Yes - I found the element of “glee” - as another poster mentions - disturbing.
Also, when I first saw the site, I thought it was a good, maybe admirable idea. But reading various articles where police officers etc claim it hinders their work makes me wonder why they continue. It’s only admirable if it gets these paedos jailed/treated/removed from children. It’s not admirable if it’s just about freaking them out and persecuting them.
Eg: it shouldn’t be a game, which is what it really seems to be. It should only be a tool to assist law enforcement agencies.
Remember, folks, anyone who does not want to just excuse and hand-wave away pedophelia must be on the complete and utter extreme opposite and insist upon lynching and witch hunts.
I can think of explanations besides “they don’t have permission”. I would imagine they don’t want to make the pictures publicly available so that the pedophiles don’t get a chance to recognize them, and know when they are being set up.
I don’t know that for certain, of course, anymore than anyone else besides the site owners do, but it is a plausible reason.
I am afraid I couldn’t offer an informed opinion. I am not going to click on the links provided, either here or at home.
Well, the “PROTECT Act” (which in all the media was publicised as making the “Amber Alert” child-abduction alarm system a nationwide operation) signed last April 30 by the Prez does include deep in the text yet another attempt at an end-run around this, illegalizing CG images that are indistinguishable from an actual photograph of a child.
First, leave law enforcement to professionals. The enforcement of laws needs to be done by people who are accountable to the public.
Second, we must ask what differentiates child porn from ordinary adult porn. The latter is, at least in my view, protected as free speech, the former is not. We can’t ban something because it is repugnant or offensive. My argument (really lifted from NY v. Ferber) is that actual child porn represents an actual case of child abuse, and can be restricted on that grounds. This does not, however, justify the use of child porn to catch offenders, as child abuse is not justified to catch child abusers. Yes, I extend that to include police.
Note, however, that if the above arguement is the basis of our ban of child porn, we can not ban CG porn (no matter how child-like) nor photos of adults modified to look like children. Such is the price of free speech. This being GD, I’ll note I don’t agree fully with the present or past law.
I’m not suspicious because they refuse to provide the pictures - I can agree with that. What’s suspicious is that they refuse to give any information on how the pictures are obtained - if they said simply ‘Yes, they are old pictures of people who donated them for our cause’ then that would be that. But they aren’t saying that.
They ARE saying on their boards now that I must be someone they busted in the past because I say that what they are doing is doing more harm than good by scaring these pedophiles into being more cautious when approaching children.
I have to say that the whole site sort of frightens me. When I clicked over to the site, I thought it might certainly be a worth-wile cause (having never heard of this group before), and it wasn’t until after I’d read several of the transcripts and visited the forums before realizing that they are not in any way connected to the criminal justice system.
I have sort of mixed feelings about this vigilate justice thing, on one hand I certainly believe that criminal punishment should be left to the courts to decide, and that criminals should be legally prosecuted, but another part of me thinks that pedophiles should be publically persecuted to the extent that the people around them should know of their perversion, specifically because this particular crime has such a high rate of recidivism. Perhaps a high rate of social harassment, for lack of a better word, would terrify or shame them into keeping the physical manifestations of their perversion under wraps. That is the crime, correct? I have a very difficult time considering thought-crime to be worthy of this kind of social torture.
However, the people they are targeting are being baited for sexual interest in teenagers–not actually for having commited any sort of criminal action, such as statutory rape, and some of the kids (yes, kids) that they are persecuting are nineteen or twenty years old, and are having their lives torn apart for showing sexual interest in a fourteen or fifteen years old. While this is questionable in our society, there is no comparison between that situation, a person in their late teens showing sexual interest in a person in their mid-teens who may very easily be sexually mature, and a fifty year old man who likes to fondle four year old little girls or boys. The aggression and utter joy that some of those “baiters” express, particularly in the follow-up forums, is downright disturbing. Especially in light of the fact that they cannot even comprehend taking a mildly critical look at the efficacy of what they’re doing, without accusing any critics of being pedophiles themselves.
In my opinion, while their tactics may have some core merit, I think the mentality and actions displayed are downright disgusting.
