This is why we drive. Always. Even for a funeral. We'll be going to Hawaii at some point, but it's going to be a a freighter; freighters which carry passengers are a thing. I'd sooner ride the Big Dog than fly.

I'd drive to Hawaii if I could. (And I get carsick!)

Flying, which I used to love, and going to the airport, which I used to love (because of all the planes taking off and the people coming and going to and from exotic places) is now a thing I dread.

Flight attendants are now trained to spot child trafficking. If you expect airline attendants to watch for people transporting minors who don't look like a relative and be aware of warning signs such as staying very close to a child, a quiet child, or questionable touches, these things are going to happen.

"Flight attendants are now trained to spot child trafficking. "

Yeah, I wonder just how good that "training" is. I've been through human-trafficking training at work. The bulk of it consisted of how to spot trafficking in sleazy in-theater nightclubs. Since I don't spend any time in sleazy nightclubs, in-theater or otherwise, not much of it was applicable to me. Although sex trafficking happens, the idea that it is rampant in the U.S., and that lots of ordinary people are engaged in it, is a nanny-state paranoid fantasy.

And, once again, we have this: would the FA have reacted the same way if the parent was a woman? No way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that whatever training they received universally identified pedophiles and child abusers as always being male.

Bruce Schneier:

And, as I've written previously, "if you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/if_you_see_some.html

In this case, amateur policing.

Cousin Dave wrote:

Although sex trafficking happens, the idea that it is rampant in the U.S., and that lots of ordinary people are engaged in it, is a nanny-state paranoid fantasy.

Agreed. Although a good deal of blame should be laid to parents, who seem to see kiddie-diddlers wherever they go.

Earlier this year some loony mom became convinced her family was being stalked by child traffickers at IKEA, and it went viral on the Facebook pages of everyone who though the world was out to molest their kids.

http://nypost.com/2017/03/29/get-a-grip-crazy-moms-your-kids-wont-get-kidnapped-at-ikea/

The pedo police and the sex police are in overdrive. I was learning a technique about a month ago with a female Hap Ki Do instructor, and when she tried to throw me, I automatically reached out to steady myself and accidentally put my hand halfway on her boob. I moved my hand immediately, and neither of us mentioned anything.

I suppose for that, I should have been kicked out of the school and crucified like Christ himself.

Sometimes, a man's hand near his son's genitals -- not ON them, even -- is just that, and nothing more, gay or straight.

I'm sure an actual pedo's sexual orientation is MONSTER, not hetero or homo, anyway.

I automatically reached out to steady myself and accidentally put my hand halfway on her boob. I moved my hand immediately, and neither of us mentioned anything.

And you can only imagine the awkward positions we end up in (accidentally and on purpose) for BJJ. I have violated all my teammates and they me, by this point.

And I've seen parents grab their kids by the seat of their pants to prevent them from running off.

Context matters a LOT and the ability to assess risk is often over-ridden by the desire to invent risk, these days.

This is a "man" thing. Just ask the guys who have been forced to move their seat so they wouldn't end up sitting next to a child.

So, it's not just a "gay" thing.

So, human traffickers transport their victims singly on expensive airline flights rather than use a van or truck and drive them en masse? They'd rather risk the victim making a scene in a crowded airport and getting by the TSA and busy-body flight attendants?

Especially a flight from from Newark, NJ to Raleigh, NC. That's an eight-hour drive.

==============================

I wonder how much flak United would be taking if it had been a real kidnapping and the flight attendants had let it go. Would these same parents be suing United for negligence? Would there be an uproar demanding that flight attendants be given even more training on spotting trafficking?

==============================

Why did CNN find it necessary to identify Henry Amador-Batten as "a gay father" at the beginning of the article?

Are they implying homophobia on the part of the flight attendant? References to Henry's husband later in the article and the statement by the attorney suffice to give that information to the reader, if it's even necessary information for the reader to have.

==============================

Bruce Schneier makes an interesting point in one of his earlier articles (linked in IRA Darth Aggie's link), "...the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more-realistic threat assessment."

The flight attendant informs the police. Escalation. The monkey has been transferred. The flight attendant now doesn't have to worry about losing her job if it turned out to be a real kidnaping and she had said nothing. She's free to catch her next flight or go home. It's somebody else's problem now.

Fortunately for Henry Amador-Batten, the officer chose not to escalate and instead resolved the issue. Fortunately for the officer, this turned out not to be a kidnapping and he's not as famous for incompetence as John Balcerzak (the officer who returned Dahmer's victim to him)

This is a "man" thing. Just ask the guys who have been forced to move their seat so they wouldn't end up sitting next to a child.

Oh, don't throw me in that briar patch of not being around children on an airplane or train!

Why did CNN find it necessary to identify Henry Amador-Batten as "a gay father" at the beginning of the article?

Because they cant admit it is a guy thing. Its OK in today's climate to hate men, just not gay men

This has nothing to do with "the notion that gay parents are pedophiles" or "a way to engage in plausibly deniable gay hatred." This has to do with the middle-age, stocky, gray-bearded Amador-Batten being mistaken for a middle-age, heterosexual, cisgender white man in possession of small, cute child of color.

