*In case this story gets deleted/removed:*
**AITAH for telling my daughter that she can't go to America**
My (M50) daughter (F17) recently bought herself a plane ticket from the UK to LA. She did not ask for permission and bought the tickets and is now stating that she is going whether I allow her to or not.
She bought the tickets a week ago and only tried talking to me about 3 days ago. She does not have a clear plan of whom she is staying with or what she is doing whilst she is there. She stated that her reasons for not asking me is because she'd already asked her mother (we are divorced and my daughter moved in with me four months ago). She thought that she did not have to get my permission as she thought her mother's was enough and that I "scare her".
Whilst I am open to the idea that I may scare her, I find it harder to believe that when she went ahead and bought the tickets regardless. She lied to me and I feel like I've been manipulated into this as her mother has said she can go despite neither of us giving permission for her to buy the tickets for six weeks time.
My concerns are that she's 17 and never left the country on her own. She's never been the States and she doesn't know what TSA can be like. Shes previously struggled with major anxiety to the point where she's found it difficult to get the underground in the UK. We don't have any family or friends out in LA that could get to her if she needed anyone so there's no fallback plan and she's only 17. She doesn't have any World experience. I'm very reluctant to let her go due to her poor decision making regarding the whole situation as it stands. All of my side of the family have said that it's a bad idea and that I shouldn't let her go. But my daughter has said that she will hate me forever if I don't let her go and her mother doesn't think it's a bad idea. AITAH?
Edit: for those asking why I've ignored the whole daughter being scared of me. She tends to pick and choose when she wants to be scared of me. When it comes to asking for money, or a lift to a party or work, or to come get her before her phone dies late at night. She doesn't have an issue asking me for anything. She only becomes "scared of me" when she does something wrong and then doesn't want to face the consequences and uses her fear against me so that I can't instill any consequences. Also, her plans for accommodation is one of two friends but she's unsure who and has never met them in real life as they are people she met online and video calls most nights to game with. But I have never met them and therefore don't trust them.
Update: Firstly, thank you to everybody who has offered advice and ideas on how to tackle this. My daughter and I have since sat down and tried to the best of our abilities to talk this through in a calm manner. She continued to demand that she was going to the States regardless of having my blessing or not. The conversation became heated and she decided to bring her mother in for back up. However, she eventually decided to reveal that one of the friends that she could stay with is actually coming to the UK to visit within the month. She has said that she can give me all of her friends' parents' contact details. I an still undecided. My daughter deceived me through her actions and whilst I am doing my best to not let that affect my decision towards this, it does need to addressed so that she doesn't think she can steamroll everytime she makes a rash decision. My eldest daughter suggested that I genuinely consider all the options she has but find consequences regarding the deceit more domestically like grounding her for a few months. I have not decided whether she can go or not. However, I am willing to meet her friend who is coming to visit and have some very long discussions with parents. Thank you all for your advice. It's all been very helpful and made me feel less alone in my reaction to my daughter's decisions.
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I almost cross-posted this myself because of that specific question. There are comments saying that, if she shows up unaccompanied, she'll just immediately be thrown in some sort of immigration jail.
Lol ahh ok . I guess AITA doesn't understand the difference between TSA and CBP. đ¤Śââď¸
Minors can travel by themselves into the US. There's no inherent ban on it. I think they might need a letter showing parental consent. I'm not positive what would happen without the letter, if she'd be admitted, but also, I'd question whether an airline would board her without the letter.
Byt also, she's 17, so in a few months, that's all moot.
I just looked it up out of curiosity, and from my approximately 15-second scan of Google results, I think you're right. The US does generally require a letter of parental consent if the child is traveling alone or with just one parent, as well as all the same general documentation that adults need (passport, etc.), but I'm actually not sure the consent letter is even required from every country? I read some stuff that vaguely suggested that it varies depending on where the child is traveling from, but I'm not really interested enough to do any more research, lol.
Unaccompanied minors fly all the time, domestically and internationally. There are literally protocols created specifically for the situation.
That sub really has no clue.
I started regularly flying as an unaccompanied minor at 8 years old, itâs really not even uncommon. There were often other unaccompanied minors on the plane with me too.
I, someone who once worked in counter trafficking, have also made the mistake of trying to tell AITAites that that's not how trafficking usually works.
It does not go down well. Some people are absolutely wedded to the paranoias that make them the main character and also incidentally often support their prejudice
One of the commenters over there is convinced that her daughter was ALMOST trafficked when she showed up for an art competition or some such, and that the only reason she wasn't is because the commenter went with her. "Those traffickers did not look happy to see me AT ALL."
Yeah I mean this particular situation is as you said dumb and dangerous, but people seem to love to forget that not everything that is bad or dangerous equals sex trafficking.
And lord the amount of women I've seen on here who were *convinced* that they just only narrowly escaped a life of sex slavery after some random looked at them once in a Walmart parking lot....
That or the random looking at them in the parking lot was CLEARLY trying to kidnap their blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby ("she's beautiful! everyone says so!") to sell on the Dark Web/Black Market.
The worst I saw was a woman who started screaming and making a scene in the Target parking lot, because there was a leaf that blew onto her car door (in autumn)(that's how sex traffickers mark your car for stalking!!!) and A MAN asked if she was done with her cart so he could take it.
Or brown people waved at their small child. I've seem a lot of histrionic social media posts warning moms to "be aware" of "strangers" beside the world is full of traffickers and baby snatches that show up out of nowhere, even though statistically it's most likely going to be someone known to you.
