Originally published at: "Suspicious buses" attempting to pick up children in Virginia | Boing Boing
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It will, of course, turn out that these were completely normal buses and the only thing that was suspicious were the people who reported them. (Which is why the bus drivers didn’t want to engage with them.) With all the qanon child abduction fantasies floating around, there are so many people turning the banal and everyday into weird conspiracies.
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Remember this?
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Yeah, probably. But I’d still keep an eye out for this weirdo:
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So many people these days seem convinced that “human traffickers” are prowling the country trying to abduct random kids off the street.
The whole “stranger danger” thing has always been a bit overstated, but TV shows like SVU and internet echo chambers like Qanon forums and Facebook parenting groups seem to be amplifying it to the point where every person of color in the supermarket checkout line and every beggar on the corner is seen as an agent of an international cabal just waiting for parents to look the other way so they can snatch the kids and ship 'em off to a brothel in Mexico or Thailand or wherever.
Can somebody PLEASE start a public service announcement campaign to explain to these people that human trafficking 99.9% of the time involves specifically vulnerable people like runaways and undocumented immigrants? It’s a real problem and deserves attention, but not THIS kind of stupid attention.
If you want to protect your kids, get rid of your damn guns, as the odds are about a million times greater that your kids will shoot themselves (or their friends) with your guns than that you will someday use those guns to fight off the mythical home invading child sex trafficking Wayfair employee you fantasize about.
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Yeah, this has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Hopefully that’s all it is.
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Meanwhile the ACTUAL child traffickers are passing laws to support their activities, and stealing children from impoverished countries… they are trafficking legally and the approval of some of society.
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Or doing it illegally but on an industrial scale with state backing, such as the ongoing phenomena of Russians “adopting” Ukrainian children.
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These assholes obsess over “those people” wanting to steal away their precious white babies, in part because they know that they are doing that same shit to the babies of the poors, non-white people, or in this case, of an ethnicity they’re trying to deny…
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Well, the alternative, if it’s not just a moral panic, is that someone looking to kidnap or abuse children decided the best way to do that was to buy a school bus and is just driving around hoping kids will get on it. That seems… unlikely.
It is always projection, isn’t it?
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Yes, I agree with your assessment. This sounds like paranoid bs that is unlikely to be true.
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Six years after the first Dirty Harry movie, where the baddie hijacks a school bus.
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And, of course, usually abuse or sexual assault are coming from a family member, a friend of the family, or a trusted adult in a position of authority.
Which is frequently willfully ignored even when a child does say something
But let’s worry about buses, clowns, and trans people 
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There are lots of private schools around Fairfax county that have their own buses. Usually the short types. White with tinted windows and with little or no markings to speak of probably because they are used by multiple clients. My guess it’s one of those that was seen.
Hell, I’ve even seen dog kennel / training schools with those buses that go around picking up pets.
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I mean, it would be funny if it were true, though - the world’s saddest would-be kidnapper splashing out all that money for a bus, driving around hoping some kid will get one, day after day, with no results…
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it’s rational to worry about clowns. heck, i’m worrying about clowns right now!
on the rest, you’re completely correct
they reference a study which estimates only 7% of child sexual abuse is by strangers
the type of insular communities where kids are not educated about sexuality and are expected to be seen but never heard - the kind favored by the american right wing - are the type of communities where abuse can thrive
multiple buses in the same area trying to abduct groups of children? doesn’t pass the smell test
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Aw come on - he’s fun!
