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The Child Snatcher(s) (Child Abductor Trope / Meme): UL?

James_H said:
I just heard a bit of lore first-hand. As I posted on another thread, stolen children being forced to work as beggars is a large-scale problem in China. I was just talking to a colleague of mine here in Hong Kong who has a two year old son, she won't go to mainland China with him because she fears for his safety. Helicopter parenting is the norm in Hong Kong but perhaps her concerns are legitimate.

Anyway, she told me a story about how she was in a park (in Hong Kong) and a woman approached her and started asking her questions about her son. She (the mother) ran away, because she was afraid that the woman might be a child-thief who had a knock-out chemical on her skin or a spray of some kind that she could use to incapacitate her (the parent) while making off with her son. To me this is classic UL stuff (she also told me a FOAF about someone getting their kidneys stolen in Shenzhen after going to the toilet alone, which is a common story in Hong Kong) but there are stories all over the world of people using mysterious knock-out chemicals to perpetrate robbings, rapes etc (see stories about scopolamine use in Colombia, etc), so who knows?
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Although I have never met the family myself, friends of my wife's friend had their four-year-old daughter kidnapped in China while on holiday with her grandmother. If that sounds like a tenuous link, I can assure you this is not an urban myth. She was taken when the grandmother went to the lavatory and police believe they were probably being followed for some time. I do have a few more details (not many), but I won't be posting them.

This occurred last year and despite consulate assistance and a police investigation no lead or information has ever arisen and the family assume she is dead. I didn't say as much, but perhaps this is a coping strategy as it may be better than some of the alternatives. Kidnapping statistics in China look high because the huge population means that even infrequent phenomena are multiplied up, but the abduction of children is still a major issue in China: the figures I've read suggest anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 are taken annually (no figure is reliable). The popular narrative is that regular Chinese people have learnt over the last century or so that it never pays to put your head over the parapet and will turn away and ignore even blatantly suspicious or criminal behaviour in public rather that risk getting involved. I don't have enough experience of China to confirm or deny this thesis, although it does remind me of the cases where drivers who have knocked down cyclists or pedestrians then try to kill their victims as the law requires the guilty party to pay potentially-lifelong medical expenses to his victim (I hope I'm getting that right): great pressures on malleable materials bring about grotesque forms.

Edit: just had a Google. The kidnapping hasn't been reported in any English-language media.

Edit2: wife has just corrected me, she was six, not four.
 
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Yithian said:
although it does remind me of the cases where drivers who have knocked down cyclists or pedestrians then try to kill their victims as the law requires the guilty party to pay potentially-lifelong medical expenses to his victim (I hope I'm getting that right): great pressures on malleable materials bring about grotesque forms.
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I've heard this a few times too.
 
Indian police have arrested 16 people after two men became the latest victims of hysteria over WhatsApp rumours of child kidnappers.

The men had stopped to ask directions in north-eastern Assam state when they were beaten to death by a large mob.

Rumours of child kidnappings are spreading across India over WhatsApp, and have already led to the deaths of six other people in the past month.

Police say it is proving hard to debunk the messages on social media.

Deaths linked to WhatsApp rumours
April: A man in the southern state of Tamil Nadu is beaten to death by a mob after he is seen aimlessly wandering the streets

May:
  • A 55-year old woman in Tamil Nadu is lynched for giving sweets to children; police arrest 30 people
  • A man in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh is lynched for speaking Hindi and not the local language, Telugu
  • A man in neighbouring Telengana is killed by a mob while entering a mango orchard at night
  • Another man in Telengana is lynched when visiting a village to see his relatives
  • A man in the southern city of Bangalore is tied up with rope and beaten to death with cricket bats, allegedly for distributing chocolates to children
June: Two men are lynched in north-eastern Assam after stopping their car to ask for directions


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44435127
 
Tribble said:
Indian police have arrested 16 people after two men became the latest victims of hysteria over WhatsApp rumours of child kidnappers.

The men had stopped to ask directions in north-eastern Assam state when they were beaten to death by a large mob.

Rumours of child kidnappings are spreading across India over WhatsApp, and have already led to the deaths of six other people in the past month.

Police say it is proving hard to debunk the messages on social media.

Deaths linked to WhatsApp rumours
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Five more lynched.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44678674
 
More lynchings.