One of the issues I think there is with this particular baiting operation is that they are providing actual personal information about the people they’ve baited. They’re asking people on their forums to call these people at home, to call them at work, to call their bosses, to call their families, to post fliers on the windshields of cars in their neighborhoods.
These actions will most certainly have a very negative effect on those people’s lives. The people at perverted-justice not only recognize that negative impact, they’re counting on and ecouraging it. They readily advocate getting these people fired, having their wives leave them, and in at least one case threatened someone with a weapon (answering the door with a baseball bat).
We live in a society in which the mere implication that someone committed or will commit a sex crime is a very serious thing, with the capacity to completely destroy a life, even if the accusation is false. Which brings me to the absolute most bothering thing that I’ve seen there:
They readily admit and happily accept that the personal information and pictures of innocent people will, from time to time, be placed on that site. And of course, they call these people, their bosses, their families, and harass them with things like ‘We’re not going to go away or give up at trying to get you fired until you admit what you did and repent for it.’ They are often unwilling to even consider the possibility of innocence. What they’re doing is weilding the power to destroy a life, and in my opinion, they ought to be at the very least exercising the responsibility to make absolutely certain that they’re not going after an innocent person.
Turning their information over to law enforcement would be one thing, because at least then it would be investigated in order to find out the veracity of the accusation. But these people don’t do that. They get a feeling that based on what someone said, they’ve got to be guilty. They do not believe the burden of proof is on them before they go after this person’s life and livelihood.
No kidding. The one forum thread I read regarded a kid from Georgia Tech–they were talking about “how to handle him” and saying things like they’d have a scripted set of questions to ask him in one forum, while having all the perverted justice people in another separate, private forum, reading what he said. Then, they would go over his answers, decide which were the weakest, and attack him some more to “get him to give them the truth” and “find out the truth”. They referred to it as a “gang bang” and clearly had already tried and hung him, and were waiting to tear him apart. Not to find out if he was guilty of any actual sex crimes, or find out what his motives were, or to even find out if he really did intend to go through with the encounter. They’d clearly already decided he needed to be shredded, and were planning how to attack anything he said to get him to say what they wanted to hear.
They contacted his extended family, they contacted his work, were trying their damndest to get any federal security clearances he may have revoked, they sent transcripts to his friends, they were talking about posting flyers with photos, on and on and on, for no actual crime. For christ’s sake, they were even talking about how “the terrorists would find out about his perversion” and thus blackmail him into causing another 9-11, which was cheerfully added to his list of crimes. Dear god.
It’s like a tank full of hungry sharks, into which dropping the tiniest bit of blood will cause a feeding frenzy.
I’ve been reading there since this thread opened, and I’ve got to say that while I’m no fan of pedophiles who molest little kids, I do have a very strong interest in not seeing the lives of innocent people ruined out of overzealous desire to punish the ‘bad people’.
And over there at perverted-justice, not one single time in any one of the threads that I’ve read is there any kind of effort made on their part to prove guilt. It’s all on ‘well we post your info, you prove yourself innocent.’
Scary as hell how driven they are. It’s like they’ve already decided that shredding someone is their goal, so they might as well just go out and find someone, anyone, to shred. And they do it, sometimes hounding the person until he gives in to the ‘kid’ and then pouncing like a rabid tiger.
Don’t get me wrong: they might mean well, but they’ve fallen into what I’ve personally termed the Nietzsche Fallacy: “When hunting monsters, one must take care not to become a monster.”[sup]*[/sup]
Pedophiles who molest children are certainly something we need to do something about: even I would agree with that. On the other hand, I DON’T agree that pedophiles per se deserve to be punished, which is what this website seems to be advocating.
If we’re going to persecute them solely for Who They Are Attracted To (as opposed to What They DO), then we’re not any better than gay-bashers and homophobes, IMHO. Sure, we might not share their attractions; but we’re still hating them for who they want to fuck.
I learned on this very board that doing so was wrong.
[sup]* So called since someone on this board has attributed something very like this quote to N. I haven’t personally verified it; but I think it’s a good piece of advice.[/sup]
