I don't want to open this up to a debate about human trafficking but suffice it to say that there is a lot of mythology that came from white slavery panic (which is what the Mann Act stemmed from), rooted in early 20th century fears about women's independence and race mixing:
"According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery.' These white slave narratives, or white-slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909."
[2] Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution."
Mann Act - Wikipedia
This mythology has continued to the present day helps along by media hysteria and movies like Taken.
The reality is human trafficking is about immigrants who become indentured servants or are roped into slavery. It's about coyotes taking people across borders for illegal pay. It's about illegal adoptions. It's about garden variety prostitution including child prostitution.
While many predators can be charged with sex trafficking violations and pedophiles and predators will associate with one another and trade *advertiser censored* and sometimes access to kids they have control of, the idea of vast networks involving powerful people or governmental corruption is mostly just fiction.
Yeah, Sharon Marshall was kidnapped by a monster and he had a lot of bad friends.
That's not the same thing as some shadowy and organized sex trafficking network.
Oh there are networks. Low level criminals who trade young people for sex. They utilize truck stops and motels.
It's not some sophisticated enterprise involving auctions and cages and government officials. Instead, it involves street people and at risk kids from super dysfunctional backgrounds, drug addiction, mental illness, kids kicked out for being gay, kids who ran away die to sex abuse or physical abuse. It involves poverty and hopelessness.
Could this kid had been trafficked? Yes. If he's Timmothy, whoever he was given to cannot have been a functional, normal human because no normal person would keep a missing child the authorities are looking for.
And in that case I can see the kid running away or wing handed off to other dysfunctional people and eventually lured or forced into prostitution, drug dealing and crime like burglary.
These creeps beat the kids into submission so that would fit.
But the incredible tale of Noreen is the stuff of fantasy and wild conspiracy theories. At no time has there ever been any credible evidence to support her beliefs.