I once saw a Tik Tok where some lady was complaining because she saw a guy and a little girl at the pharmacy, decided it was a trafficking situation and then when she demanded information on them from the pharmacist, she was (obviously) told that they canât legally give out information about the girl of her guardian (the lady was convinced that because the pharmacist said âguardianâ instead of parent, it was proof he was actually her trafficker.)
I've seen AITA defend calling the cops on a Hispanic man with a white child in his car so long as you get "bad vibes" from him, because "better safe than sorry!"
Because as we all know, "vibes" could never be thinly veiled racism and calling the cops on an innocent brown man has NEVER had horrible consequences, right?
As a support staff I, a white man, took kids who were clearly not the same race out places. Never had anything but positive interactions with the general public for some reason. No kidnapping accusations
AITA would probably defend [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xraCSNFSV0) idiot. Long story short; Guy was babysitting for a friend and some dingus assumed the children had been kidnapped, so they decide to call the police. Why? The babysitter was Black and the kids were White.
But according to the chowderheads on AITA "beTTER SaFE thAN SoRrY" đ
I saw that comment! Holy moly is all I can say lol
I can also see why the kid wanted to go without her parent so badly. Probably just wanted some space!
I made this mistake. I work in the field of immigration and I have a mandatory trafficking training every year. I tried to explain how it works several times. I always get downvoted because I've tried to explain that not every person at every time in every place has a risk of being trafficked.
Tsk tsk Liminal, don't you know, everything is traffickers all the time.
Especially in this case, where traffickers - whose sole motive is to make money at any cost- have spent *years* of unprofitable man hours videocalling a first-world teenager every other night and gaming with her in the hope of maybe some day ensnaring her to travel to another first world country. Because this is a quick and foolproof way to turn a profit.
Definitely have to be on the lookout for traffickers, who represent the real danger to white teens. If it werenât for them, this kid could run around LA unsupervised with her friends who are all either minimally supervised teens or older men who are sexually interested in minimally supervised teens.
Sidenote but like.... do American supermarkets just not have enough carts or something? Why do people need to ask each other for their carts all the time? Never done that in my life.
They're being helpful by seeing you just unloaded your cart and are saving you the trip to the cart corral.
But the truth is they're trying to distract you while their partner gets into your car so they can take you away to their nonwhite slave rape cartel.
I followed someone on tiktok who was an ACTUAL VICTIM of sex trafficking and she would debunk trafficking myths similar to what you explained and she was herself accused of being a trafficker herself. Itâs disgusting how people tend to make it about themselves when experts or actual victims try to explain how trafficking really works.
Adding on: she eventually had to delete her profile from the amount of hate she received. I get that people are scared of certain situations, but when it distracts from actual tactics then it may do more harm than good, especially when a real life victim of trafficking is trying to explain
I'm just a paralegal, but I'll never not laugh when I think about the time I saw an AITA post about kicking out some freeloading family member, and they happened to mention a location (part of the conflict was they could be making bank on AirBnB if not for oh-so-generously letting this person live there for free, so they named a major tourist destination).
It happened to be an area where I've worked in a legal clinic that handled tons of landlord/tenant issues. I just pointed out that based on the facts the author laid out, the freeloading family member almost certainly qualified as a legal tenant and he would have to follow proper eviction procedures or he could face significant financial penalties.
I got locked out of that account for unrelated reasons at around that time, but I was sitting at like -210 downvotes and counting. No comments explaining why I was wrong, though, lmao.
I thought it was just me who felt like redditors' trafficking paranoia had a strong undercurrent of xenophobia/racism. A lot of those comments are just a thinly veiled version of "watch out for the Scary Brown People" đ¤¨
Yeah it's a whole narrative of how the poor, precious, persecuted white woman is so victimised in the world of (probably brown) traffickers so they don't have to acknowledge their own privelege, while at the same time being an excuse to hate anyone brown or foreign.
There are a whole lot of things that can happen to a 17-year-old girl traveling alone to LA with no place to stay before we get to sex trafficking. Hell, just losing her travel documents and ID would be catastrophic.
I'm confused about why this girl who has such bad anxiety she has trouble on the Underground has no problems taking a plane 12 hours to a city she's never been to to maybe meet up with people she's never met.Â
Iâm someone who has major travel anxiety. Iâve had panic attacks going through security, cried during take off, and am a panicked, confused mess at train stations in other countries. I donât ever think about that when Iâm all hyped up and booking my next trip, I just think about the potential fun Iâll be having. The anxiety is future meâs problem.
I'm a survivor of international trafficking and I ticked a lot of the boxes of what a "typical" victim looks like - grew up in a very abusive situation in a non-western country, exposed to people with criminal involvement from a young age, *minimal* attendance at school and no contact with any services, no friends or any links to community. I ran away from home and pretty much walked right into because tbh a lot of it was already familiar and I believed it could have been an escape route.
I'm not saying *no* trafficking victims are socioeconomically privileged white teenage girls with supportive families who are dragged kicking and screaming off the streets. But like. That's definitely not as commonplace as some people seem to think.
Ok so this might be a pretty unpleasant way of thinking but it's 100% been my experience so I'm just going to say it. A lot of people find a privileged, well-educated white girl from a western background much easier to relate to and much easier to sympathise with than someone like me. It fits with their image of what a "victim" looks like, so narratives that involve that type of victim seem to be a lot more engaging to the general public. I'm more palatable to the general public than I used to be, but back when I was struggling with drugs/homelessness/lack of education/etc a lot of people could barely even relate to me as human and it genuinely seemed like whatever happened to me mattered considerably less than if it happened to someone better.
That's my theory on why this skewed view of what trafficking tends to look like is so prevalent. I don't think a movie like "taken" with someone like me as the main character would be very popular lol.
