:smack: PV = PJ or Perverted Justice.
I believe there was a thread last year about the legality and ethics and such of websites like PJ. I will try to find it. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a court challenge about this re entrapment.
Since they seem to have a pretty good conviction rate for the Dateline program, I’m sure quite a few cries of ‘entrapment!’ have been dismissed by the judges. The fact that you (not YOU, the general ‘you’) gladly took the rope and hung yourself with it does not entrapment make.
Yeah, I believe most states laws say if you thought you were chatting with a minor, and went somewhere to have sex, it doesn’t matter how old they actually were. I think the fact that you went to the location is the clincher.
I leave this to the legal types.
But who knows if the dude really would go through with it? And, no minor was harmed as the decoy isn’t a real minor. 
I admit that it is likely legal, but is the law right?*
I must admit these dudes are really fucking stupid. I mean, I have some sympathy with the dude that sleeps with a 16yo that *claimed *to be 18, but the decoys claim to be 13, and that’s just wrong.
I dunno, the stupidity and sickness of some of these dudes just has me shaking my head.
- Congress passed a law that defined “kiddie porn” in such a way that an adult (in a prono film) pretending to be underaged was “kiddie porn” but didn’t the courts toss out that section, as no minors were actually harmed- IIRC?
I know man, it’s like a bang your head against the wall thing. If it was any other crime, people would likely be saying “This shit is fucked up” but then again, these fucks are driving a hundred miles to screw a 13 year old.
Shaking my head too.
IANAL, but I know that various police departments in the state of Illinois do similar things themselves. They have officers posing as very young teens, checking out chat rooms and talking with guys who want to have sex with them. Then they set up meetings at places like fast food/mall parking lots, put out an appropriate-looking decoy, then bust the guy when he comes up to talk to the “teen.”
From what I saw in the promos for this show, I guess some of the guys they bust even make references to the show so they know about it but still figure it can’t happen to them.
DrDeth, there have been a number of discussions on the board on this and similar topics, and what these guys are being busted for are crimes of intent. If, say, you wanted to kill your neighbor, and you went out and bought a gun, watched your neighbor’s house, saw him go into his bedroom and turn out his lights, and you peered through the window and shot at the figure lying in the bed - if that turned out to be just a hump of blankets and pillows, should you get off scot-free because you didn’t actually shoot him, or should you be charged with something like attempted murder? Same deal here.
I’ve only watched the show a few times as it makes me want to hurl but IIRC aren’t most of the charges against these guys just “solicitation of sex with a minor” type thing? They aren’t being charged as harshly as someone who actually had sex with a minor but they are being hit with solicitation. Seems on the up and up to me but I’m not a lawyer.
Am I mistaken or did one of the alleged perps shoot himself in the head on one episode?
I had to laugh at one of the first guys they arrested…as they threw him on the ground and handcuffed him, he was hollering, “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything yet!”
Yet?
Doesn’t that imply intent?
A cultural double standard that kind of ticks me off: we talk about “evil predators, how, just HOW can they be sexually attracted to a child??? That is just sick, sick, sick!” Yet at the same time, littered throughout the city are advertisements with minors dolled up provocatively and in sexually compromosing scenarios. Models, and not the supermodel type, just regular, sexy models whose names you’ll never know, draped over some James Bond lookalike, or peeling back the sheets from some buff, scruffy male model… and a lot of these kids are in their teens.
My girlfriend and I were looking at a huge, and rather racey poster of a scruffy looking male model in his 30s, lying back in ecstacy as some gorgeous babe was peeling off his clothes. It waqs a cologne ad.
“How old does she look to you?” I asked my fiancee.
“Hmm… She looks 14, maybe. Hard to tell with the make-up.”
“Yeah,” I answered, “I was guessing 15.”
“No she doesn’t look that mature.”
So there are of girls everywhere like Carmen Kaas* (who became a supermodel at 14) modelling as minors, but photographed pretending to be adults in adult situations.
