Sound of Freedom - Guardian linking anti Child Trafficking to Right Wing

[CuriouslyDifferent]

I have a distasteful view of the Guardian. However, this is a new low.

I’ve attached the article but I can’t believe somehow the Guardian is linking the success of an anti Child Trafficking film, to the right wing.

Like that’s a bad thing?

https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/06/sound-of-freedom-movie-qanon-jim-caviezel

Every side should be anti trafficking, never mind child trafficking…. But the Guardian doesn’t want you to see this film.

As always, I ask the question Why?

From what I’ve heard, the film is a hard watch, but why minimise it in this manner. why link it to Qanon (who suggest there’s some powerfull people involved in peado rings). Why talk about it being a right wing issue.

I’m not a fan of Minor attracted People or whatever term theyvare using to normalise child abuse. Maybe that’s a problem for the guardian. I believe we should have the death sentence for child abusers. If that makes me right wing. sign me up.

I get what you're saying @Wanderingowl and agree about the risks and single mothers, etc. It is quite an issue when we are are supporting them in the community.
However, what seems to be a development is hearing more about outright abduction attempts in some western countries, including here, by pairs of people, of younger children, using distraction techniques.
I wondered if this sort of thing might become more of an issue, as the trade and the profits grow.

I hadn't meant to hit send. In terms of risks to kids in wealthy countries, vulnerable children will always be most at risk of abuse. Sometimes by individuals and sometimes by people working together. Kids in care, kids with mental disabilities, kids living with parents with active addictions, kids who's parents are in the thrall of a religion, a predatorial partner or are pushing their children into the media or high level sports with no regard for their wellbeing.

But those aren't the kids who get reported missing and are of little regard to people like J1J2 who, for some reason, are so keen to minimise what can and does happen to many thousands of children. Holding up the minimal risk of abduction for sex slavery to western children as a way of mocking the concerns of people that are well aware that kids here aren't the main target for that particular type of abuse.

I guess it's a sad fact that the general safety that we enjoy is not guaranteed and societies can and have gone backwards throughout history. We may well enter more dangerous times in the future. But at the same time, I know I grew up in a period where children were taught about stranger danger, when many children around me, some who I knew, were being abused by clergy, trusted family members and friends of their families. So I guess, for me as a parent, I'm much more conscious of the possibility of danger coming from someone who aims to make me trust them.

That's not to say that your concerns aren't a case of you noticing something early because you are in a position to see it beginning. It's also realistic that as more parents have become aware of the ways that predators have been able to access or children in the past and prevent that access. Predators will come up with new ways to get at children. And shutting down people's ability to point out those new tactics, would realistically be part of it.

the Q nonsense blew up from message boards, the 800,000 number was often (mis) quoted in the mix, I still see it now.

it’s still an overblown right wing fantasy, like how the pizzagate hoax ended up actually puttimgreal live families and children at risk thanks to a nutter gunman.

@J1J2 the film has nothing to do with Qanon. Why aren't you getting that?

@J1J2 this is the charity behind the film - I have followed their work for years. Long before Qanon was a thing. I would encourage everyone to have a look.
Maybe look into the statistics on internet searches and downloaded content of child rape - then ask yourself, where and how is this content being created? These are real people you know?

ourrescue.org

instagram.com/ourrescue?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Also, often these are not 'missing' children, they are also being abused by family members. They unearth global networks of these sickos who are linked via networks on the dark web. I just don't think you are grasping what is going on.

Very well said.

Oh it's not a moral panic or obsession. I only wish it were. 1 in 4 girls having some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18 is not a moral panic and that's before we get on to trafficking.

If you were to ask a roomful of women whether they had experienced any unwanted sexual attention from adults of other older children before the age of 18 very few hands would be down.

I'm very anti QAnon, and scoff at most conspiracies but child trafficking is real and is a big problem. Talk to some survivors , why would they lie about it ?

And what in the fuck has any of that QAnon rant got to do with this movie? This movie was written before QAnon existed. Do not you understand what the word 'before' means?

And do you also know that there are contemporaneous mainstream news reports about Tim Ballard's actions in Colombia. Here are two from 2014 from ABC and CBS.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/inside-dangerous-mission-rescue-children-colombias-sex-trafficking/story?id=26185510

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-mans-mission-to-rescue-child-sex-trafficking-victims/

So do you think that the QAnon conspiracy theorists are so powerful that they went back to a time over 3 years before their site existed, created this story, hired a bunch of actors, and acted out in front of American mainstream journalists that they brought to Colombia? Because that really is quite the conspiracy theory tbh.

If you’re genuinely trying to suggest this film has no connection to QAnon then you know nothing about QAnon or are supremely disingenuous.
They’re the same story, QAnon is not an author or a single person, but a paranoi conspiracy movement that latched onto this narrative and pushed it its own way.

The very real issue of women experiencing assault in high numbers is not the same as the ridiculously faux politicised fake numbers of child trafficking and ‘adrenochrome’ harvesting.
nonsense detracts from genuine problems.

I don't believe in the adrenachrome stuff, nor Carl Nicky Beech, the Royal Family being lizards and all that. But globally there are traffickers who target children. I haven't seen the film though , was it linked to this Qanon stuff?

