Damn right it was a clumsy question:
“My question is whether are there any purportedly underage girls trolling chatrooms for sex with older man who are not in fact police informants. Less flippantly, is there any information about how many actual young children are actually seduced (or have attempts to seduce them made) like this, as opposed to the percentage of them that are police officers or agents.”
I reacted the way I did because:
-The question is stupid. The only way it could be answered factually would be to question predators who have been caught and convicted and ask them how much success they had before they were caught. And I don’t think they are going to tell you.
-While “Billdo” is in the clear because he is known to other posters, I didn’t know that, nor was he known to me. If it had been a “Guest” who posted the question, what would your response have been then?
-Even if the question could be answered, I don’t think it should be. The Straight Dope doesn’t hesitate to distance itself when someone asks about drugs or medical advice. Information about how effective certain law-enforcment methods are in dealing with predators is information that someone could use to devise a strategy.
I will apologize to Billdo for one thing, and that is for accusing him of notifying a mod.
I don’t get the problem with the original thread- its not like he was asking for specific sites where young girls look for old men, the question was “do they really do that”, meaning (to me anyway), if girls don’t really do this, why do the pervs keep falling for it? It’s like if there were actual places that advertised free heroin, and you could really go and get free heroin, but there were also trap places set up by cops offering free heroin. You could understand why a user would get caught in one of the fake free herion schemes if there were real ones as well. You could not understand why they would be caught if every free heroin offer ever was a fake set up by cops.
One of the primary values of this site is (or at least should be) that one can ask questions that could be difficult to ask in real life. They might be difficult simply because they are embarrassing, or they might be like this case where the subject matter is one such that it opens the questioner to accusations about his or her motives.
IMHO we need to give people posting questions the benefit of the doubt, and assume the question is being asked in an academic manner.
“This question is stupid” is not an appropriate response in GQ. And whether the question should be answered or not is also not your call. Who the hell died and left you in charge of what constitutes a stupid or appropriate question?
Even if you did feel that stupdity/appropriateness were legitimate concerns or POVs, you could have registered those objections (either to a mod or even within the thread) without insinuating that Billdo has some evil motivation in asking. And the fact that you didn’t know his reputation when you made the comment doesn’t excuse it; to the contrary, it highlights how quick you were to assume evil intent without any information about the poster that might justify such an assuption.
Did you even read the thread? It was a perfectly valid question and he is clearly not a creep trying to compute his odds of getting caught. If a young woman, such as myself, posted the question, would that spark your suspicion too? I think it’s terribly unfair to just assume he’s a creep just because it’s a guy asking the question.
I read the thread. As to whether or not it is a valid question is up for dispute. As I said before, the Straight Dope will close down threads where it is apparent that someone is seeking information that could be used to facilitate illegal activity.
Go start a thread about “How to get a traffic ticket fixed”, or “Foolproof ways to cheat on taxes” and see what happens.
The question, if answered, could provide someone ( a lurker, perhaps) with information best not divulged.
On another tack, if you were a predator, and you really were seeking info for the purpose of computing odds of getting caught, how would you phrase your question? Probably very similar to the OP in GQ.
Your examples are in no way similar. Re-read the original OP and see if at any point he asks for internet sites, where to go to find underage girls, anything dubious. His questions are: do young girls really do this, and how often.
A perv looking for where to go to solicit minors would ask for site names, chat rooms, etc. Anyone answering the questions specifically posed in the OP would be providing zero info helpful to the budding child molester.
Just as a side note, I’d like to point out that using posh words like “postulate” to describe the sort of idiocy you two have come out with merely invites speculation as to which bit of your anatomy you’re pulling your conclusions out of.
I wouldn’t ask at all on a forum where my IP was logged and my contact details held and my posts were publically visible in perpetuity because I’m not a fucking moron.
