everyone wants to help liberate youth from traffickers until they see what shade of yellow the armored vehicle is painted in, then suddenly it's "we can't do that" and "it's just a schoolbus" :nekoeyeroll:

@reiko trafficking was one of those terms i could never feel like i had a solid definition of as a kid, people either used it differently from each other or used it super imprecisely (or god forbid refer to legal definitions) and now as an adult i can recognize that when there are terms that are like that it's because people are trying to cover for something fucked up

@ZiaNitori I particularly like the way ideologues on the "right" will use the word when parents on the "left" do things consistent with their culture and vice-versa wherein nobody is actually being separated from their home as the term implies, like after school programs or short stay summer camps. a choose-your-own-adventure novel of a word, almost meaningless on its own

@reiko @ZiaNitori people on the right characterize moving states to access healthcare for trans kids as "trafficking". i'm not aware of a popular bad faith concept leftists have of right-wingers as traffickers, tho i am aware of actual trafficking by elected officials like gaetz and that "sound of freedom" asshole.

trafficking is not a meaningless word, it means having your moves controlled by people who make money off of you. if you get flown out to an island to do a bit of labor and then you come home with a stack of cash in hand and no complaints about what work you were asked to do, you have still technically been trafficked. it's very often done to people without documentation and it can also be done by parents to their kids if they are turning the kids into a source of cash. it was infamously done to brittney spears by her dad for decades right in front of everyone, so it's done with varying shades of legality, tho obviously anonymity and ignorance are usually factors protecting traffickers.

many, many kids go missing at the border, never to be seen again. the entire government is complicit in stealing human life and selling slaves. trafficking gets to be a priblem of daunting proportion

@ViciouslyKind @reiko when kids are pushed to go to school under threat of truancy are they being trafficked?