In the world of liberals, progressives and PC social justice warriors:
Whether or not investigations of middle-age men with their hands on small children's laps is "mean-spirited and completely unacceptable" depends on who each of those men turns out to be. The United flight attendants probably didn't realize that Amador-Batten is a gay co-parent. If he'd been a straight man the whole event might have been considered unfortunate but understandable. If he'd been wearing a MAGA hat... well, then it would be good for the flight attendants to err in favor of the safety of the child.

This is a "man" thing. Just ask the guys who have been forced to move their seat so they wouldn't end up sitting next to a child.

So, it's not just a "gay" thing.

Jay R at May 30, 2017 1:52 PM

________________________________________

And in the case of American Airlines last year, that would have been a very good move indeed. You'd think at the least, since the man was likely smelling of alcohol, they would have moved the GIRL to another seat - there were plenty of available seats, which should have made his refusal to move all the more suspicious. Now they're facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/oregon-man-pleads-guilty-groping-13-year-old-girl-flight-article-1.2951246

And, according to Oregon Live, since he's already been in jail for almost 11 months since the attack, this month, he was "placed on home detention for six months while he participates in an outpatient treatment program for severe opiate addiction and alcohol abuse...

"The 11 months in jail is the longest amount of time Camp has been in custody. It's also the longest period that he's been completely clean and sober, his lawyer said."

He also has to register as as a sex offender for 15 years.

And, from last June at the Washington Post (on the same case):

fundy.13
6/20/2016 9:58 AM EDT
All of these men complaining that they were made to feel like pedophiles when they were asked to move seats is ridiculous. Last year on an international flight I was asked to move seats because the airline had seated me next to a little boy flying on his own. I ended up not having to because there was already an empty seat next to another unaccompanied minor (a boy about the same age as the one I was seated next to) and the airline sat them together. Not once did I think "they're treating me like a criminal!" Additionally, this sort of thing doesn't happen to just men, I'm a married woman in my twenties and they still asked me to move seats.

(end)

And if anyone wants to know why, after trying to push his hands away, the girl didn't just scream, remember that she's young and was likely terrified; how was she to know he wouldn't have tried to kill her if she had screamed?

Conan: "So, human traffickers transport their victims singly on expensive airline flights rather than use a van or truck and drive them en masse?"

Airline flights? Probably not in a made-for-TV melodrama in which the victim is an intelligent, resourceful young feminist daughter of a poor Romanian family, lured by the prospect of a high paying career in America, then drugged, transported from Eastern Europe to Mexico in a cargo container full of teenage girls, and then smuggled across the Southern U.S. border in the back of a plain white van by ugly Mexican coyotes.

"So, human traffickers transport their victims singly on expensive airline flights?"
Yes, of course. Maybe not "expensive" airline flights. But it's certainly faster and more cost effective to transport a woman or teenage girl or young child, say from Seattle to L.A., or Portland to Miami, in a cheap seat on a passenger plane. Duh.

As for the question of why the victims don't make a scene in public... when we're talking about small children, that's just a stupid question. But if you want, maybe you could ask Shasta Groene, Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Tanya Kach, Steven Stayner, or Elizabeth Thomas why they didn't make a scene when out in public.

As for American victims of sex trafficking, mostly they're not jumped in some mall parking lot, chloroformed and carried away in the back of a van. Usually they're very young, naive, stupid, gullible, ignorant, mentally ill, developmentally delayed, autistic, lured, defrauded, groomed, coerced, blackmailed, intimidated or in situations where they're scared shitless and don't think they have any better options. They don't realize the nature of the situation they're in until they're in way over their heads, and not smart enough think of a way out. Many of those who do get their shit together enough to try to find a way out overestimate the motivation of authorities and other strangers to help them and quickly learn better.

Cousin Dave: "Although sex trafficking happens, the idea that it is rampant in the U.S., and that lots of ordinary people are engaged in it, is a nanny-state paranoid fantasy."

It's interesting how two people can have two extremely different views of the same issue: for example you, who probably wouldn't notice a sex trafficking victim if half a dozen of them sat at the table next to you at McDonalds unless they were wearing ho costumes, versus me, who probably also wouldn't notice half a dozen of them sitting next to me at McDonalds but deals with them every day at work.

I suspect neither of our perspectives is completely accurate and the truth is somewhere in between.

The training I had to take at work focused more on recognizing the situation, than trying to pick out a victim by sight. As I said, it focused mainly on in-theater sleazy bars and go-go clubs. There was nothing in the training that would apply to ordinary everyday America.

"Although sex trafficking happens, the idea that it is rampant in the U.S., and that lots of ordinary people are engaged in it, is a nanny-state paranoid fantasy."

How much do you want there to be?
Augusta, GA reported two arrests of female traffickers of Asian descent earlier this year. They are said initially to have controlled about a dozen girls.
Non-black Lives Don't Matter, anyone?