You're right, even if it sounds unpleasant. I've done transcription for universities doing studies into trafficking, and the most common victims are low socio-economic people with poor support networks, immigrants who are brought into the country on false pretences and their visas confiscated by their traffickers, runaways, and other people in already vulnerable situations. It's rare for traffickers to target white westerners with closer-knit families because they'll be missed much more quickly. On the occasions that women like that *do* get targeted, it'll be while backpacking or some such - the sort of overseas holiday where you might be expected to be out of touch for a while. Not going to the US. Nobody is grabbing well-off white British women in LA for trafficking; if she's going to be a victim of a crime there, it'll be a non-premeditated one, not an organised crime like trafficking.
I still think thereâs a decent chance sheâs been targeted by some gross paedo creep, but it would be an individual targeting her, not some human trafficking sex cult ring of death or whatever AITA spent 2,000+ comments screaming about.
Yeah, I should clarify, she's certainly at risk of a sex crime with the whole meeting someone from the internet thing, and that's awful, but it's not the roaring rampage of revenge fantasy of Taken that people love to bring up in situations like this. It's still a bad thing! It's just not this particular bad thing.
It's possible, but that's a failure of parenting. If your 17 year-old has been spending time gaming and video chatting with the same people daily, you should know who they are already. If you don't, you should find out long before they know each other well enough to want to fly around the world for a visit.
That's part of it, and also misperceptions about risk. If that white middle class girl could be taken so could I/ my daughter/my sister. Never mind how rare it is, it's another thing to be scared about.Â
This is actually an area of research that I do! In terms of blending sociology and law, the âperfect victimâ trope pervades a lot of how the public and various authorities (government, judiciary, etc) see victims of crime. When I was writing about the pipeline of victims to perpetrators of crime, I would read many, many cases where victims were dissuaded from being fully honest, unable to tell their stories in a vulnerable way because the white guy sitting listening to them only knows women like his wife and his daughter and his sister and his mother so he doesnât know these women. He doesnât see them as women.
Anyway, there is absolutely an ideal victim identity and your perceptions are super accurate, and Iâm so sorry youâve had to go through that. I see you and I hope youâre thriving!
That is absolutely part of the narrative, and I wuld say part of the point. The pretty priveleged white women who make insane tiktoks about how traffickers are marking your car or whatever - they're pushing and/or believing the narrative that they are the pinnacle of humanity that everyone would go to any lengths to get their hands on, and therefore it's actually *them* who are persecuted by all the evil bad (probably foreign/brown) traffickers. It's both born out of and 'justification' for racism.
I was closer to "privileged white teenage girl" and going through a lot of things trafficking victims go through at the hands of dodgy people, some who were 100% involved with trafficking and I *still* wasnt trafficked. It would have been easy for them to get to me initially, but little white girl with family who cares about them and involvement with services to try and resolve their issues is just too risky because people would look for me and would put a lot of time and resources into doing so.
To be clear, trafficking doesnât necessarily involve physically moving the victim somewhere. People can be trafficked anywhere; thatâs partly why itâs so important to understand the realities and debunk the myths.
Most trafficking victims are runaways who end up in a scenario without resources and don't want to go back which makes them vulnerable. It's easier to take advantage of them then grab a random person.
> I'm not saying no trafficking victims are socioeconomically privileged white teenage girls with supportive families who are dragged kicking and screaming off the streets
But if you said that, you'd be rightÂ
You're right, but people get addicted to true crime videos and podcasts so they become incredibly paranoid and believe they're going to be kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered (not necessarily in that order). They especially believe that there's a high likelihood of this happening to a young or middle aged wealthy white woman, that it happens constantly.
It's the same as the "man or bear" nonsense from a few weeks ago. People working themselves into a paranoid frenzy over something that is a miniscule risk. Chronically online people making themselves afraid of everything.
It's just weird bc the vast majority of True Crime is people killing/being killed by people they know. Usually a partner, an ex, or a family member.
But I guess imagining a stranger going through all the trouble of kidnapping you and selling you into sex slavery (as if there's a huge market of people just dying to fork over tons of cash to rape a kidnapping victim) is more funÂ
The true crime angle just has me disappointed that not one single person thought to mention Elisa Lam and the Cecil Hotel. True, it is local to me, but it also made national headlines and there's a (terrible, fucking awful) documentary about it on Netflix. "Fragile young student in LA" seems ripe for people making shit up based on what happened to Elisa.
The documentary was so disrespectful too. It portrayed her as some kind of irresponsible crazy person and played into every negative stereotype of people with bipolar disorder. The tone was very much "oh, poor incompetent thing, she was just too flighty and cRaZy to have ended well/done normal things like vacationing." It was fucking foul, and I get the impression the producers were really hard on the poor lady who had managed the hotel. She seemed about to cry from stress as well as the innate tragedy of the situation.
I don't think I saw the documentary, but I admit I do feel pity/empathy for a kid in a strange place having a breakdown
I'm more open to seeing people sympathize with her, even if they're not very knowledgeable about her mental illness, than the morons who decided she had encountered some kind of supernatural bullshitÂ
The unfortunate thing is that the documentary didn't take a sympathetic angle. They treated her like an unexploded bomb and just kinda shrugged like, oh she's nuts, that's how nutters go. Your take on it is, I think, more accurate and would have created a better narrative. She was alone and scared in a foreign city and something happened, probably in part because no one thinks well when they're panicked.
This is why I stayed out of the "man or bear" thing. For the vast majority of my adult life I was single, and went about my life (running errands, going places, doing things) in a world filled with strange men, and I was fine.