And no, that thread would have provided no useful information to any potential ne’er-do-well. Knowing the chances of getting caught doesn’t alter said chances one bit, nor does it give you any information about how to spot a LEO posing as a kid. Let’s say the answer was that 30% of hot sexy teens online are in fact middle-aged policemen with beer guts. How, exactly, are you going to use this information to endanger the real hot sexy teens?
By what I’ll charitably refer to as your logic, we should never discuss any law enforcement methods at all, or the success rates thereof. I leave you to ponder whether this is really a sensible policy.
Then you raise your concerns with the appropriate people. You don’t leap in to imply the OP’er is a criminal deviant just because you personally consider his question “invalid.”
You forgot the part where DOZENS of people here have met Billdo and at least several of those know his REAL NAME and, possibly, address. Him asking here where to find underage poon would be like him asking the same question at his job. Even fucking morons know better than to do that.
It was not a “How do I do this illegal thing?” kind of question. It was a “Does this ever really happen?” kind of question. It was a question that, once I saw it asked, I too was curious to know the answer, even though I have no intention of doing anything with the information. It was the kind of question that might have occurred to me, and I didn’t think anything of the fact that it did occur to Billdo or that he saw fit to ask about it here on the SDMB.
I didn’t forget, I was just avoiding that fact since it’s apparently insufficient for Tweedledum and Tweedledee here (and to be far fairer than either of them warrants, they don’t know him and nor do I). But yes, the credulity required to believe that Billdo had any ill motives mounts to positively stratospheric levels when that’s taken into account, does it not?
I can see how that would raise someone’s confidence in him, and probably make them want to mention it in their defense of him. However, “I know the guy” in and of itself isn’t an adequate defense.
Why should the average member have to depend upon someone’s subjective and personal feelings about a poster, when it is appropriate based just on the content of the thread to say, “That’s a legitimate question and there is no basis for a personal attack or accusation…”?
I think both the attack and the response really miss the mark.
While I believe the question was legit and in no way seeking illicit info, I also agree “we know him” is not an adequate defense for anyone, in any case.“I knew him I never thought he’d do something like that” is an all to common response when family/friends are interviewed about illicit acitivty by someone they know. If someone told my nan I smoked pot, she would absolutely say “no way would he do that, I know him”
If someone asked “Are there really terrorist sleeper cells hiding in the U.S.?” would you think he must really be a terrorist himmself.
Billdos’s question was completely legit. It’s one I’ve wondered about myself. The knee-jerk response a few people had to it say a lot about the sad state of media induced paranoia in the U.S.
I think Billdo’s question is a good one. In the mid-late 80’s there was a great uproar over the problem of mail order kiddie porn. Objective studies showed that beyond sting operations conducted by the postmaster general, kiddie porn “in the wild” almost didn’t exist. Sure what did exist WAS a bad thing, but the truth was that the demand far outstripped the supply, so when the postmaster general went fishing, there were lots of hungry fish to be caught. Busting a few of the consumers didn’t really impact the few actual suppliers very much, and did very little to reduce the victimization of children.
There is an old saying that a lock will not stop a thief, but it may keep an honest man honest. If you leave a car unlocked with the engine running, you will most likely be able to catch a stupid teenager when he hops in for a joy ride…that probably isn’t the way to impact car theft by a ring of professional thieves though.
I have to wonder if these sting operations make it seem so easy to seduce a young girl, that they catch perpetrators who really aren’t depraved enough to manipulate real victims. Is all this chumming bringing in so many tuna that sharks have an easier time hiding?
I had my own recent encounter with Zambini57’s asinine style of posting in this thread:
I admit my response in that thread was kneejerk and uncalled for, but I get tired of posters who come in and dump all over threads by making assumptions, accusations, and otherwise crass and useless comments without really addressing the topic at hand.
That being said, I did note the two mods quickly coming to the defense of a known poster, which seems a little unfair and uneven in enforcement of the policies here, regardless of their personal familiarity of Billdo. I doubt the mods would have come to my or even Zambini57’s defense in such a situation.
