The Trade in Innocents

There’s a category of evil so total that ordinary language just gives out. People reach for the word satanic when they talk about the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children, and I understand the reach — when you’re confronted with a grown adult treating a child as a thing to be used and sold, “wrong” and “bad” feel like words for spilt milk. You want a bigger word. There isn’t one.

So let me be clear about where I stand before anything else: this is as close to pure evil as anything on this earth gets. The buying, selling, and abuse of human beings — children most unforgivably of all — for profit and for someone’s gratification, is the total negation of everything I believe. We’re all built from the same stuff. To treat another person, a child, as livestock is to spit on that truth in the most absolute way there is.

It’s real, and the scale is staggering

This isn’t a rumour or a film plot. Human trafficking is one of the largest criminal enterprises on the planet, worth billions, with tens of millions of people — by most serious estimates — held in forced labour and sexual exploitation at any given moment. The internet has turned the abuse of children into a global, searchable, shareable horror that barely existed a generation ago. The numbers are almost impossible to hold in your head, and behind every one of them is a real person whose life is being torn up while the rest of us look away.

That part deserves all the outrage you can muster. None of what follows is me softening it.

But the truth is worse than the myth

Here’s where I have to apply the rule I bang on about everywhere else on this site: question everything, but prove something. Because there’s a version of this story that gets passed around — shadowy elites, secret rituals, a satanic cabal running it all from the top — and as comforting as that version is in a sick sort of way, it does real damage.

It’s comforting because it puts the evil far away. Among monsters in robes, among “them,” somewhere you’ll never go. The actual, documented truth is much harder to sit with: most abuse isn’t done by hooded strangers or distant elites. It’s done by people the child knows and trusts. The relative. The coach. The family friend. The groomer who spent three months in the messages being kind. It happens in ordinary homes, in plain sight, far more than it happens in any dungeon.

And the cabal myth doesn’t just miss that — it actively helps the abusers. It floods the real hotlines with noise that buries real children. It turns a provable, prosecutable horror into a meme that’s easy to mock and dismiss. And it lets people feel like they’re “fighting” by sharing a post, while the actual kid at risk three doors down gets no one’s attention at all. The people who profit from this evil could not ask for a better smokescreen than a fantasy that keeps everyone looking in the wrong direction.

Doing better — really better

So what does doing better look like on the darkest subject there is?

It looks like refusing to mythologise it, because the myth is a gift to the guilty. It looks like learning the real signs — the actual, unglamorous warning signs of grooming and exploitation — instead of hunting for symbols and conspiracies. It looks like protecting the children in your own orbit fiercely, believing kids when they tell you something’s wrong, and reporting properly through the people who can actually act, not the comment section.

And it looks like keeping your outrage aimed where it can do some good, rather than where it just feels good. Performance doesn’t save a single child. Paying attention to the real, near, ordinary version of this evil might.

The children caught in this trade are exactly as human as your own. Exactly. That’s the entire horror of it, and the entire reason to do better — not louder, not for the feed, but actually, where it counts.