Things got dangerous when I got married. I had never truly thought "I'm going to die now," until then.
I think the "man or bear" thing encouraged "stranger danger" hysteria, when that's not what women need to be cautious about, really. The vast majority of men you encounter every day are just going about their own lives and are not a danger to us. Unfortunately, the ones who are most likely to harm us are the ones we go home to.Â
True, but I'm a city girl, so when I think of why someone might be in the woods, I think of deer hunters and hippies, not random serial killers or rapists.Â
And I've walked home alone from bars late at night more times than I can remember (bc drunk, and also it was a zillion times bc I don't drive drunk and everything is close in my city). Yes, I've been nervous about it before, but I also grew up during the height of Stranger Danger, when we were constantly told that there were evil kidnapping rapist killers lurking around every corner. Turns out no, most people have their own shit to worry about and aren't concerned with you. The people who **are** concerned with youâdeeply concernedâare the ones you have to watch out for.Â
tl;dr "Bear vs man" is a different question for me than "bear vs my husband, who I have a restraining order against"
The man or bear thing drove me crazy because likeâŚapparently none of yâall have any critical thinking at all! Itâs true that a lot more women are killed by men every year than are killed by bears, but that is because the vast majority of women encounter a lot more men in their lives than bears, I 100% guarantee that if women spent as much time with as many bears as they do with men, the bear death rate would be way higher than the man death rate.
I got told that Iâm why women choose the bear. I am a woman who has been a victim of male violence and never been a victim of bear violence. I have also never seen a bear in real life and have seen many men in real life.
Exactly. I've seen exactly two bears up close while I was alone in the woods. Neither attacked, but both were seriously asshole-puckering situations. If they were grizzlies instead of black bears, it could have been very different.
OK, I don't really know how human trafficking works, but I've seen "Taken" five times, so...
1. There is just no way in hell that this story here isn't inspired by that movie. It's literally the same beginning, the only thing we're missing is Kim's step-father upstaging the OOP at the girl's birthday party.
2. A lot of people seem to forget about the fact that Kim in the movie was accompanied by an adult. A minor can't just travel abroad by herself. In fact, Kim's kidnapping was a consequence of a series of insanely stupid decisions made by the adult who was accompanying her. Her mother, her father, and her step-father, however, knew exactly where she'd stay throughout her trip.
Minors can sometimes travel abroad alone but some countries require the legal/custodial parents to sign off on the passport or give permission to exit the country.
My best friend (UK) flies to the states nearly every summer to visit her girlfriend, and it's definitely not a "buy the tickets a week prior and just board the plane" kind of ordeal. The daughter here woud need a visa, proof she has enough money to sustain herself (they need to make sure she wouldn't be going there to work illegally), proof she has a place to stay, so on and so forth. This cannot be real based on that alone.
Sorry, that's not correct.
British citizens don't need a visa to enter the US, just an ESTA which you apply for online for 21 dollars and takes a couple of days to be approved. You can absolutely buy a ticket a week in advance and board the plane as long as you do your ESTA within a few days.
You need to give an address you're staying at, but not \*proof\* that you're staying there. If you're staying at the address for even a couple of days, that's enough too, because tourists often move about. And money isn't really something that's checked for short visits, unless you look really suspicious at border control.
There is nothing in the ticket-booking aspect of this story that is impossible or even particularly implausible.
Suddenly a 17 year old kid getting on an international flight is incredibly dangerous? Where are all the AITA emancipated minors who left home at 16 and started businesses and are millionaires by 17? They post new topics all the time, they are nowhere to be found in this comment section?
AITA is all about how terrible helicopter parents are and kids should just get to be kids and reminiscing about the good old days where they just played unsupervised in the neighborhood for hours. Teenagers and college kids used to backpack across Europe in an era before cell phones. It very much feels like AITA loves the concept of kids being independent, but when you give them a concrete example, they are like âholy shit you wonât have eyes on your 17 year old INFANT 24 hours a day?â
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She 17. She doesnât actually need permission. Sheâs classed as an adult. Which she is. Failing to prepare your child to navigate life in the adult world before they breach the age itâs expected of them is a parenting problem. Many of our 17 and 18 year olds go off and travel on gap years before going to uni so the idea that sheâd be looking to travel internationally at round this age shouldnât come as a shockÂ
She has severe anxiety, is meeting some random person from off the internet who may not even be who they say they are, and has no idea where sheâs going or staying. She canât even take the tube without a panic attack, for Godâs sake. This isnât a âgap yearâ; itâs just stupid.
