9 Year old's question "Why do they kidnap children?"?

“They do it so that the parents of that child will pay big money to get the child back.”
Simple.

Who, the US border authorities?

You tell them there are cruel people in this world. There are many reasons why people kidnap children and none of them are nice.

You then tell the children you will do everything you can to protect them. This is also a time when they need to learn a safe word. Only people who know the safe word are allowed to take them when you aren’t there.

There are a myriad of reasons.
One of them is organ harvesting.

I agree with the money answer. That’s what I was told as a kid. Added in was that rich people were usually the targets, so it’s very unlikely anything would ever happen, but bad people can make mistakes so children should never go anywhere with someone they don’t know and never believe someone if they say mommy or grandma told them to pick them up. I was told Mommy or daddy will ALWAYS tell me when someone else is coming to pick you up.

Side note: when I was a kid my mom didn’t let me wear anything with my name on it. She felt it was a risk that if a stranger knew my name I would be more tempted to believe they knew he or my parents.

Well they can kidnap anyone.

When my daughter was about seven she asked that question.
I told her they raised the kids to be sold for slaves.
True, in many cases.

Because they are physically weak, and generally naive to their surroundings.

He apparently saw a report about “trafficing” and doesn’t know what it means.

Gawd, what a horrible thing to have to explain, or even avoid explaining.

If he’s worried about it, maybe you can tell him done children don’t have families to protect them, but he does, he has lots of family, and do he doesn’t have to worry.

If he is just trying to understand it, I guess you can say there are bad people who take children, because they want them to work for no pay, which is against the law.

@JLeslie good answer.

Sorry for all the typos. I’m glad my answer helped. Hard to know what’s right to say to children when they ask these types of questions. I hope your grandson hasn’t stayed stuck on the bad thoughts of what he heard.

Maybe start by asking him why he thinks they kidnap children. You’ll have a better idea of where he’s coming from.

So kidnappers will ask the kidnapped child’s parents to give them a big amount of money to get the parents’ child back. Or to kill :( them sell their body parts and get money. Also just selling them to people as servants. Kidnappers are so greedy of money.

^^ You don’t have kids, do you @GalaXian. No one in their right mind would tell a kid that a kidnapper would kill them and sell their body parts. That’s just terrifyingly gross AND it’s not true.

It is horrible to tell children, but Dutch, sometimes it is true. Black market organs are big business.

I realized after I posted that the person was probably referring to internal organs and I’m sure that’s possible.

But what, exactly, is telling a child something so brutally graphic supposed to accomplish? While you’re at it, describe the sex trade in detail, too.

We have these traditional children’s stories here about children meeting a brutal end due to them misbehaving.
There is the one about the child that likes to play with fire, and ends up burning himself to a crisp.
The one about the kid that stares into the air all the time and then falls off a cliff.
The one about the kid that sucks on his thumbs too much, and gets them cut off with scissors.
So telling kids they will get dismembered by the organ mafia when they run off, is just following established tradition.

Hansel and Gretel comes to mind.

I bet, that if you asked someone what some of their favourite movies from their childhood are, most will list at least one horrifically violent action or horror film.
Kids love bloody violence.

I never liked it. I never liked scary stories. The fairy tales didn’t scare me, because I didn’t believe they were real and they were depicted in cartoons.

Edit: Real stories like Son of Sam, children kidnapped for ransom, and serial rapists did scare me, and I did know them as a child.

I’ve never know a kid who loved bloody violence.

My favorite movie from childhood is Swiss Family Robinson.

Did you grow up in an orphanage, or something?

I loved Swiss Family Robinson!
the girl was disguised as a boy to protect her.

No @ragingloli. Violence and abuse wasn’t part of my upbringing (for the most part…Mom had a temper.)

Thinking of some childhood shows and movies from ages 4–9:

Speed Racer – a favorite kids’ cartoon of my kindergarten class, features large amounts of routine deaths of hapless race drivers caught up in the carnage of hyper-aggressive racing and murderous rival drivers cheating and operating in gangs to knock other drivers off cliffs and into walls, etc, where they explode. It’s one of the main interesting things about it – the persistent theme that danger is serious and can kill people at any time if they aren’t up to the challenge or make the wrong decisions.
(Watch just 45 seconds into the intro to this episode when the jolly peppy child-friendly intro suddenly shows a race car lose control, burst through a guard rail, and fly through the air off a cliff… the camera then lingers to show a colossal fireball that surely the driver had no way of surviving.)

Star Wars . . .

Space 1999 – plenty of death an violence, much of it quite gorey

Westerns (e.g. the oh so wholesome show The Rifleman, where Chuck Connors’ character doesn’t want any trouble, but routinely finds himself just having to use his rapid-fire rifle marksmanship to shoot lots of badguys)

World War Two movies…

Peter Pan – Cut off Captain Hook’s hand and fed it to a crocodile who then keeps hunting Hook. In the original version, Pan kicks Hook into the crocodile’s mouth, where he is eaten to death.

Bambie – Bambie’s mother dies in a fire

In the original Cinderella I think one of the step sisters literally cut her foot to make it fit the glass slipper.

The one movie that stands out in my mind as perfectly horrifying from my childhood is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

I remember the movie “Cube”, where in one of the chambers, a series of wire grid meshes popped up and sliced one of the guys to pieces, and his body collapsed into a pile of flesh cubes in slow motion.
Loved it

[Mod says] Moved to Social with OP’s permission.

@longgone Thank you