We’re all familiar with the story of the Pied Piper, yes?
If you’re not, here’s a synopsis. A man wanders into Hamelin, a German town. The townspeople pay him to get rid of the rats, which he does successfully using music. He expects payment. But, alas, the townspeople are dicks and they don’t pay him what they owe him. So, the man steals their children and vanishes.
It’s not known if the story is based on true events. It first appeared in Hamelin around the time of the Great Plague, although the events took place in the 1280s.
Why am I talking about the Pied Piper anyway? Because of something going on in our nation’s capital. No, not the toxic dumpster fire that is Der Trumpenfuherer, but 14 young women and a number of young men went missing in a 24 hour period, with even more missing since February. 25 young women and men, just vanished. All minors. As of last night 14 teenagers are still missing.
These young women are black and Latino and are from working-class neighborhoods in the District. Until this week, very few media outlets paid any attention to this. A Townhall on Wednesday evening was tense.
It’s tough for me, given the rumors that these young people are being trafficked, not to see some parallels between the story of the Pied Piper and what’s happening in Washington D.C. There are some interpretations of the Pied Piper’s story that end up with the children in sex slavery. See William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire and the accounts of the Children’s Crusade, which ended very badly for those children who joined it, although those accounts too may be apocryphal.
The District’s police don’t think there’s a Pied Piper sweeping the city, stealing young people and selling them off into sexual slavery. They attribute the increase to a program that tracks each missing child on social media. I wonder if the program’s start is in response to the disappearance of Relisha Rudd in 2014. Relisha has never been recovered and the initial effort to find her was disgraceful.
There’s also the case of a District police officer who did this:
A former D.C. police officer was sentenced to prison Thursday after pleading guilty to charges that he recruited and arranged dates for several local teenage girls to engage in prostitution.
And there’s also the serial killer who stalked Princeton Place in the 90s, who killed with impunity because his victims were destitute and black (as was he).
So it’s understandable why people in the community think these missing people are being trafficked, not to mention that missing black and Latino women do not get nearly the media attention that missing white women do. This pattern in media has been evident for many decades—even in similar cases occurring at the same time. You all know about Scott Peterson and his wife and unborn son. You probably don’t know anything about Latoyia Figueroa of Chester PA (whose case spawned the term “missing white woman syndrome” ---even Michelle Malkin noticed and was surprisingly not a jerk about it) or Evelyn Hernandez---a pregnant woman whose remains were also found in San Francisco Bay. She went missing with her five-year old son at roughly the same time as Scott Peterson’s wife. He has not been located, and to my knowledge, her murder has not been solved. Even when one googles “Who Killed Evelyn Hernandez?” guess what comes up? A huge link to Wikipedia’s page on the murder of Laci Peterson.
It’s hard not to believe that if these young people had been white, there’d be wall-to-wall coverage not to mention commentary from the horror show occupying the West Wing.
Incidentally (from NBC Washington):
According to local police data, the number of missing child cases in the District dropped from 2,433 in 2015 to 2,242 in 2016. The highest total recently, 2,610, was back in 2001.
The police need not to blow these off as runaways---it’s basically what they’re doing now. The community seems to believe they’re being trafficked. It’s on the police to prove this true or not-true. Is there a Pied Piper stalking the District? Or not? And if they’re runaways, why is no one locating them, and then addressing the conditions that cause them to be runaways?