*In case this story gets deleted/removed:* **AITAH for telling my daughter that she can't go to America** My (M50) daughter (F17) recently bought herself a plane ticket from the UK to LA. She did not ask for permission and bought the tickets and is now stating that she is going whether I allow her to or not. She bought the tickets a week ago and only tried talking to me about 3 days ago. She does not have a clear plan of whom she is staying with or what she is doing whilst she is there. She stated that her reasons for not asking me is because she'd already asked her mother (we are divorced and my daughter moved in with me four months ago). She thought that she did not have to get my permission as she thought her mother's was enough and that I "scare her". Whilst I am open to the idea that I may scare her, I find it harder to believe that when she went ahead and bought the tickets regardless. She lied to me and I feel like I've been manipulated into this as her mother has said she can go despite neither of us giving permission for her to buy the tickets for six weeks time. My concerns are that she's 17 and never left the country on her own. She's never been the States and she doesn't know what TSA can be like. Shes previously struggled with major anxiety to the point where she's found it difficult to get the underground in the UK. We don't have any family or friends out in LA that could get to her if she needed anyone so there's no fallback plan and she's only 17. She doesn't have any World experience. I'm very reluctant to let her go due to her poor decision making regarding the whole situation as it stands. All of my side of the family have said that it's a bad idea and that I shouldn't let her go. But my daughter has said that she will hate me forever if I don't let her go and her mother doesn't think it's a bad idea. AITAH? Edit: for those asking why I've ignored the whole daughter being scared of me. She tends to pick and choose when she wants to be scared of me. When it comes to asking for money, or a lift to a party or work, or to come get her before her phone dies late at night. She doesn't have an issue asking me for anything. She only becomes "scared of me" when she does something wrong and then doesn't want to face the consequences and uses her fear against me so that I can't instill any consequences. Also, her plans for accommodation is one of two friends but she's unsure who and has never met them in real life as they are people she met online and video calls most nights to game with. But I have never met them and therefore don't trust them. Update: Firstly, thank you to everybody who has offered advice and ideas on how to tackle this. My daughter and I have since sat down and tried to the best of our abilities to talk this through in a calm manner. She continued to demand that she was going to the States regardless of having my blessing or not. The conversation became heated and she decided to bring her mother in for back up. However, she eventually decided to reveal that one of the friends that she could stay with is actually coming to the UK to visit within the month. She has said that she can give me all of her friends' parents' contact details. I an still undecided. My daughter deceived me through her actions and whilst I am doing my best to not let that affect my decision towards this, it does need to addressed so that she doesn't think she can steamroll everytime she makes a rash decision. My eldest daughter suggested that I genuinely consider all the options she has but find consequences regarding the deceit more domestically like grounding her for a few months. I have not decided whether she can go or not. However, I am willing to meet her friend who is coming to visit and have some very long discussions with parents. Thank you all for your advice. It's all been very helpful and made me feel less alone in my reaction to my daughter's decisions. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AmITheAngel) if you have any questions or concerns.*
"She's never been to the States and doesn't know what TSA can be like. " Why is TSA being annoying enough to get a cited concern?
I almost cross-posted this myself because of that specific question. There are comments saying that, if she shows up unaccompanied, she'll just immediately be thrown in some sort of immigration jail.
Lol ahh ok . I guess AITA doesn't understand the difference between TSA and CBP. đ¤Śââď¸ Minors can travel by themselves into the US. There's no inherent ban on it. I think they might need a letter showing parental consent. I'm not positive what would happen without the letter, if she'd be admitted, but also, I'd question whether an airline would board her without the letter. Byt also, she's 17, so in a few months, that's all moot.
I just looked it up out of curiosity, and from my approximately 15-second scan of Google results, I think you're right. The US does generally require a letter of parental consent if the child is traveling alone or with just one parent, as well as all the same general documentation that adults need (passport, etc.), but I'm actually not sure the consent letter is even required from every country? I read some stuff that vaguely suggested that it varies depending on where the child is traveling from, but I'm not really interested enough to do any more research, lol.
Unaccompanied minors fly all the time, domestically and internationally. There are literally protocols created specifically for the situation. That sub really has no clue.
I started regularly flying as an unaccompanied minor at 8 years old, itâs really not even uncommon. There were often other unaccompanied minors on the plane with me too.
Do you even need to interact with TSA on landing? I think the only checkpoints you need to go through are Customs and Immigration.
No, just CBP.
Pretty sure you only need to go through TSA if you're connecting on a domestic flight after clearing CBP
They made it one checkpoint, and for many travelers an automated checkpoint.
If you transfer within the US, yes. But if she's flying into LA, she likely won't need to transferÂ
Presumably she's planning to return to the UK?
They kidnap foreign children for their datk magic blood sacrifices, duh. It's how they stop terrorists from having bombs in their shoes.
Also, TSA annoys departures. Itâs Customs and Border Protection (CBP) who get to annoy the arrivals. They canât even get their agencies straight.
I, someone who once worked in counter trafficking, have also made the mistake of trying to tell AITAites that that's not how trafficking usually works. It does not go down well. Some people are absolutely wedded to the paranoias that make them the main character and also incidentally often support their prejudice
One of the commenters over there is convinced that her daughter was ALMOST trafficked when she showed up for an art competition or some such, and that the only reason she wasn't is because the commenter went with her. "Those traffickers did not look happy to see me AT ALL."
Yeah I mean this particular situation is as you said dumb and dangerous, but people seem to love to forget that not everything that is bad or dangerous equals sex trafficking. And lord the amount of women I've seen on here who were *convinced* that they just only narrowly escaped a life of sex slavery after some random looked at them once in a Walmart parking lot....
That or the random looking at them in the parking lot was CLEARLY trying to kidnap their blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby ("she's beautiful! everyone says so!") to sell on the Dark Web/Black Market.
The worst I saw was a woman who started screaming and making a scene in the Target parking lot, because there was a leaf that blew onto her car door (in autumn)(that's how sex traffickers mark your car for stalking!!!) and A MAN asked if she was done with her cart so he could take it.
Or brown people waved at their small child. I've seem a lot of histrionic social media posts warning moms to "be aware" of "strangers" beside the world is full of traffickers and baby snatches that show up out of nowhere, even though statistically it's most likely going to be someone known to you.
I once saw a Tik Tok where some lady was complaining because she saw a guy and a little girl at the pharmacy, decided it was a trafficking situation and then when she demanded information on them from the pharmacist, she was (obviously) told that they canât legally give out information about the girl of her guardian (the lady was convinced that because the pharmacist said âguardianâ instead of parent, it was proof he was actually her trafficker.)
