Abstract
The QAnon conspiracy threatens anti-trafficking education because of its broad dissemination and focus on a range of myths about trafficking. These myths are rooted in historic and ongoing misinformation about abductions, exploitation, and community threats. This article examines the extent of QAnon’s co-optation of human trafficking discourses and evaluates its connection to trafficking myths, particularly related to gender, race, class, and agency. From this perspective, the article considers how anti-trafficking education can respond to these myths and build a pedagogy in the age of Q.
Highlights
The QAnon conspiracy threatens anti-trafficking education because of its broad dissemination and focus on a range of myths about trafficking
He proceeded to follow my daughter through the store [...], all the while motioning to a car a grey Toyota Camry type vehicle with tinted windows and a bad exhaust, that was waiting for him outside.’
What many ignored as an absurd online conspiracy turned potentially deadly on 16 December 2016, when Edgar Maddison Welch drove to Washington D.C. from North Carolina armed with an AR-15 rifle and a .38 calibre handgun to investigate the pizza restaurant himself
Summary
One of the major challenges anti-trafficking educators face is overcoming the myths, misperceptions, and misinformation about human trafficking.[5]. Whether the threat is built on racialised myths of ‘exotic’ temptations or the Indecent Other exploiting innocents, these constructions ‘reinforce racism and dualistic simplifications of a complex issue.’[25] The invited response is a reifying narrative of rescue where dominant white patriarchal social values can repair the ruptured moral order This context proves informative in examining the rise of QAnon and how racialised moral panics about trafficking have found traction in both mainstream and social media. The motivations that inspired violent attacks against Jewish immigrant communities in centuries past are forebears to the frequent death threats levied against individuals like George Soros (a major Q target) and broader ongoing violence against Jews.[32] This tendency to co-opt and manipulate issues of concern to support racist and reactionary social positions has been noted as both a contemporary and historical tactic. The context, dissemination, and presentation of trafficking myths have allowed QAnon to flourish in trafficking discourse, making anti-trafficking education all the more difficult
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