Rumour of child snatchers spread via WhatsApp has taken another life in Bidar district of Karnataka. A 32-year-old Google software engineer was beaten to death and three others, including a Qatari national, critically injured by a mob which suspected they were a group of “child lifters”.

WhatsApp rumours warning villagers of child lifters has taken more than a dozen lives across India since May. The Bidar incident is latest in the series of killings.

Mohammed Azam Ahmed of Malakpet in Hyderabad, who works with Google as a software engineer, died on the spot, while a Qatari national, Salham Eidal Kubaisi (38), and Noor Mohammed and Mohammed Salman from Barkas in Hyderabad suffered critical injuries and were admitted to the Bidar Government hospital initially before being shifted to Hyderabad.

An official from the Aurad Police Station, in whose area the lynching took place, told the Indian Express that three WhatsApp administrators who circulated the photos and messages that the four men were child kidnappers have been arrested. “We have also arrested 30 people who were part of the mob,’’ the official said.

Kubaisi’s wife Zaibunnisa told the Indian Express that the four had set off from Hyderabad Friday morning to meet a relative at Bidar and attend a social function. After the function, they were en route to see a piece of land which they were interested in purchasing.

“When they stopped for tea near a school at Murki village in Aurad taluka at about 4.30 pm, they saw school children heading home. Salham started handing out foreign chocolates, which he was carrying, to students. However, someone raised an alarm that strangers were luring kids with chocolates and people started gathering immediately,” she said.

https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/15/whatsapp-lynching-again-google-engineer-killed-in-karnataka/
 
WhatsApp is taking some limited action, may not be enough. The least it could do is permanently ban the groups and individuals who have forwarded these false claims.

WhatsApp has said it will limit how many times messages can be forwarded in India, to curb the spread of false information on its platform.

The announcement comes after a spate of mob lynchings were linked to messages that circulated on WhatsApp groups.

The government on Thursday reissued a warning to the company that it could face legal consequences if it remained a "mute spectator".

With more than 200 million users, India is WhatsApp's biggest market.

WhatsApp said its users in India "forward more messages, photos, and videos, than any other country in the world".

Groups on WhatsApp can have a maximum of 256 people. Many of the messages that are believed to have triggered violence were forwarded to multiple groups which had more than 100 members each.

In a blog published on its website, the company announced that it was "launching a test to limit forwarding that will apply to everyone using WhatsApp".

For Indian users, however, the forwarding option will be limited even further. A WhatsApp spokesperson for India told the BBC that this means a single person would be able to forward one message only five times.

However, this does not stop other members from a group from forwarding the message to a further five chats of their own.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44897714
 
Interesting quote in the FT 371 article on this from a neuropsychologist about how the herd mentality invents paedophile rumours (or child abduction for body parts, as the Indian rumours) which everyone joins in with because if you don't, you become a suspect yourself, and may, well, be murdered, to put it bluntly. He says it's an Indian phenomenon, but I'm not so sure, this blind adherence to superstition and mistrust to bolster one's standing in the "herd" can appear in any human society. Don't ask me what to do about it - but not murdering people is a start.
 
There was an interesting report on the BBC News website yesterday about how fast "fake news" and false rumour is spreading now around various countries thanks to suckers, er, people sharing them on social media. Read that and you'll see how relevant it is, i.e. very. It's leading to quite a few deaths.
 
GNC said:
There was an interesting report on the BBC News website yesterday about how fast "fake news" and false rumour is spreading now around various countries thanks to suckers, er, people sharing them on social media. Read that and you'll see how relevant it is, i.e. very. It's leading to quite a few deaths.
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People have been burning each other due to rumours since long before mobile phones. Social media may facilitate or speed up the process, but it's not the root cause.
 
No, but it's certainly making it this year's popular pastime.
 
I suppose people see Facebook as an extension of their personality, they just react and post whatever's on the top of their mind. They don't really process the fact that it's Out There open to the world. with quickly-gathering, wide implications and effects. I notice there's no mention there that she phoned the police first (or even phoned the police at all). As though consciously or subconsciously she saw alerting people via facebook as good as phoning the police. And maybe the poor woman panicked and didn't have the calm rationality to think 'is this true or not?' because of the emotive subject matter. I think it's a bit much if people are being awful to her about it (they'd be the first to throw things if it turned out to be true, and she hadn't said anything). Who among us hasn't repeated a FOAF tale and only realised later what guff it was?

tldr: I guess it's surprising it doesn't happen more often.
 