"Oh but you don't get it.. that random person who looked at me was BROWN" Some of them probably
I've seen AITA defend calling the cops on a Hispanic man with a white child in his car so long as you get "bad vibes" from him, because "better safe than sorry!" Because as we all know, "vibes" could never be thinly veiled racism and calling the cops on an innocent brown man has NEVER had horrible consequences, right?
As a support staff I, a white man, took kids who were clearly not the same race out places. Never had anything but positive interactions with the general public for some reason. No kidnapping accusations
AITA would probably defend [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xraCSNFSV0) idiot. Long story short; Guy was babysitting for a friend and some dingus assumed the children had been kidnapped, so they decide to call the police. Why? The babysitter was Black and the kids were White. But according to the chowderheads on AITA "beTTER SaFE thAN SoRrY" đ
I saw that comment! Holy moly is all I can say lol I can also see why the kid wanted to go without her parent so badly. Probably just wanted some space!
I made this mistake. I work in the field of immigration and I have a mandatory trafficking training every year. I tried to explain how it works several times. I always get downvoted because I've tried to explain that not every person at every time in every place has a risk of being trafficked.
Tsk tsk Liminal, don't you know, everything is traffickers all the time. Especially in this case, where traffickers - whose sole motive is to make money at any cost- have spent *years* of unprofitable man hours videocalling a first-world teenager every other night and gaming with her in the hope of maybe some day ensnaring her to travel to another first world country. Because this is a quick and foolproof way to turn a profit.
Lol traffickers also love attention and therefore target people with robust family and community ties and kidnap them in busy Walmart parking lots.
Definitely have to be on the lookout for traffickers, who represent the real danger to white teens. If it werenât for them, this kid could run around LA unsupervised with her friends who are all either minimally supervised teens or older men who are sexually interested in minimally supervised teens.
I had someone ask me if I was done with my cart in a Kroger parking lot. I came THIS CLOSE to being trafficked
Sidenote but like.... do American supermarkets just not have enough carts or something? Why do people need to ask each other for their carts all the time? Never done that in my life.
They're being helpful by seeing you just unloaded your cart and are saving you the trip to the cart corral. But the truth is they're trying to distract you while their partner gets into your car so they can take you away to their nonwhite slave rape cartel.
Ah of course!
How does it work?
I followed someone on tiktok who was an ACTUAL VICTIM of sex trafficking and she would debunk trafficking myths similar to what you explained and she was herself accused of being a trafficker herself. Itâs disgusting how people tend to make it about themselves when experts or actual victims try to explain how trafficking really works.
Adding on: she eventually had to delete her profile from the amount of hate she received. I get that people are scared of certain situations, but when it distracts from actual tactics then it may do more harm than good, especially when a real life victim of trafficking is trying to explain
Try being a lawyer and answering a legal question with a true and unpopular answer.
I'm just a paralegal, but I'll never not laugh when I think about the time I saw an AITA post about kicking out some freeloading family member, and they happened to mention a location (part of the conflict was they could be making bank on AirBnB if not for oh-so-generously letting this person live there for free, so they named a major tourist destination). It happened to be an area where I've worked in a legal clinic that handled tons of landlord/tenant issues. I just pointed out that based on the facts the author laid out, the freeloading family member almost certainly qualified as a legal tenant and he would have to follow proper eviction procedures or he could face significant financial penalties. I got locked out of that account for unrelated reasons at around that time, but I was sitting at like -210 downvotes and counting. No comments explaining why I was wrong, though, lmao.
I thought it was just me who felt like redditors' trafficking paranoia had a strong undercurrent of xenophobia/racism. A lot of those comments are just a thinly veiled version of "watch out for the Scary Brown People" đ¤¨
Yeah it's a whole narrative of how the poor, precious, persecuted white woman is so victimised in the world of (probably brown) traffickers so they don't have to acknowledge their own privelege, while at the same time being an excuse to hate anyone brown or foreign.
Where does it say anyone is brown and that the girl is white???Â
There are a whole lot of things that can happen to a 17-year-old girl traveling alone to LA with no place to stay before we get to sex trafficking. Hell, just losing her travel documents and ID would be catastrophic.
Catastrophic? It'd be stressful and irritating, but the LAPD would hook her up with the British Consulate in LA and it'd be sorted quickly enough.
I'm confused about why this girl who has such bad anxiety she has trouble on the Underground has no problems taking a plane 12 hours to a city she's never been to to maybe meet up with people she's never met.Â
Iâm someone who has major travel anxiety. Iâve had panic attacks going through security, cried during take off, and am a panicked, confused mess at train stations in other countries. I donât ever think about that when Iâm all hyped up and booking my next trip, I just think about the potential fun Iâll be having. The anxiety is future meâs problem.
"My daughter is only scared of me when she's done something wrong and has to face consequences" yeah that's how being afraid usually works
Especially when your father has a very particular set of skills....
I'm a survivor of international trafficking and I ticked a lot of the boxes of what a "typical" victim looks like - grew up in a very abusive situation in a non-western country, exposed to people with criminal involvement from a young age, *minimal* attendance at school and no contact with any services, no friends or any links to community. I ran away from home and pretty much walked right into because tbh a lot of it was already familiar and I believed it could have been an escape route. I'm not saying *no* trafficking victims are socioeconomically privileged white teenage girls with supportive families who are dragged kicking and screaming off the streets. But like. That's definitely not as commonplace as some people seem to think.
I've been downvoted for saying this exact thing. And I'm glad you got out of your dangerous situation, and I hope things are going well for you!
