DATELINE: Has Catching Perverts Gone too far? [ed. title]

I was watching the Frontline sting operation, which has snagged over 21 creeps. The method is simple-a decoy pretends to be a 14 year old girl, and sets up an entry on MYSPACE. She pretents to be curious about sex, and (inevitably) there is a crush of perverts eager to correspond with her. In about two weeks, many of these people have sent photos (of various parts of their anantomy), and requested to meet with her. Despite the fact that transmitting this stuff (to a minor) is both illegal and immoral, a wide spectrum of people wind up getting caught-there was a baptist preacher, a small town policeman, a rabbi, a HS teacher, etc. My question (the point for debate is): has this gone too far? Do the actions of the decoy amount to actively promoting this kind of behavior?
I must admit, that seeing this on TV has made me really disgusted with these guys, and I don’t think the show actually deters any of them (several of the perverts admitted that they knew of the Frontline sting.
What do you think? is this a valid way of catching criminals, or is frontline actually contributing to a problem?

Frontline? Surely Dateline.

Perverts? Surely Fleas.

Spot on!

Gone too far?!

How many have they caught? 100 guys? 200? That’s not a drop in the ocean in the sea of deviants trolling for kids. I think I read once that there were 80,000 web sites world wide that dealt with various forms of child pornography.

Have you seen the follow up? Most of these guys got less than 60 days in jail, and many none at all. A few got several months. But it is/was amazing how little real punishment is meted out.

I have no sympathy for them. Any sympathy I might have is for the wives and children who are going to see on national TV their husbands and fathers trying to hook up with a teenager. I imagine they are equally humiliated.

Chris Hanson acts high and mighty over this, but he’s chasing ratings, plain and simple. Once they’ve milked this for all it’s worth, we’ll not hear him preaching about protecting kids anymore.

As I said, my only objection is that Dateline is dragging the families through the gravel right along with the perp.

But contributing to the problem? Surely you’re kidding.

Apologies for the mistake-for some reason, I did think it was Frontline. but in any event, the show has held a mirror to society; and what it reveals about humanity isn’t pretty. i guess i can’t imagine there are so many people with sick and twisted desires. And the Internet has made it possible for such people to advance their desires-pretty sad-I think the interent is one of the most useful things ever invented-it is sad that it has been responsible for so much exploitation of children. I guess i am naive-I thought these guys would actually be getting 5-6 year jail terms for these acts-i didn’t know judges were so lenient. :confused:

Pedophiles, along with Islamic terrorists, is this generation’s boogyman.

In the 16th century it was witches. The 1950’s had communists, the 1980’s had Satanists again, but we’ve got the pedos and terrorists.

Not that child abuse isn’t a serious societal issue, but our fear outstrips the actual incidence of pedophilia. At least, abuse by people outside the family. Dateline is practicing the lowest form of psuedo-journalism, both feeding and feeding upon societal fears while parading the monsters they catch in front of us for our amusement and catharsis. In addition, they’re warping the criminal justice system by practicing a legally questionable form of vigilante justice.

You wonder why these guys get such short sentences, raindog? Well, mostly it’s because they haven’t actually approached or touched a child. But it’s also because the DA’s the prosecute them have to know that their cases are as flimsy as balsa wood. If they didn’t make lenient plea bargains, more of the accused would feel the need to fight in court, where they’d have a good chance at winning.

“What do you think? is this a valid way of catching criminals, or is frontline actually contributing to a problem?”

“I guess i am naive-I thought these guys would actually be getting 5-6 year jail terms for these acts-i didn’t know judges were so lenient. :confused:

(The food here is awful and the portions are too small.)

Seriously though. I’ve seen these shows and they are disturbing. I just don’t understand what you’re getting at here. Do you really think these guys wouldn’t be trying to hook up with minors if Dateline wasn’t trying to catch them?

What about pedophile terrorists? (Oh wait, that’s the Catholic church…)

If these Dateline shows (yes it’s Dateline, not Frontline) serve any purpose at all, it’s punishing stupidity. Most Myspace teens don’t advertise sex to adults – the “grooming” process typically works the other way 'round, with adults approaching children. As for teens who do seek out an adult’s attention, they typically claim to be adults themselves, or at least they’re more discreet about it. Children are far more devious and clever than parents give them credit for.

What’s really disturbing, however, is how Dateline will sometimes use an actual teenager to open the door and lead the pervert into the house. That’s child endangerment – what if the pervert’s so hungry & desperate, he doesn’t want to wait until they get to the room with all the tv cameras?? What if the pervert brings a gun? But I guess that would be a small price to pay for higher ratings. :rolleyes:

Have they gone too far? Hell no! Keep it coming. I don’t think we do nearly enough in this society to protect children from the abominations who would rape them. Do you have any young children? Imagine them suffering the horrific abuses dished out by those monsters and then ask yourself that question again.

Does the show promote abominable behavior? Of course not, it just reveals it. You might as well ask if a hardware store promotes ax murder by selling axes or a seed store promotes terrorism by selling fertilizer.

Let me ask you this: When those shows ran their sting operations, did they catch you? Why not? Oh, probably because you aren’t a child-raping abomination trolling the internet for prey. Anyone who doesn’t like cookies is never going to be caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

When I saw the title, I thought Frontline (whose work I greatly respect) had done a thoughtful analysis of the witchhunt aspects of the reports on Dateline (who I consider at most half-a-step-removed from yellow-journalism jackals).

So did I. And that would actually be a really awesome episode - of course, Frontline is always awesome, so that doesn’t mean very much. but still.

