The Office of Human Trafficking, 1

From a short story I am working on that was inspired by a NY Times article about a wave of child abductions occurring in China. I thought it would be interesting to transpose the whole thing to America and play with the absurdity and tragedy of it:

---

Some of the children are thought to be sold to buyers in Canada, Mexico, or even Jamaica. However, parents of abducted children who have investigated the matter say that most are purchased domestically by rural families in other parts of the country--places like Iowa, Idaho, and Appalachia. With the country in the grips of a harsh recession, the sale of stolen children is becoming a thriving business, they say.

"Yeah, I know a guy who can get you a kid for maybe five, six thou," said Jackson Nash, 52, a carpenter from Wisconsin. "Friend of a friend. I hear about it all the time. Dunno what they use the kids for, could be anything. Heard a lot of different rumors. Some say they're using the kids to work in the meth labs out here. Others say its cheaper and safer to buy some kids to be the farm-hands than to hire them immigrant workers. Get to work em for years, ain't even got to pay em so long as everybody thinks they're you're kid. Also heard about this group over in the Dakotas that're buying up these kids to turn em into a militia, take back the country from the liberals and United Nations. You know, heard a lot of things. Can't say I really know for sure why or what's going on."

Even the extent of the problem is debated. According to law enforcement authorities, the children are simply runaways. All of them. The White House insists there are fewer than 1,000 cases of human trafficking per year--a figure which they say includes not just children but pregnant women, old men, and people in wheelchairs. But advocates for abducted children say there may be hundreds of thousands across the nation, perhaps even millions.

Samuel Montgomery, 29, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of nearly 2,000 children in and around Cleveland who have disappeared in the last two years alone. None of the children in his database had been recovered. "It's like looking for a gold fish in the Marianas Trench," he said as he pasted up posters. “It’s like digging for a single needle in a haystack the size of the planet Earth." The posters featured the word missing in all caps above crudely-photocopied pictures of his son's face.

According to rumors, the older children, less in demand on the market, can end up as prostitutes or virtual slaves. Some of the children begging or busking in major US cities are believed to be in the employ of the very criminal gangs that abducted them. Rumors also persist of a new blood sport gaining popularity in underground rural clubs, a form of dog fighting that does not involve dogs. “I don't want to even think about what happens to those kids,” Mr. Garofalo said, tearing up. "I like to think my son's been bought by a lonely rich couple looking for a kid to take care of them in their old age."