepresenting the realities of what trafficking actually looks like. Despite the omnipresence of narratives about young women being abducted by mysterious strangers in public places, the majority of trafficking victims are marginalized people.
You would think a folklorist would be a bit more more savvy about the longer history, though - raises eyebrows in sex historian: Dubious rumors purporting to raise awareness about the “realities” of sex trafficking are nothing new. “A lot of these urban legends, it’s old wine in new bottles,” says folklorist Benjamin Radford, noting there’s a long-established genre of “stranger danger” stories focused on abductors of women and children at malls stemming all the way back to the 1950s.
In the UK at least this maps very closely indeed to the 'white slavery' [sic] panics that can be traced back to the early decades of the C20th. Readers of novels and memoirs of the period may collect that there are hints of this here and there - e.g. in I Capture the Castle Cassandra has been warned of the dangers of apparent hospital nurses in public places like Lyons Corner Houses, and in Hons and Rebels Decca Mitford reports supposing a friend of Nancy who greeted them in a park once to be 'a white slaver' (o how his friends hooted and then called him that ever after).
It was pretty much a recurrent tabloid-press (okay, precursor to tabloids-press) motif: young women going about their business, well, usually, relatively innocent enjoyments such as shopping or the movies, coming over faint and having a motherly woman say she would take care of them - but she had really stuck them with a hypodermic of DRUGS!!! and they wake up far from home in a brothel.
People who were actually working in anti-trafficking organisations had very similar reactions: that a lot of time was wasted investigating allegations (which almost invariably turned out to be girl leaving home to be with boyfriend or the like) and got in the way of the real work they were doing.
In the early C20th one can see that this might well be a reaction to the increased presence of young women in public spaces without mothers/older family members/chaperones, and all those anxieties about 'flappers' etc and women no longer being in their Proper Place.
I'm wondering what work it's doing for the TikTok generation, though. Providing a narrative for a more inchoate sense of dangers to young women?
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