So we create these “ideal images” of what a hot babe should be, and a lot of those images are made up of minors. And maybe as I’m getting older, I’m a bit more aware of this now, but a lot of them look more like minors than I remember in ads from when I was younger (Yuck!). So our media denounces men who are attracted to 13-year-olds, all the while glorifying images of sexualized teens.
(Seriously, there are some ads near work that give me the heebie-jeebies. One has a pair of guys in tux’s and they are both easily in their early 30s leering over this “hot chick” in a coctail dress and the skinny kid practically looks 12!)
*Note: I have no idea of how old Kaas is in that photo, but she’s been modelling pretty much like that since she was 14.
I didn’t see the episode so I’m not sure how the shooting was portrayed, but a prosecutor in neighboring Murphy, Texas was busted on the show soliciting what he thought was a 13 year old boy. He subsequently shot himself in the head when the police came to collect him at his home.
That’s how it’s been explained in the past.> * Intent* to have sexual contact with a minor. Nearly every crime can be judged on or legally boiled down to intent.
I recommend, then, that YOU be the judge of the legality of their actions.
First, ask yourself what the legal conditions for “entrapment” are.
Then ask yourself if the actions taken by police or the PJ crew constitute entrapment.
Dont child molesters watch TV. I hate saying this but…There is a huge drive that these people have. They must know the dangers. Yet they still do it. Something is wrong. Are they sick.? Can they not control their impulses or what? If they can not stop then what do we do, open Alcatraz again and separate them from the world. If their internal programming is so strong then we have to jail them forever. Somehow that does not seem right either.
I just do not see a solution .
How do other countries deal with these people.?
We moved our TiVo box and only have one tuner hooked up, so I’ve missed To Catch a Predator for a number of weeks, but it seems to me that there were a number of these guys who were aware of the program?
There have a number of studies done on the 20million+ teens who use the internet all the time. Last year, Cox Communicatons released the results of a survey:
In other words, a lot of teens online behave idiotically when it comes to self-preservation, and there are too many of them for any sting operation to make it discouragingly likely that a pedophile will get arrested instead of getting what they want.
Not only do they watch TV, but many of them have seen the Dateline shows. They’ve actually quoted chat logs where the predator asks the decoy if they’ve seen the Dateline show, and how stupid those guys are. :rolleyes: One guy had been caught by Dateline before, made an appointment to see another decoy, but had to bump the time because he had to go to court for his other charge, and still showed up.
When I worked on the forensic unit, I developed an absolute loathing for pedophiles (greater even than my dislike for people with BPD), because it was like knocking one’s head against a brick wall. Sessions would go something like:
Me: Can you tell me why you’re here?
Pedo: Well, I’m here for sexual asault on a minor, but they really don’t understand.
Me: What don’t they understand?
Pedo: It was totally okay! She was into it, asked me to do those things.
Me: She was… five?
Pedo: Yeah. So?
Me: :smack:
If I got them to admit that maybe, possibly, they could sort of see why society thinks it’s wrong to have full-on sexual contact with a five year old, I had made a significant breakthrough. None of them ever, in the four years I was there, even admitted that what they did probably wasn’t the wisest choice, let alone a REALLY BAD THING. There really is a disconnect there, and I just don’t think it’s surmountable.
One of the guys, 22, was telling Chris Hansen that he showed up because the 13 year old girl asked him to.
:smack:
My daughter may ask me to let her have ice cream for dinner. Doesn’t mean she’s going to get her wish.
A couple of episodes ago the man was saying he was under a lot of stress because his best friend’s mother was dying. I turned to Ivylad and said, “In those months that your dad was dying, did you ever have the urge to have a sexual online chat with a child?”
Not surprisingly, the answer was Hell No.
These people have a different mindset. I’m not entirely sure they even know what they’re doing is wrong.
My son used to want to use IM and go into chat groups about video games. I kept telling him no, too many sickos out there. He didn’t believe me. Then TCAP came along. Now we all watch it together. My 14 YO son now sees how manipulative these guys are, sometimes working for months on what they think is a 13 year old kid. On the show they repeatedly make reference to the fact that this is not just a one time communication from these pervs, it is a concerted effort and lasts a long time before the meeting takes place.
