An year ago, I wrote this about the lack of freedom ruining childhood:

Rather than mollycoddling helicopter-parenting your children to oaf-rock, let them trick-or-treat without adult supervision and eat uninspected candy.

Now, I shall get into the causes:

The loss of freedom, in the past, has been do to moral panics, namely StrangerDanger and Satanic Panic. Today is no different, but the panic is SexTrafficking:

We need to rewind to Sweden in the post-war era:

It used to be that one could convince others in Sweden to persecute prostitutes simply by saying that god does not like prostitution. In the post-war era, Sweden became more liberal. Convincing Swedes to persecute prostitutes became harder. ¿What is a prude, horrified by the thought that total strangers behind closed doors might be consensually enjoying themselves, to do? ¡Claim that all prostitutes are victims of involuntary sex-trafficking and that all patrons are rapists!:

This is simply a lie. Most prostitutes are consenting adults and most patron are nice people, who hare lonely and have unmet sexual needs

This lead to the Exil Swedish Model:

0thly, I must distinguish between the Nordic Model and the Swedish Model:

The Nordic Model is great personal freedom, with a strong social safetynet. The Swedish model is decriminalization of being a prostitute, but extreme penalties for buying sex. Cops love this because they get to rob and rape prostitutes, just like under the old model of prohibition:

Cop:
"Nice customers you have outside your house. It would be ashame if they all ended up in JohnSchool."

Prostitute:
"I shall give you bribes and freebies."

¡Cops love raping and extorting!

The terrible Swedish model metastasizes like a cancer. With it come absurd claims about millions of trafficked women.

¿How does this cause the loss of freedom of children? ¡Absurd fears about children being abducted for sextrafficking!

Parents do not let children do anything because they fear that nonexistent sex-traffickers will abduct their children. ¡The fact is that it is the safest time to be a child in the United States of America in 50 years!

Politics make strange bedfellows:

The free-range movement for children and the movement to decriminalize prostitution have allied themselves against the common enemy of the moral panic of sex-tracking hysteria. The fathers in the free-range movement for liberating children are especially committed, spending hours alone, behind closed door, with prostitutes for the decriminalization of prostitution, which is very commendable and should be encouraged.

A conversation with Iisaw about the Nordic Model and how it relates to TwilightTown in The Twilight Enigma inspired this post:L

The Twilight Enigma
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iisaw

Interesting.

Yes, fear is a great tool for those in power, since respect and trust are so hard to earn and so easily to lose. As a general rule of thumb, if you can easily and sensibly add ": Be Afraid!" to any news headline or article title... it can safely be ignored.

That doesn't mean that sexual predators aren't out there, it just means they're much more likely to wear the cloak of authority rather than be a skulking stereotype.

7029380

Indeed:

One would have to leave a child unattended in a public park 700 thousand years before one would expect a 50%/50% chance of being abducted. As for child-molestors, they exist, but usually target the children of friends and family. As for sex-traffickers, they are a bogeyman invented by prudes for preventing decriminalization of prostitution and are as real as the child-sacrificing satanists parents feared during the satanic panic:

Hopefully, in the year 2030, a mother, deep in a red state, will laugh at the fear of sex-traffickers abducting children, as she books a session with a prostitute, which will be totally legal because prostitution will be decriminalized, at the local co-operative bordello, for her and her husband, for celebrating their wedding anniversary.

7029380

I just realized that one can misinterpret my example of an hypothetical 2030:

I mentioned a mother in a Red State booking a legal session with a prostitute because, with the prudish culture of Red States, they would be the last to consider decriminalization of prostitution. One must understand that this moral panic appeals to both sides of the political spectrum:

The left want to protect women and girls from sextraffickers; while, the right want to punish dirty whore and the disgusting johns. 1 of the worse Attorney Generals was a Democrat:

Kamela Harrish lead a crusade against the nonexistant sextrafficking which ruinied many lives and lead to the murder of many sexworkers, forced to work on the streets because of her, with no way to screen clients. I prefer all other Democratic Candidates to her. If it will come down to her or Trump, I shall hold my nose and vote for her, because, although she is a pile of horseapples, she is our pile of horseapples, while Trump might favor Russia.

This moral panic is a bipartisan affair.

7029977
Oh, yes... Be Afraid!!! is a tactic used by both all sides, really.