It's the summer holidays, FFS. For the next six weeks, our existences will be...enlivened...by the sounds of children shrieking. If every instance is accompanied by a Facebook panic, it's going to be an interesting season.

As an aside, who else remarked on the fact that a crowd gathered from as far away as Sunderland? I'm irresistibly reminded of the "Brian Potter" quote from Phoenix Nights:

"I've not seen them this excited since they printed that paedophile's address in t' paper."

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
It's the summer holidays, FFS. For the next six weeks, our existences will be...enlivened...by the sounds of children shrieking.
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I actually can recall my Dad, back when we were nippers, stepping into the garden, calmly gathering us around, and telling us (or rather my little sister and her friend) to NEVER full-on scream and screech, unless there was a genuine reason to do so. I remember it clearly because he wasn't annoyed or angry, just very very serious and firm - as opposed to it being the usual frustrated-parent-at-the-end-of-their-tether routine begging/threatening us to turn it down a notch. He wasn't talking about yelling, shouting, or kids being kids, he was talking about SCREEEEAMING and screeching. He told us it was basically "crying wolf".

Now I don't have kids, and I'm not particularly child-friendly, but I can understand entirely why he pulled us up that day, and it sets my teeth on edge when I hear kids, I'm assuming little girls, screaming full-on whilst apparently playing.
To me, it's a parenting issue - how the hell can anyone just let their kids make that sort of row without their blood running cold ? On more than one occasion I've had to force myself not to jump over a hedge and demand "Where's the murder?" or ask some half-wit how he's going to know when one of his kids really is being taken by a monster if she screams like that when playing. I think we can all imagine how that would look, and how it would probably turn out for me!

Noisy kids definitely piss me off, and I'm a miserable old git, but screaming kids unsettle me - exactly how Nature intended, I imagine. Ferchrissakes parents, teach your spawn to save the screams and screeches for a day which will hopefully never come - and maybe if the unthinkable happens, someone like me won't hesitate to leap to their assistance without risking crashing into and breaking up an innocent but rowdy Wendy-house party.
 
Another case in India.

A pregnant woman has been beaten by people who suspected her of kidnapping a child in the Indian capital Delhi.

Police told the BBC that the woman, 25, was in a stable condition and that three people had been arrested.

It is the latest incident in a wave of attacks fuelled by rumours of child kidnapping in the capital and neighbouring states.

Last year, a similar spate of attacks saw several people beaten and killed over rumours of child kidnappings.

Footage of the incident shows the woman surrounded by a group of people. They can be heard accusing her of kidnapping children and beating her.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49547919
 
The "kidnapper in a white van" panic is spreading like crazy again in the USA and Europe. Thanks to, of course, Facebook and other social media.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/04/tech/facebook-white-vans/index.html

And now, it's possibly led to someone's death.

Nazario Garcia was gunned down Sunday in his white work van.

Before the shooting, police say the brothers’ mother, Gjuandell Effinger, sent a video on social media -- claiming the occupant of a white van with the same tag number as Garcia had tried to abduct her from the parking lot of a nearby Walmart.

Investigators say there’s “no evidence to support an attempted abduction.”

https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2019...ings-about-white-vans-before-deadly-shooting/
 
Another disturbing case in India.

More than 100 people have been arrested for allegedly beating three men to death in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

The incident happened in Palghar district on Thursday but a video of the attack went viral on Sunday. Reports say the men, who were reportedly mistaken for thieves, were going to a funeral when the mob dragged them out of their car.nAmong the dead are two Hindu godmen and their driver.

The viral video shows the mob lynching the men as police struggled to rescue them. The mob reportedly suspected that the men were child abductors.

Attacks over child abduction rumours have happened in the past in different parts of the country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52350728
 
Another lynching in Mexico.

A Mexican political advisor has been killed by a lynch mob after child kidnapping accusations were spread on messaging groups, authorities say.

Daniel Picazo, 31, was attacked and beaten by a crowd of around 200 people in the central state of Puebla. He had been visiting the town of Papatlazolco when he was cornered by the mob, before being dragged into a local field and set on fire. Local officials called the attack an act of "barbarism".