These guys know what they are doing is wrong, as frequently mentioned in their chat logs where they say they could get in trouble for what they are doing. They don’t care though and deserve to be punished for it. IANAL but this is intent to commit sexual assault upon a minor. Not to mention the distribution of pornography to a minor (all the naked pictures they send). He can’t get away with it by saying that the girl was asking for it any more than a rapist can get away with it.
I don’t care at what age a person becomes physically a sexual being. Emotionally and intellectually a 13 year old, or even a 16 year old, is not equipped to handle the possible repercussions and responsibilities of sexual activity. They aren’t thinking of possible consequences including, but not limited to, STDs, pregnancy, rape, abortion or death. Adults are generally aware of what could happen after they have sex and can make the appropriate decisions.
And as for the “mixed messages” within our society, I deal with it by refusing to patronize the companies that employ those messages. I will never buy anything from Abercrombie. My nieces asked for clothes or gift cards from there but we will never buy anything from them.
I walked past one of their stores in the mall and they had a 16 year old boy (my wife and I asked him how old he was) standing in front of the doorway. He was wearing skin tight jeans that hung so low on his hips that his pubic hair was showing. His shirt was open and he had no t-shirt on so you could see he was in great shape. My wife asked him what his job was and he said he was supposed to talk to the girls. During their conversation he would lead them into the store. There was also a 16 year old girl outside the store in similar low cut jeans and a bikini top, doing the same thing.
Any company that objectifies or sexualizes minors will never get a single dollar from me. If more people felt that way and stopped buying tight shorts for their teenage daughters that say “Juicy” on the ass, then maybe the companies would stop doing it.
One of the guys they arrested in the sting in the neighboring county was a native of India. He surrendered his passport when he was arrested. He came back a few weeks later (before his court date) and asked for his passport to be returned to him “for business purposes”. Naturally, his request was denied.
Anyone here not surprised he didn’t show up for his court date?
Another of the guys who was arrested was engaged to be married when he made on-line arrangements to have sex with a 13-year-old. The woman he was engaged to went ahead and married him. Now that really blows my mind.
I actually just came into this thread to start my own pit, but against Dateline rather than the morons who appear on it. While I am in no means advocating the actions of the people being arrested, I am just as sickened by what Dateline themselves are doing. I saw one episode of this special about a year ago, and then I saw it again last night, and saw that in the course of a year of it being on, Dateline still hasn’t taken any course of action in reporting how to PREVENT predators from going after your real children. And a 5 second tagline “parents, talk to your kids about their internet usage” at the very end of the show doesn’t count.
While I won’t argue that the show has made parents, children, and everybody else (including potential predators!) aware that such dangers exist, I think that its purpose has been completely overshadowed by ratings. This is a very popular show, and for the wrong reasons. It has taken the subject of child abuse and turned into America’s Funniest Home Videos! As has been stated in this thread, NO real 13 year old girls would act that way, either online or in real life. These decoys are trying to hunt down the country’s rejects - wanna-be lowlife losers who no real girl would ever talk to. Again, while I’m not advocating their actual actions, it really is exploitive the way Dateline is putting all these false hopes into these lonely men who are led to believe (or given a little ray of hope) that SOMEBODY out there wants their attention. Has this show ever reported of tracking down somebody who’s actually had a real encounter with an underaged girl before?
I really think it’s horrible that turning child molestation into a joke is now one of the biggest forms of entertainment in this county.
To add to that, the repeating showing of new episodes is proof enough that this show ISN’T solving the problem. They even bragged in the beginning of the last episode that there’s no shortage of people that the decoys are dragging in. If this show isn’t preventing people from being more wiser about not “coming over just to talk, or to go out to dinner” (so why are there condoms in your pocket?) then it isn’t even doing the purpose it assumably was originally created for - to stop online predators.
If it weren’t for the fact that appearing on camera and unblurred would be career and social suicide, I’d start to think that some of these encounters are being staged by actors.