Mom Sues Southwest After Being Accused Of Trafficking Her Daughter

Mary MacCarthy says they were targeted for being a multiracial family.

The thing about moral panics is that no matter how noble one’s cause or sincere their intent, once they get caught up in a panic or hysteria, they stop thinking clearly and they make mistakes. Often very bad mistakes that end up screwing with the lives of innocent people.

A woman has filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines over a 2021 incident in which an employee of the Airline flagged her as a possible child sex trafficker simply for traveling with her biracial daughter.

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Mary MacCarthy, who is white, was traveling with her 10-year-old daughter from their home in California to Colorado for her brother’s funeral after he died the previous night. As soon as they landed, MacCarthy and her daughter were approached by the Denver police and interrogated about the suspected “human trafficking” on the damn jet bridge. They weren’t arrested, but they were sure as hell both traumatized.

MacCarthy believes that the employee targeted her “on a racist assumption about a mixed‐race family” and is suing the airline for racial discrimination. While Southwest is not commenting at this time, the employee previously told police that there were a number of other equally innocuous reasons for why they thought it was a good idea to alert the police.

Via Washington Post:

As The Post previously reported, MacCarthy said in a letter to Southwest at the time that she and her daughter had to catch a connecting flight in San Jose, and by the time the pair boarded the flight to Denver, it was so full they could not sit together. So they asked other passengers whether any would be willing to trade seats, and they were eventually able to sit next to each other.

According to a police report filed at the time, an unnamed flight attendant began to suspect possible human trafficking for several reasons. She told police that MacCarthy and her daughter were the last passengers to board the plane and that MacCarthy was “demanding” she sit next to her daughter. The flight attendant also alleged that MacCarthy did not speak to her daughter during the flight and found it “odd” that she did not allow the girl to speak to the flight crew, the report stated. So she flagged it to her higher-ups.

How strange that a mother would want to sit next to her 10-year-old daughter on a flight! Whoever heard of such a thing, except literally any person who has ever been on a plane before, especially on Southwest where they don’t have assigned seating. Also very weird that people on their way to a funeral after the sudden death of a family member might not be especially chatty.

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Here is the criteria that airline employees are meant to look out for as signs of human trafficking — while some seem reasonable enough, others are entirely innocuous things that apply to many people who are definitely not doing any human trafficking. Particularly those of us who are terrified of air travel.

Traveler is unable to provide details regarding their location of departure and/or flight information and/or destination

Traveler has someone speaking for him/her

Traveler is an adult and is not carrying their own identification documents

Traveler does not have any personal luggage

Traveler is not appropriately dressed for travel and/or their destination

Traveler shows signs of physical abuse

Traveler exhibits fear, anxiety, depression, submission, tension, nervousness and/or avoids eye contact

A group of people, or an individual, traveling for an unrealistic/vague/suspicious job offer

A person buying plane tickets with cash instead of credit or debit card; particularly take note if this individual is buying a large number of one-way tickets

However, it is worth noting that none of these warning signs are “belonging to a mixed-race family.”

A similar incident happened a few years ago when Cindy McCain was traveling and her “gut” told her that she was witnessing a human trafficking incident right there at the airport before her very eyes.

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“I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted — it looked odd — it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me. … I went over to the police and told them what I saw and they went over and questioned her and, by God, she was trafficking that kid,” McCain told KTAR TV at the time, later adding that she “found out” that the woman was waiting for the man who bought the child to arrive on his flight.

If you are thinking “Why on earth would seasoned criminals be doing this kind of exchange at the airport?” you are a bit more swift than Cindy McCain. As it turned out, she did not find out any such thing and that child was not being trafficked.

It’s all well and good that people are concerned about child sex trafficking, coercive sex trafficking of adults and labor trafficking in general. Where it becomes a problem is when people get hysterical and see it everywhere or when they ignore the actual, very depressing reality of how trafficking actually occurs in favor of narratives with more dramatic flair. Or when they conflate voluntary sex work with “sex trafficking.”

It’s not entirely dissimilar to the “stranger danger” hysteria of the 1980s, which — though well-intentioned — obscured the fact that kids are actually far more likely to be harmed by someone they know.

This is also the case with the vast majority of child sex trafficking. Most trafficked children are trafficked in their local communities by their parents, foster parents or others they know personally, rather than getting dramatically abducted in Walmart parking lots and whisked away to Denver, Colorado. Many are LGBTQ+ kids who have been thrown out of their homes by their parents. Many are immigrants who cannot turn to police for fear of deportation — which is the case for most labor trafficking as well. Quite frankly, a better social safety net, the decriminalization of sex work and better pathways to citizenship would all do a whole lot more to combat child sex trafficking than any “If you see something, say something!” nonsense ever could.