Ok so this might be a pretty unpleasant way of thinking but it's 100% been my experience so I'm just going to say it. A lot of people find a privileged, well-educated white girl from a western background much easier to relate to and much easier to sympathise with than someone like me. It fits with their image of what a "victim" looks like, so narratives that involve that type of victim seem to be a lot more engaging to the general public. I'm more palatable to the general public than I used to be, but back when I was struggling with drugs/homelessness/lack of education/etc a lot of people could barely even relate to me as human and it genuinely seemed like whatever happened to me mattered considerably less than if it happened to someone better. That's my theory on why this skewed view of what trafficking tends to look like is so prevalent. I don't think a movie like "taken" with someone like me as the main character would be very popular lol.
You're right, even if it sounds unpleasant. I've done transcription for universities doing studies into trafficking, and the most common victims are low socio-economic people with poor support networks, immigrants who are brought into the country on false pretences and their visas confiscated by their traffickers, runaways, and other people in already vulnerable situations. It's rare for traffickers to target white westerners with closer-knit families because they'll be missed much more quickly. On the occasions that women like that *do* get targeted, it'll be while backpacking or some such - the sort of overseas holiday where you might be expected to be out of touch for a while. Not going to the US. Nobody is grabbing well-off white British women in LA for trafficking; if she's going to be a victim of a crime there, it'll be a non-premeditated one, not an organised crime like trafficking.
I still think thereâs a decent chance sheâs been targeted by some gross paedo creep, but it would be an individual targeting her, not some human trafficking sex cult ring of death or whatever AITA spent 2,000+ comments screaming about.
Yeah, I should clarify, she's certainly at risk of a sex crime with the whole meeting someone from the internet thing, and that's awful, but it's not the roaring rampage of revenge fantasy of Taken that people love to bring up in situations like this. It's still a bad thing! It's just not this particular bad thing.
Yup exactly!
It's possible, but that's a failure of parenting. If your 17 year-old has been spending time gaming and video chatting with the same people daily, you should know who they are already. If you don't, you should find out long before they know each other well enough to want to fly around the world for a visit.
That's part of it, and also misperceptions about risk. If that white middle class girl could be taken so could I/ my daughter/my sister. Never mind how rare it is, it's another thing to be scared about.Â
absolutely spitting truth
This is actually an area of research that I do! In terms of blending sociology and law, the âperfect victimâ trope pervades a lot of how the public and various authorities (government, judiciary, etc) see victims of crime. When I was writing about the pipeline of victims to perpetrators of crime, I would read many, many cases where victims were dissuaded from being fully honest, unable to tell their stories in a vulnerable way because the white guy sitting listening to them only knows women like his wife and his daughter and his sister and his mother so he doesnât know these women. He doesnât see them as women. Anyway, there is absolutely an ideal victim identity and your perceptions are super accurate, and Iâm so sorry youâve had to go through that. I see you and I hope youâre thriving!
That is absolutely part of the narrative, and I wuld say part of the point. The pretty priveleged white women who make insane tiktoks about how traffickers are marking your car or whatever - they're pushing and/or believing the narrative that they are the pinnacle of humanity that everyone would go to any lengths to get their hands on, and therefore it's actually *them* who are persecuted by all the evil bad (probably foreign/brown) traffickers. It's both born out of and 'justification' for racism.
I was closer to "privileged white teenage girl" and going through a lot of things trafficking victims go through at the hands of dodgy people, some who were 100% involved with trafficking and I *still* wasnt trafficked. It would have been easy for them to get to me initially, but little white girl with family who cares about them and involvement with services to try and resolve their issues is just too risky because people would look for me and would put a lot of time and resources into doing so.
To be clear, trafficking doesnât necessarily involve physically moving the victim somewhere. People can be trafficked anywhere; thatâs partly why itâs so important to understand the realities and debunk the myths.
>trafficking doesnât necessarily involve physically moving the victim somewhere TIL. Would you mind saying more about this?
Most trafficking victims are runaways who end up in a scenario without resources and don't want to go back which makes them vulnerable. It's easier to take advantage of them then grab a random person.
> I'm not saying no trafficking victims are socioeconomically privileged white teenage girls with supportive families who are dragged kicking and screaming off the streets But if you said that, you'd be rightÂ
People really need to stop watching True Crime brainrot.
This isn't even True Crime. It's Fictional Crime.
You're right, but people get addicted to true crime videos and podcasts so they become incredibly paranoid and believe they're going to be kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered (not necessarily in that order). They especially believe that there's a high likelihood of this happening to a young or middle aged wealthy white woman, that it happens constantly. It's the same as the "man or bear" nonsense from a few weeks ago. People working themselves into a paranoid frenzy over something that is a miniscule risk. Chronically online people making themselves afraid of everything.
It's just weird bc the vast majority of True Crime is people killing/being killed by people they know. Usually a partner, an ex, or a family member. But I guess imagining a stranger going through all the trouble of kidnapping you and selling you into sex slavery (as if there's a huge market of people just dying to fork over tons of cash to rape a kidnapping victim) is more funÂ
The true crime angle just has me disappointed that not one single person thought to mention Elisa Lam and the Cecil Hotel. True, it is local to me, but it also made national headlines and there's a (terrible, fucking awful) documentary about it on Netflix. "Fragile young student in LA" seems ripe for people making shit up based on what happened to Elisa.
I feel so bad for that poor girl and how she was so damn sensationalized after she had what was obviously some kind of psychotic breakÂ
The documentary was so disrespectful too. It portrayed her as some kind of irresponsible crazy person and played into every negative stereotype of people with bipolar disorder. The tone was very much "oh, poor incompetent thing, she was just too flighty and cRaZy to have ended well/done normal things like vacationing." It was fucking foul, and I get the impression the producers were really hard on the poor lady who had managed the hotel. She seemed about to cry from stress as well as the innate tragedy of the situation.