The movie was written before QAnon existed. Tim Ballard was making the mainstream news, as I have linked to, in 2014. You saying the same thing over and over and over again, while ignoring actual facts that disprove what you say, really does not make the point you think it does.

@J1J2 its you that is coming off as a conspiracy theorist by your comments...

A lot of the trafficking and organ harvesting in children are unaccompanied asylum seeker children. Their journeys over to Europe and England are horrifying. They get taken at unknown rates from care homes once they're here in the UK, but it's not shouted about as they're not white english children. It's horrifying what goes on in the world.

Oh really? So going by years of evidence coming from actual child protection organisations rather than the claims circulating in the nonsensical paranoid fantasy that sprang from the bowels of the cesspit that is 4Chan is considered conspiracy theory huh?
Who said satire was dead!

Do tell what 'facts' have I ignored...
This doesnt happen in a vaccuum, QAnon simply built from this pre-existing paranoid garbage, adding the Donald Trump & Republican/Democrat politics line.
There have also been plenty of questions raised about what Ballard HAS actually done, let alone how much of the depiction has been fictionalised - its not remotely a documentary any more than 'Inglorious Basterds' is a true historical account.

https://slate.com/culture/2023/07/sound-of-freedom-movie-jim-caviezel-trafficking-qanon.html

It's absolutely bollocks that the highest number of trafficked children come from western countries. They don't. The majority of trafficking dc come from the middle east and Africa. They are sold into modern day slavery, organ harvesting, prostitution and a small number make it into EU countries or the UK where they may still be kidnapped again and forced into county lines, forced illegal sex work, and god knows what else. There are still missing children which the gov. put in hotels whilst they age assessed.

Often their families pay the traffickers themselves because there dc would die if they stayed in their own country but the traffickers make money by selling them again en route to whichever country they said they would get them too.

Youre entire argument, eroded, when I see someone who uses the word nonsense and child trafficking in the same paragraph…….

The news reports, with video, from 2014. You are someone who is actively attempting to obfuscate the reality that there is wholesale child abuse happening through organised crime for the gratification of perverts who can pay for it. You are either doing this because you have skin in the game and want the world to ignore it for personal reasons. Or, most likely, you are the type of useful idiot who blathers on about all the silly wimminz and conspiracy theorists who are paranoid about their children because doing so, erroneously, makes you feel smart. You throw out a few facts that you think make you so knowledgeable, when those facts have fuck all to do with the point anyone is making. You are the equal opposite of the lizard people conspiracy theorists, in that each of you help the world ignore the grimy reality.

No I'm not, at all.
I have simply pointed out the ridiculous inflation of the instances of child trafficking that have also been twisted to be politically aligned (which should ring alarm bells for any sane person) - BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY also manage to hinder genuine work on the ground to reduce trafficking, unlike the show-pony story around the 'hero' portrayed in this 'film'.

You understand that posts by a poster here who works in this area contradict your claims completely. You really do shine with misplaced arrogance. Child trafficking is an enormous 'industry' but the vast majority of the victims are from developing world countries. You are the the one constantly trying to muddy the water by pointing out that children in wealthy countries are of little risk of abduction. A point that no-one here is arguing. A point that is absolutely not argued in the Sound of Freedom movie. A point that isn't in the contemporaneous news reports, back when this stuff wasn't so twisted by politics, that back up Ballard's story.

YOU and people like you are the ones who have been twisted to make this about political alignment. This issue should not be political. It's an issue that should be something that all non-repugnant people are against. But because YOU and people like you, have decided that you are the good guys, always on the right side of history. YOU and people like you, are making it political because people who you disagree with politically have taken that normal, sane, empathetic stance. YOU and people like you, are so convinced of black and whiteness or morality that you have forgotten that people can disagree and agree on different issues. YOU and people like you are the ones doing what you are accusing the 'right' of doing. They may be taking advantage of the fact the issue of child trafficking has become political, but it was not them who made it political. It was YOU and people like you.

Pay attention to what site you are on. This is fucking mumsnet. It's always been traditionally left leaning. And it's British, a region where the right is more to the left that what passes for the left in the US. It's not influenced by the American evangelical right. Stop thinking your constant use of American political jargon means anything here. It doesn't. It's irrelevant.

A presentation of the film by Tim Ballard, on whose story it is based.

I agree with the PP, and the OP also. The baseless malevolence of the Guardian article is almost beyond belief. Shame on them.

Well those sure were words.
Trying to suggest I'm the kind who's made this political is beyond laughable and conveniently ignores where conspiracy theorists tend to sit politically (and bedfellows with fundamentalist christians) and where this whole moral-panic originated and spread from, but I guess its easier to pretend everyone else is the problem.

Yes its undeniable that trafficking is worse in poorer countries, but that still doesnt change the fact that the claims made about the scale of this and numbers affected are grossly inaccurate. Again - numerous actual child protection organisations have said the instances of inflated panic has made their jobs more difficult.

But sure thing, unquestioningly swallow this nonsensical, paranoid, hysterical fantasy then, knock yourself out. There's enough out there about Ballard to make anyone skeptical of his successes - and motives.