Fear-mongering is the act of making people unnecessarily afraid through manipulation and misinformation, and it undermines the credibility of actual sex trafficking victims.

Whether you realize it or not, it’s everywhere, specifically on your TikTok “for you page.”

These outlandish videos presented as tips on how to avoid being sex trafficked are designed to instill fear in a pathetic attempt to gain views. 

It looks like people inspecting smoke detectors and alarm clocks for spy cameras or warning others that cash on their windshield or a zip tie wrapped on their car door means they are going to be kidnapped by a stranger in a Walmart parking lot.

In 2022, TikTok user @JanelleandKate uploaded a compilation of signs that you are being targeted, citing a misplaced shopping cart as one, and received over 10 million views.

The reason these exaggerated videos are likely fabricated is that trafficking is a highly personal and complex issue that typically involves recruitment by family members and intimate partners.

According to the Polaris Project, a nationwide effort to combat trafficking, in 2020, 42% of 2,448 victims were trafficked by a member of their own family, and 39% were recruited through an intimate partner.

This is not to say that one shouldn’t be aware of their surroundings or trust every stranger they encounter.

But life is not always like a psychological thriller, and pretending it is curates a culture of fear that distracts from what’s really happening.

The reality that is less likely to go viral is that traffickers do not target strangers off the street. 

Instead, they groom their family members, romantic partners and friends or society’s most vulnerable, such as homeless people, drug addicts and runaways. 

These middle-class white women want to push a narrative that a perpetrator is lurking in every corner because it’s far more thrilling to assume a man in a white van is a kidnapper than a plumber, which ignores the fact that human trafficking is a system that relies on a power structure of gender, race and class.

Whether these video trends are a sick way to profit off of people’s anxiety or out of a well-meaning desire to help others, they lead to real-life consequences of overwhelming law enforcement with false reporting and the perpetuation of trafficking myths.