Why the hell are they doing it with 14 year olds? There are plenty of sick fuckers who’ll go looking for pre pubescent children. Believe me they’re thousands of times worse.

No, I think it’s a legitimate question. Assuming that most 14-year-old girls don’t go trolling for older men on MySpace–and I think that’s a pretty safe assumption, since 14-year-old girls can probably get all the ass they want from 14-to-18-year-old boys at school–couldn’t this kind of sting pull someone in who wouldn’t have actually molested a child for their entire lives otherwise? I mean, knowing how MySpace works, the only way I can really see this kind of sting working is if the fake-out guy goes and finds older men and sends them naughty messages. Of course they’ll snag some dudes that way. Unless there’s conclusive proof that (a lot) more actual 14-year-olds act like that on the Internet than do Dateline correspondents, the only reasonable conclusion for me is that Hanson and crew are just as evil as most of the men they snag.

What, that a lot of grown men are sexually attracted to 14-year-old girls? That shouldn’t be news to anybody. That’s how the human brain works. After all, it hasn’t been that long since girls were expected to start a family at 14. Romeo and Juliet were 13, IIRC. The question is whether adults can control those urges. IMO, anyone who sets out pretending to be a 14-year-old girl who is more sexually curious than actual 14-year-old girls are, is bringing evil into the world by making those men seriously entertain thoughts they would not have otherwise, because it would’ve never come up.

How much exploitation of children is actually going on on the Internet, and how much of it is caused by the Internet?

As for child porn, there may well be 80,000 websites (I don’t know anything about that, so I’m going off a previous poster’s numbers), but any consumer of adult porn on the Internet knows that the same online porn clips are generally on hundreds if not thousands of different websites. Child porn websites would naturally seek to minimize their legal exposure, so presumably even fewer of those websites would actually film original material. Of those that do, I’m told that there’s a booming industry of “child porn” that’s actually 18-year-old girls made up and airbrushed to look like underage girls. (I can’t vouch for that, although it makes sense.) There was a market for child porn before the Internet, although I can see where the demand increased once people realized what the Internet could do for all porn industries, and that’s an unfortunate thing.

As for underage kids being lured into sexual relationships with adults, again, I can’t help but think that real kids aren’t as sexually suggestive as the sting operations. For example, I have a very flattering picture of myself on my MySpace, taken by an ex who was a rather skilled amateur photographer, and I haven’t gotten a “Friend Request” from an underage girl since I was 19 years old.

I see the fear machine is chugging along just fine.

Can you elaborate on that, please?

If police did this, wouldn’t the be entrapment? Both legally, and morally? You’re posting on a website, BEGGING for adult men to respond, and then you turn around say “GOTCHA!”

These people aren’t forcefully raping ANYONE. These set-ups are CONSENSUAL. The premise is the kid wants to meet the adult, and is in fact looking for sex. Wtf is that? Ok, we can argue on and on whether that would actually damage the kid or not, but it’s about as far from “raping innocent unknowing youngsters” as you can possibly get.

The fact that these men respond when a 14yo girl offers herself to them doesn’t make them sick perverts, it makes them men, for crissakes. Men without scruples, etc, etc, but it’s as much human nature as anything else. This is damn entrapment, that’s all.

Sure. This:

is a classic example of the fear-mongering technique that has made “won’t somebody think of the children?” so cliche. It’s been used to make marijuana illegal (Reefer Madness was originally called “Tell Your Children”, and most of the 1930s anti-marijuana propaganda was centered around the idea that adults were enslaving innocent children to the drug). It’s been used to ban videogames for adults. It’s been used to kill decent movies with an NC-17 rating and bankrupt the producers. It’s been used as justification to install porn blockers on school computers and in libraries, which ironically prevents children from doing legitimate research and succeeding in school. That’s just in the last 10 years. Before that, it had been used to persecute Jews and Democrats–the Red Scare nearly destroyed my family. It had been used to persecute Satanists (whose actual theology is much different from what most people think it is) and atheists (who have been denied custody of their children for not believing in God). It was used to justify the Holocaust and hundreds of smaller pogroms before that. It was used to justify witch hunts which resulted in the burning of innocent people.

“Think of the children” is dangerous. It’s a fallacy that results in a lot of bad public (and private, in Dateline’s case) policy and hurts a lot of people.

I think much of what Dateline does is entrapment. If these guys’ urges are so uncontrollable, let them set the grooming in motion and let the chips fall where they may (and should). I don’t think these men should be having this type of interaction with teenagers, but they’re closing being lured in.

I was watching an episode last night and, as they always do, they were revealing the chat log for one guy. At one point, the guy writes something to the effect of, “I don’t think I want to have sex.” The decoy writes back, "Don’t you want to have sex with me (or something similar). When asked about this, the response, since teenagers can’t consent, this wasn’t entrapment. What does one have to do with the other, especially if an of-age PO is writing it.

Oh, and the decoys that meet the guy at the door aren’t teenagers; in fact, most of them are undercover police officers.

By definition, any sex with a minor is non-consensual because minors cannot consent. That’s a rather broad interpretation, but good enough to start on.

Personally, I dislike the show for two reasons: One, because it feeds into the fear of “OMG who might be on the internet stalking Mandy!?” with the inevitably resulting Helen Lovejoy disease. Two, IIRC most molestation/child rape happens from within the family; of course there’s no sensational way to set something like that up, so it gets swept under the rug.

Alright, let me rephrase that: “We don’t do enough to protect children from sexual predators.” Are you going to associate that with “Reefer Madness”?