Dateline worked with the PD and perverted-justice.com to catch creepy men sexually chatting up 12-13 year old boys/girls* on-line then driving to their house to get busy with them.
The creepymen are called into the kitchen by “Dell” a young woman with a voice that could pass as a boy or girl. Once Creepyman is inside the Dateline guy comes out and calls them on their attempted dirty deeds. He informs them they’re going to be on Dateline and then lets them leave. Most of the guys think they’re heading home but the PD nail them in the driveway.
In all they nab about 50 of these guys.
I think it is sad so many guys would risk so much for a little sex. It’s scary to think so many of these creeps are out there. It’s worse to think so many of these guys meet up with young boys and girls.
But all that aside, this is GREAT TV!
I love watching these guys get busted and squirm when questioned.
Dateline guy: “You sent her a picture of your penis. Why would you do that?”
Creepyman: “I did?? Oh, I, errrr. I don’t think I meant to.”
Dateline Guy: “Why would you come here to have sex with a 13 year old?”
Creepyguy: “I thought she was 24.”
Dateline Guy: “Really. Let’s read the transcript from your chat.”
Creepyguy: craps pants
I could watch this show all night. Where the hell do I sign up to help?
Yeah, it was great television. Chris Hansen played it just right, acting like an authority, ordering these guys around, inspecting their belongings, but without crossing the line and actually identifying himself as law enforcement. When one of the creepyguys asked to see his ID, he just changed the subject (“Oh, you’d like to see my ID? Well, what I’d like you to see is this photo of your penis you thought you were sending to a 13 year old boy!”).
I love how these charmers would come to the house with condoms, a camera, and hard liquor, then claim with a straight face that they came “just to talk”. Riiight. :rolleyes:
My favorite moments were the look of relief these guys got on their faces when Chris Hansen said that they were “free to leave” after answering question after agonizing question, only to be nabbed by the real cops outside. One creepyguy even thanked Hansen for “letting him go” with just a warning. Hee hee.
I’m so glad that MSNBC got the cops involved this time.
We’ve been watching the teasers about this episode for a couple of weeks, and we watched a portion of the show.
Very disturbing stuff.
Perhaps y’all can answer these for us…
How was NBC able to show these guys’ faces? I don’t believe they exposed all 50 of them on the air, but I can’t imagine any of them knowingly giving permission to have their faces on TV. Were they only able to expose those who were eventually arrested, tried, and convicted?
Would signing a waiver be considered “cooperation with the authorities” in order to make a public example of them, and possibly result in more lenient sentencing?
Working for an ISP, I’m well-aquainted with the “opportunities” (for lack of a better word) for aberrant behavior (for lack of a better word) that many people find in the percieved anonymityof the internet. But stories like this make me very interested in the specifics at work behind the numbers.
Are the numbers so high because the internet is such a fertile hunting ground for people like this?
Are the numbers so high because the internet serves as an excellent (for now) medium for sting operations?
Are the numbers so high because there has been, even long before the internet, such a high proportion of people who behave this way, but were never brought to justice due to the stigma and social pressures keeping the victims from coming forward?
All of the above and more? If so, at what proportions of probability?
I realize this isn’t really the thread for these kinds of questions…
My best guess would be that there has always been this same percentage of the population prone to pedophilia, but they never had the opportunity to “seduce” and stalk a victim far enough away from where they lived to give them a sense of safety?
Argh, we have a guy working for us now who has a nice little transcript, complete with phone number and picture, on the perverted justice site. He thought he was going to bang a thirteen year old girl in a park, and was all ready to bring condoms… That’s just naaaasty! :dubious:
If nothing else, does nobody ever figure out that offers to get laid by the underage on the internet are probably never for real? It’s like being convinced the phone sex lady is all twenty two and smokin’ hot–no damn way! Think she’d be making money talking to losers about their weenies on the phone if she really looked the way she sounds? I guess it’s possible, but the smart money says it ain’t.
Ach, the capacity for small heads to fool/rule big heads is apparently infinite. :smack:
I wondered that myself. Several times in the show they had small photos of 50 or so people on the screen. You never know in television but I suspected those were real pictures of all the men.
I would think someone could play it that way.
Creepyman: “Judge. I feel very strongly how wrong I was in my crime and I allowed Dateline to broadcast my capture in hopes it will stop things like this from happening in the future.”
Years ago my friends and I played out mini-stings on AIM. We’d sign up an account with a name like “sexygrl3322”. Our profiles said we were 12 or 13.
Within moments of going online people were chatting us up. Scary really.
We’d get these loosers to start hitting on us - we wouldn’t move the converation this way but we wouldn’t avoid questions about our “tits”. Some of these guys would pressure us for phone numbers or to meet someplace. I always told them I was in my old home town and a few guys lived quite close to the area I said I was in. They start wanting to do some cybersex chat and we’d let them. We’d play the part of the 12 year old to the tee by not responding how they’d want us to. Most the chats would end the same way…
Creepyguy: “I’m taking off your shirt”
sexygrl3322: “Do you like the Backstreet boys?”
Creepyguy: “I’m putting my hand down the front of your pants”
sexygrl3322: “ur so wak. OMG LOL!”
Creepyguy: “I’ve got your pants unzipped and I’m starting to go down on you”
sexygrl3322: “While you’re down there watch out for my 35 year old penis!!”
sexygrl3322: “and remember you sick bastard. You never know if you’re talking to a girl, boy, man, woman or the police of your local community.”
My friend and I would do this and share the log files as a joke but at the end of the day we might have stopped a few people. Nothing says “oh shit” like telling a guy if we had arranged to meet in real life he’d be face to face with an 6.1, 200 pound pissed off guy.
