Are children really being snatched from their mothers at Ikea stores by sex traffickers undeterred by crowds, cameras and the siren song of Swedish meatballs?
No.
But if you’ve been on any social media in the past few days — especially a mommy Facebook group — all you’re hearing about is a post by a southern California mom, Diandra Toyos, who says she and her three kids were “stalked” in Ikea by “traffickers.”
Her proof (such as it is) is that two men looked at her kids, sat down when they sat down, and looked at her kids some more. They also seemed to be following Diandra and her kids … in a store where all the foot traffic flows in the same direction.
Nonetheless, “Something was off,” Toyos wrote in her original post. “We knew it in our gut. I am almost sure that we were the targets of human trafficking.”
In the aftermath of the post, some have claimed it’s a hoax. Toyos tells The Post that “I’m not 100 percent sure it was human trafficking. That was simply my gut feeling. There was clearly something going on and targeting my children, but I don’t know for sure what.”
Fine, if she felt uncomfortable with the men, she definitely should have moved away from them. But I take issue with her telling other moms, as she did on Facebook, that they need to be ultra-careful because “this is happening all over.”
Or, as I put it on my Free-Range Kids blog: “Pointlessly terrified mom warns other moms to be pointlessly terrified.”
Pointlessly terrified mom warns other moms to be pointlessly terrified.
How dare I make light of such a serious situation? After all, mothers are gushing thanks for the post: “a great reminder that this kind of stuff can happen,” wrote someone on Westchester Moms.
The praise is piling on — “Outstanding advice,” “Good information!” — just as it did last week, when a very similar post went viral by a mom who thought kidnappers were about to snatch her baby out of her arms as she waited in line at the grocery store. (But she stared them down. Who knew kidnappers are such cream puffs?)
My point is not to make fun of the folks freaking out. My point is to try to give us all a reality check: Come on — two men are going to grab three kids, all under age 7, IN PUBLIC, in a camera-filled store, with the MOM and the GRANDMA right there, not to mention a zillion other fans of moderately priced furnishings?
Can we please take a deep breath and realize how insanely unlikely that is? How we don’t need to be “warned” about this because NOTHING HAPPENED!
Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. He says:
“Child abduction rarely occurs in a crowded public venue like that, where help would be easy to muster. [Moreover] most sex-trafficking lures and abductions are of teenagers. Parents should spend their worry time on other perils.”
So why don’t they? The answer is in Diandra’s own warning. She wrote that she’d recently read the story of yet another mom who said she and her kids had been targeted at (ironically!) Target. “I’m reading more and more about these experiences, and it’s terrifying.”
People are posting scary stories on Facebook that make parents paranoid, to the point where THEY post scary posts, which inspires MORE paranoia and scary posts.
That’s exactly it: People are posting scary stories on Facebook that make parents paranoid, to the point where THEY post scary posts, which inspires MORE paranoia and scary posts, etc. etc.
What’s worse, the effect is resonating far beyond the Facebook comment section. It is changing parenting — and childhood.
When we are warned over and over that our kids are in constant danger, even in the safest situations, we start to believe it.
From there it’s just a baby step to childhood on lockdown, never letting our kids walk to school, arresting the parents who let their kids play in the park, smashing the window of the car in front of the dry cleaners, because the mom left the child napping there for three minutes. We will not tolerate parents who trust their kids and trust the odds.
Instead, gripped by hysteria, we are giving our children a childhood unlike our own — a childhood with no freedom at all — simply because someone pressed “share.”
Lenore Skenazy is founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids, and a contributor at Reason.com.