In the 16th Century, the essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote: “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.” In his seminal study Centuries of Childhood, historian Philippe Aries made the case that this emotional detachment towards children was common until the 18th Century. As per this theory, children were merely miniature adults with no special protection. Today, things are very different.
While Aries’ work has been criticised on many fronts, he was certainly onto something in claiming that we have become a child-centric civilisation. This is something to be proud of. But have we gone too far? There is reason to believe that we have indeed become overly infantilised. Young adults are increasingly treated as children, and as a result, come to develop a perverse sense of entitlement. That is the thesis put forth by Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind.
But more worryingly, the concern with children is fertile ground for political manipulation. Demagogues exploit fear, and given the centrality of children in our civilisation, it is not hard for populists to figure out that instilling fear about the plight of children can give them political leverage.
The recent release of The Sound of Freedom is a case in point. This is a seemingly conventional film about the deeds of a character based on Tim Ballard, a man who claims to be an anti-trafficking activist. Child trafficking has long been and continues to be a worldwide problem, so any media product that focuses on this issue is welcome. But when the approach to this problem becomes a moral panic with very implausible claims and inflated numbers, the noble purpose is lost.
In previous epochs, children were violently abducted from their parents for slavery or ransom purposes— that is the origin of the word ‘kidnapping’. But just because real cases of kidnapping did sometimes happen, should we then automatically accept as true the story of a pied piper who magically hypnotised children with his music and drove them away as zombies?
We easily dismiss the pied piper of Hamelin as medieval folklore. Yet, contemporary moral crusaders make similarly outrageous claims. Ballard himself has claimed that children are sold online by furnishing retailer Wayfair— in one version of this debunked conspiracy, trafficked children are placed inside expensive cabinets. Jim Caviezel— the actor playing Ballard in The Sound of Freedom— has claimed that traffickers drain children’s blood to obtain adrenochrome, a chemical allegedly used by Hollywood elites to stay young. Both men have spoken at QAnon events.
They have become the useful idiots of people playing dirty politics. The QAnon movement claims that there is a plot against Donald Trump, led by a secret cabal of blood-drinking paedophiles. These claims have originated with Q, an anonymous person who posts cryptic messages in conspiratorial forums. Nobody knows the identity of Q, or what their ultimate purpose is (though there are highly plausible explanations). But QAnon conspiracy theories have played in favour of politicians who have realised that they can obtain votes, not by engaging in reasoned debate, but by using scare tactics. It is unlikely that a shrewd politician such as Donald Trump believes the QAnon nonsense, but he has refused to disavow QAnon conspiracy theories presumably because he knows that pandering to the QAnon movement is politically useful.
It would be unfair to solely blame right-wing conspiracy theorists for the manipulative use of concern for children. Although not to the same degree, left-wing activists occasionally engage in similar tactics. For example, climate change is a serious problem and requires urgent action. But instead of advancing reasoned arguments, eco-activists have become too eager to arouse emotions by presenting Greta Thunberg as the face of the movement. This tactic has become so widespread, that the idiom “poster child” has been enshrined in common parlance.
Nobody wishes to return to the pre-modern world where children died, and few people seemed to care. But we should also aim not to be controlled by fear. Primeval humans were in constant fear of the forces of nature, but science and skepticism allowed them to come out of the cave. However, we are now being controlled by a new type of fear. As Stanley Cohen explained in his seminal book Folk Devils and Moral Panics,
societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media.
Paedophiles and human traffickers exist. But they do not operate under the auspices of a “deep state”, lurking in every school and child-care centre of the world. As with any other problem, child trafficking must be tackled with a sense of proportion and empirically grounded information. Save the Children has a strong reputation as a reliable institution addressing the problem of child abuse. They report that “an estimated 1.2 million children are affected by trafficking at any given time”; this is a regrettably high number, but placed against the backdrop of world population of 8 billion, it does not warrant the kind of panicked reaction that has now become all too frequent. Likewise, Save the Children categorises as myth the claim that “all human trafficking involves sex or prostitution.” Being obsessed with child trafficking associated with paedophilia, we run the risk of dismissing trafficking associated with child non-sexual labour and the use of child soldiers.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously quipped that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Paedophilia and child trafficking must be taken seriously, but if we truly seek to address this problem, we must leave aside irrational fears, consider claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, and separate the plausible from the outrageous.
