Before I even knew how to drive, I remember a family member telling me about one thing I needed to be especially careful about once I did have my license.
If I was stopped at a gas station, she told me I should never accept a business card from any man who approached me.
She apparently read on Facebook that groups of men were posing as car detailers interested in gaining women’s business. They wore rubber gloves to protect themselves from a harmful chemical their business cards were contaminated with.
If you left the gas station with a business card in your car, the fumes would eventually cause you to pass out. The men would follow your car until then, then kidnap you to be trafficked.
Though the story stayed with me for years, I can’t recall a single instance of this actually playing out and have found several articles debunking the chain post as an urban myth.
In recent years, it seems as though more and more similar posts are shared online.
Human trafficking is a huge problem in our society and deserves the attention it is getting.
Unfortunately, though, the conversation is often marked by rumors and conspiracies.
The Polaris Project, which operates the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline and holds the largest data set on trafficking in North America, has written about how these unproven theories harm their efforts to help those in need.
“Conspiracies distract from the more disturbing but simple realities of how sex trafficking actually works, and how we can prevent it,” according to The Polaris Project.
Rather than elaborate schemes, this modern-day slavery is usually so inconspicuous that we don’t even recognize it.
Before I began attending trainings and workshops with She Has a Name, a Central Ohio anti-human trafficking organization, I thought the crime was perpetrated by shady international villains like the ones in “Taken.”
Instead, I learned that our state consistently has one of the largest commercial sex trades in the United States.
It’s a problem that hits close to home and one that should concern and anger us.
But, well-to-do white women like myself are so terrified that we could possibly fall victim to human trafficking that we overlook the women, and some men, who actually do.
Traffickers capitalize on this horrific, but lucrative, business by seizing on people’s vulnerabilities.
Whether they are pimps and drug dealers or even small business owners and family members, traffickers are manipulative and know how to target their specific victims.
Those of us who are more vulnerable in society – individuals with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and migrants, racial minorities and those with substance use disorders – can be more susceptible to human trafficking.
Sadly, these are the people whose struggles we often overlook.
Many of us reading this column, myself included, are lucky enough to have a stable job or income and a support network of friends and family who care about us.
We’re so comfortable that we tend to focus only on the issues that threaten us, or people like us.
If we are genuinely troubled by human trafficking, we have to start caring about everyone who is affected.
We need to keep talking about trafficking – but that doesn’t mean sharing questionable posts that only stoke fear.
In trying to gain sympathy for ourselves as potential victims, we are diverting resources from those who have truly been victimized.
Our own selfishness is adding to the exact problem we claim to be fighting.
-Kayleen Petrovia is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.