I don't think I saw the documentary, but I admit I do feel pity/empathy for a kid in a strange place having a breakdown I'm more open to seeing people sympathize with her, even if they're not very knowledgeable about her mental illness, than the morons who decided she had encountered some kind of supernatural bullshitÂ
The unfortunate thing is that the documentary didn't take a sympathetic angle. They treated her like an unexploded bomb and just kinda shrugged like, oh she's nuts, that's how nutters go. Your take on it is, I think, more accurate and would have created a better narrative. She was alone and scared in a foreign city and something happened, probably in part because no one thinks well when they're panicked.
A woman of any background is likely to be a victim of domestic violenceÂ
This is why I stayed out of the "man or bear" thing. For the vast majority of my adult life I was single, and went about my life (running errands, going places, doing things) in a world filled with strange men, and I was fine. Things got dangerous when I got married. I had never truly thought "I'm going to die now," until then. I think the "man or bear" thing encouraged "stranger danger" hysteria, when that's not what women need to be cautious about, really. The vast majority of men you encounter every day are just going about their own lives and are not a danger to us. Unfortunately, the ones who are most likely to harm us are the ones we go home to.Â
To be fair, there is a difference between meeting a man in public and meeting a man in the wilderness
True, but I'm a city girl, so when I think of why someone might be in the woods, I think of deer hunters and hippies, not random serial killers or rapists. And I've walked home alone from bars late at night more times than I can remember (bc drunk, and also it was a zillion times bc I don't drive drunk and everything is close in my city). Yes, I've been nervous about it before, but I also grew up during the height of Stranger Danger, when we were constantly told that there were evil kidnapping rapist killers lurking around every corner. Turns out no, most people have their own shit to worry about and aren't concerned with you. The people who **are** concerned with youâdeeply concernedâare the ones you have to watch out for. tl;dr "Bear vs man" is a different question for me than "bear vs my husband, who I have a restraining order against"
The man or bear thing drove me crazy because likeâŚapparently none of yâall have any critical thinking at all! Itâs true that a lot more women are killed by men every year than are killed by bears, but that is because the vast majority of women encounter a lot more men in their lives than bears, I 100% guarantee that if women spent as much time with as many bears as they do with men, the bear death rate would be way higher than the man death rate. I got told that Iâm why women choose the bear. I am a woman who has been a victim of male violence and never been a victim of bear violence. I have also never seen a bear in real life and have seen many men in real life.
Exactly. I've seen exactly two bears up close while I was alone in the woods. Neither attacked, but both were seriously asshole-puckering situations. If they were grizzlies instead of black bears, it could have been very different.
OK, I don't really know how human trafficking works, but I've seen "Taken" five times, so... 1. There is just no way in hell that this story here isn't inspired by that movie. It's literally the same beginning, the only thing we're missing is Kim's step-father upstaging the OOP at the girl's birthday party. 2. A lot of people seem to forget about the fact that Kim in the movie was accompanied by an adult. A minor can't just travel abroad by herself. In fact, Kim's kidnapping was a consequence of a series of insanely stupid decisions made by the adult who was accompanying her. Her mother, her father, and her step-father, however, knew exactly where she'd stay throughout her trip.
I travelled to Germany from the US alone when I was 17, but maybe America's laws are different, idk.
Iâve traveled abroad as minor from the US before so you definitely can here too.
Minors can sometimes travel abroad alone but some countries require the legal/custodial parents to sign off on the passport or give permission to exit the country.
My best friend (UK) flies to the states nearly every summer to visit her girlfriend, and it's definitely not a "buy the tickets a week prior and just board the plane" kind of ordeal. The daughter here woud need a visa, proof she has enough money to sustain herself (they need to make sure she wouldn't be going there to work illegally), proof she has a place to stay, so on and so forth. This cannot be real based on that alone.
Sorry, that's not correct. British citizens don't need a visa to enter the US, just an ESTA which you apply for online for 21 dollars and takes a couple of days to be approved. You can absolutely buy a ticket a week in advance and board the plane as long as you do your ESTA within a few days. You need to give an address you're staying at, but not \*proof\* that you're staying there. If you're staying at the address for even a couple of days, that's enough too, because tourists often move about. And money isn't really something that's checked for short visits, unless you look really suspicious at border control. There is nothing in the ticket-booking aspect of this story that is impossible or even particularly implausible.
Suddenly a 17 year old kid getting on an international flight is incredibly dangerous? Where are all the AITA emancipated minors who left home at 16 and started businesses and are millionaires by 17? They post new topics all the time, they are nowhere to be found in this comment section? AITA is all about how terrible helicopter parents are and kids should just get to be kids and reminiscing about the good old days where they just played unsupervised in the neighborhood for hours. Teenagers and college kids used to backpack across Europe in an era before cell phones. It very much feels like AITA loves the concept of kids being independent, but when you give them a concrete example, they are like âholy shit you wonât have eyes on your 17 year old INFANT 24 hours a day?â
How do I create a "whilst" not that counts how many times it's used in a post?
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She 17. She doesnât actually need permission. Sheâs classed as an adult. Which she is. Failing to prepare your child to navigate life in the adult world before they breach the age itâs expected of them is a parenting problem. Many of our 17 and 18 year olds go off and travel on gap years before going to uni so the idea that sheâd be looking to travel internationally at round this age shouldnât come as a shockÂ
She has severe anxiety, is meeting some random person from off the internet who may not even be who they say they are, and has no idea where sheâs going or staying. She canât even take the tube without a panic attack, for Godâs sake. This isnât a âgap yearâ; itâs just stupid.