Mr Picazo was visiting his grandfather's house in the town when rumours began to spread on local WhatsApp group chats that he had been involved in the kidnapping of a child. According to local media, the mob then cornered and attacked Mr Picazo and his two companions, before dragging him to a local field.

Police attempted to intervene and placed him in a patrol car, but were quickly overwhelmed by villagers, who doused Mr Picazo in petrol before setting him alight. His body was later recovered by authorities.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61794986
 
ramonmercado said:
Another lynching in Mexico.

A Mexican political advisor has been killed by a lynch mob after child kidnapping accusations were spread on messaging groups, authorities say.

Daniel Picazo, 31, was attacked and beaten by a crowd of around 200 people in the central state of Puebla. He had been visiting the town of Papatlazolco when he was cornered by the mob, before being dragged into a local field and set on fire. Local officials called the attack an act of "barbarism".

Mr Picazo was visiting his grandfather's house in the town when rumours began to spread on local WhatsApp group chats that he had been involved in the kidnapping of a child. According to local media, the mob then cornered and attacked Mr Picazo and his two companions, before dragging him to a local field.

Police attempted to intervene and placed him in a patrol car, but were quickly overwhelmed by villagers, who doused Mr Picazo in petrol before setting him alight. His body was later recovered by authorities.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61794986
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hard to like that one what happened to the sad icon?
 
Tribble said:
Child abduction panic in NE England. Kids hear screaming, seem to extrapolate a kidnapping from it, tell mother, mother posts to Facebook, goes viral, eventually gets disproved.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/any-mother-would-same-woman-16621983
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Someone(s) was posting memes (well, the literal noncomedic sort) like that on Facebook for a while for my state. The posts weren't edits; they were made by accounts that seemed fairly developed at a glance; but those accounts would usually no longer exist after a while. Meanwhile, those live posts would also be screenshotted and shared (not sure if that was part of the originator's actions, or just something people do, but it would lengthen their life on the site).
The accounts were invariably "someone had [urban legend car-marking/suspect encounters with strangers] happen to them! The police said there's trafficking there!" and none of it seemed at all true.
 
Junopsis said:
Someone(s) was posting memes (well, the literal noncomedic sort) like that on Facebook for a while for my state. The posts weren't edits; they were made by accounts that seemed fairly developed at a glance; but those accounts would usually no longer exist after a while. Meanwhile, those live posts would also be screenshotted and shared (not sure if that was part of the originator's actions, or just something people do, but it would lengthen their life on the site).
The accounts were invariably "someone had [urban legend car-marking/suspect encounters with strangers] happen to them! The police said there's trafficking there!" and none of it seemed at all true.
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'Trafficking' seems to be the abduction equivalent of 'demons'. Everywhere, until you actually look into it.
 
Another real life case.

After nine long years, 16-year-old Pooja Gaud is finally able to rest her head on her mother's lap.

Pooja went missing on 22 January 2013 when she was seven years old. She says she was picked up from outside her school in Mumbai city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra by a couple who lured her with an ice-cream.

On 4 August, she was found in what is being described as "a miraculous escape". Her mother, Poonam Gaud, says she is over the moon with happiness.

"I had given up hope of ever finding my daughter. But the gods have been kind to me," she says.

Police have alleged that the child was kidnapped by Harry D'Souza and his wife, Soni D'Souza, because the couple didn't have a child of their own. They have arrested Mr D'Souza.

Before she went missing, Pooja lived with her two brothers and parents in a small house in a suburban slum area.

On the day she went missing, she had left for school with her elder brother, but the two had a fight and her brother went into the school leaving her behind as he was running late. That's when the couple allegedly took her away, promising to buy her an ice-cream.

Pooja says that the couple initially took her to Goa and then Karnataka, states in western and southern India, and would threaten to hurt her if she cried or drew attention to herself.

She says she was allowed to attend school for a short while, but after the couple had a child of their own, she was pulled out of school and they all shifted to Mumbai.

Pooja says the abuse got worse after the baby was born.

"They would beat me with a belt, kick me, punch me. One time they beat me with a rolling pin so badly that my back began to bleed. I was also made to do chores at home and work in 12 to 24 hour-long jobs outside."

The house where D'Souza's lived was quite close to her family's - but, she says, she was unfamiliar with the roads, was always watched and had no money or phone, and she couldn't reach out for help or try to find her way home.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62593230
 
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