I’ve talked with my 14 year old daughter about this stuff and she told me most of her friends think messing around with an older man is creepy. I’m going to guess a large amount of possible sexual abuse is stopped at chat logs. I know my daughter would never give out personal information to someone after a handful of email (I know this because I read her email and keep a key logger on the computer she uses). Someone she knows from school (her same age) sent her a written mastubation fantacy in email. Her reply was “why did you send me this?” and “you’re really an idiot”.
The flip side to this is my daughters friend (we’ll call her Judy). She’s been hanging around a coffee shop next to her school and one of the guys who works there has been showing interest in her. The feeling is mutual I understand. So we have a 14 year old girl and a 22 year old guy. I understand he’s broken up with his live in girlfriend over his possible romance with Judy.
Judy thinks this is a perfectly fine romance even with my daughter telling her repeatedly it gives her the willies. My daughter has even gone so far as to tell judy she doesn’t want to hear about this guy anymore. Judy’s mother knows about this as well. For some reason she’s not getting in the way other than telling Judy not to get involved. That’s not stopping Judy from hanging out at this coffee shop everyday. I learned the other day Judy has done a few things away from the shop with this guy. A movie, shopping, etc.
I’m worried Judy is going to find herself in a bad situation and won’t have the support group she’ll need. She might not go to her mother, my daughter might end up just saying “told you so”. In this case it might go unreported.
Personally if Judy were my daughter I’d be all over this guy. Right now I’m on the fence about getting involved. I’ve thought about going down there and just telling him if he doesn’t stop with Judy I’ll personally ruin his life.
Actually, I’m more then happy if this thread wants to take this turn. It is an important subject. We might want to have it moved someplace else if it does though.
But I didn’t like the bits when, if the perps asserted their rights against self-incrimination, the narration presented this as proof that they were skilled criminals.
Anyone who would have sex with a twelve or thirteen year old is a disgusting creep who should be punished to the full extent of the law.
That truism being said, there was something about the show besides the perverts that creeped the hell out of me. Maybe it’s the odor of vigilantism that emanates from PJ. Maybe it was Chirs Hansen’s obnoxious smug demeanour, or the clear sadistic glee he took in this stunt. Maybe it was the sheer exploitatvie nature of the whole thing.
It just struck me as a pretty foul show. (What little I watched anyway. The whole thing was too depressing for me to stomach more than 20 minutes.) This show reveled in perversion as it pretended to condemn it, and appealed to it’s audience’s smug unearned sense of superiority, as well as the base human instinct to watch a trainwreck in progress.
Again, I have no sympathy for the creeps who were busted. But putting this stuff on TV doesn’t make us any safer and appeals to some pretty base instincts on the part of the viewer.
A legal question here; if there isn’t any 13-year-old involved in the whole process; that is to say that the perp talks dirty to, or sends a picture of his penis to an undercover cop or TV-show do-gooder who is merely posing as a 13-year-old, what, if any, crime is being committed?
That’s what I was wondering (along with what honeydew was wondering…particularly the part about being able to show them on film without their consent. I’d really like to know how that works.)
I was trying to figure it out on the Perverted Justice web site. The “Convicted” reports weren’t very helpful. I note one of them was convicted of Attempted Lewdness. Attempeted Lewdeness??? Err…I’m not saying something shouldn’t be done about the creepy assholes. But Attempted Lewdness??? WTF.
I’m not an attorney, but I think you would need the permission of the owner of the property to film there and that would be all. If someone comes on to their property and into their residence in the act of committing a crime, why would you need permission to show them on television? How would that be any different from showing film of any other crime on private property caught on tape?
The men were not being brought there or held there against their will. They were free to walk away from the cameras at any time.
I don’t think that it is “vigilantism” when citizens help the police and the legal system to bring child predators to justice. It wasn’t as if they carried out there own form of justice. And I have no way of knowing what Chris Hansen was feeling. If I had been in his shoes, I would have felt a mixture of repulsion, anger and fear.
I suppose the program was exploitative. If that keeps just one child from being exploited, it was worth it. I hope that stings like this take place all over the country. I’m just not interested in seeing them televised again.
One thing that did bother me about Chris Hansen was that he kept asking the men why they would do something so stupid. He should know that most of them don’t have the answers to that question.
Overall it got to me how average most of these men looked.
No, you didn’t stop anyone. What you did is get kicks out of pretending to be a 12-year-old girl. Because you aren’t trained in, or under the supervision of law enforcement you may very well have screwed up an on-going investigation that could have led to an arrest. You may very well have taught these perverts a lesson - how not to get caught. How to be more careful next time.
Had you gotten some good info out of pervert-guy and turned it over to police, guess what? You screwed a few things up and they will never be able to prosecute the guy, and now he knows law enforcement is on to him.
That’s why law enforcement discourages online vigilantism.
But once their faces have appeared on camera, they’ve already been found guilty of whatever the show is accusing them of. In other words, once they walk into the house, they’re automatically child molesters in the eyes of anyone who watches the show. Leaving at any point doesn’t do a thing to clear their name- and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it makes them look even MORE guilty. Kinda like how they’re considered to be “skilled criminals” when they refuse to self-incriminate.
Killing all adults would definitely keep at least one child from being exploited. Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s a good direction to go.
I clicked over to one of these exposes a few months back- and, after watching in horrified fascination for a few seconds, I had to turn the channel off. The only reason Dateline broadcasted this was for ratings, not in any attempt to curb the exploitation of minors. All it did was make me want to feel sorry for the predators (not that I did, mind you, but I sure wanted to).
For the record, a close friend of mine does online sting operations of this nature. The only difference is, she’s an FBI agent. She’s fighting the good fight, as far as I’m concerned.
In my personal “righteous to skeevy” spectrum: Law Enforcement Agency>Online Vigilantes>Television Shows.