Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution.
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How does one get "tricked" into meeting a child for sex, and then show up?
I've never been tricked into meeting a child for a sexual encounter...
From the article:
"In October, students at Assumption University in Massachusetts allegedly lured a 22-year-old man to campus, called him a predator and chased and attacked him when he tried to escape, according to a police report. After reviewing the man’s Tinder messages, officers said the man had thought he was meeting an 18-year-old student, not a 17-year-old, as the students had alleged."Thats how. You lie.
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You forgot the /s....
I never use /s. /s is the training wheels of online comments. /s is for cowards. Ride or die baby!
If anyone takes me seriously, it's their own damn fault.
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How does one get "tricked" into meeting a child for sex, and then show up?
I've never been tricked into meeting a child for a sexual encounter...
You are working under the assumption that these "pedo hunter" groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.
Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:
Innocent dad tortured and killed by group of chainsaw-wielding ‘paedophile hunters’
A gang of vigilantes tortured and killed a father of eight as they tried to force a confession out of him for crimes he didn't commit.
The case of the brutal torture and murder of Bradley 'BJ' Lyons, which shook Australia in December 2018, is once again under the spotlight as a jury has brought to justice the gang leader, Albert Thorn, and some of his mates who helped during the hideous attack.
Mr Lyons was referred to the gang by his wife Jana Hooper, who had falsely accused her husband of sexually assaulting two of her teenage daughters.
Thorn, the leader of the vigilante gang with a specific hatred for paedophiles, was found guilty this month of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Mr Lyons. Later this year, he will face a pre-sentence hearing.
Two other members of the gang who took part in the ordeal, Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, were found not guilty last week of the killing of the father.And I can't tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here's one example, and here's another, here's one more, and here's yet another.
These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don't care who gets hurt or killed in the process.
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I never use /s. /s is the training wheels of online comments. /s is for cowards. Ride or die baby!
If anyone takes me seriously, it's their own damn fault.
Ha, rock on with your bad self.
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I’m going to be honest, I’m suspicious of every single ‘pedophile hunter’. They are going after a demographic that people will not rush to defend, even if innocent.
Also, these ‘hunters’ probably have something shady going on in their own lives, and this is some form of projection that they also profit off of.
This type of people exist in every generation, whether forming a mob to enforce segregation or engaging in pogroms.
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Vigilantism is on the rise regardless, Either because the police are incompetent / carefree about the complaints. or because individuals are overzealous, dont undrestand or agree with the law, and decide to cosplay as the punisher.
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There's one more angle to this - apart from the raise in vigilante violence and messing up with police operations which both are very valid.
Just as we stopped getting TV feeds constantly equating pedophiles to child molesters, those guys stepped in to fill the void.
Pedophiles are not inherently child molesters. This kind of equation is not only wrong, it also adds to promoting dangerous behaviors among them.
Plenty of pedophiles will never abuse a single child, knowing full well it is dangerous and harmful for minors to be engaged in such relationships. However, the more we equate pedophiles to predators, the more people, especially in the emotionally vulnerable groups like teen pedophiles, will actually accept themselves in this role. Among those who stands against this anyway, plenty will become suicidal, not seeing an option to live a non-offending life.
There's no such thing as a "non-harmful" pedofile.
Either you're actively molesting children (yes...even teens), or you're consuming the CP that is the result of OTHER people abusing children by forcing them to participate and worse.
You don't get to say "its not repulsive to consume the product as long as youre not a creator of it". Consuming the end result is still participating in it.
I can't believe that even has to be pointed out.
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From the article:
"In October, students at Assumption University in Massachusetts allegedly lured a 22-year-old man to campus, called him a predator and chased and attacked him when he tried to escape, according to a police report. After reviewing the man’s Tinder messages, officers said the man had thought he was meeting an 18-year-old student, not a 17-year-old, as the students had alleged."Thats how. You lie.
Also, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16.
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There's no such thing as a "non-harmful" pedofile.
Either you're actively molesting children (yes...even teens), or you're consuming the CP that is the result of OTHER people abusing children by forcing them to participate and worse.
You don't get to say "its not repulsive to consume the product as long as youre not a creator of it". Consuming the end result is still participating in it.
I can't believe that even has to be pointed out.
You're clearly missing several possibilities.
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Nazis: If you support LGBT you're a pedophile. And we're already coming for you.
People, for some fucking reason: Pedophiles get fucked, do what you want to them, erase them at any cost!!
"Please hold this paper target in front of your face while I shoot at it."
"Sounds dangerous but I see you are aiming at the paper so I should be fine."
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There's no such thing as a "non-harmful" pedofile.
Either you're actively molesting children (yes...even teens), or you're consuming the CP that is the result of OTHER people abusing children by forcing them to participate and worse.
You don't get to say "its not repulsive to consume the product as long as youre not a creator of it". Consuming the end result is still participating in it.
I can't believe that even has to be pointed out.
...or you do neither of those?
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I'm going go assume from your instance you're not American, but the big flaw in your logic is if you come after me with a pipe, I'm absolutely within my rights to put holes into you until you stop moving.
Vigalante justice is going to get the people who think they're "doing a good thing" killed, and with zero consequences to the pedos who shoot them.
Perhaps a more adult, informed, nuanced take is of use here?
Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.
In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.
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No, I think this is it. This is the media doing what media does
Solid argument 10/10 on the gymnastics routine.
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I don't think that's true. Half of his kids have disowned him. He has a trans child he says was "killed by wokeness" who hates his guts.
Yeah, got to go up the line of ancestry I guess to find all his nazi supporting family.
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I monitor far-right groups pretty intensively and a good chunk of Paedophile Hunters are key organisers of said groups.
Its also not uncommon for far-right groups to be family operations where the adults will groom their teenage children into organizing and encourage their children to date other, often older, fascist organisers.
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It's unfortunate this has to be taken into the hands of vigilantes. But it seems to me a necessary evil.
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Yea, all of that is not admissible in court too. And they often end up attacking innocent people, additionally it labels them a pedo so, they instantly get fired, lose their wives, children, friends,,etc
Eyup, I remember this one guy this dude found who was insanely guilty. Was not only in a "relationship" with a child, but was trying to get him to do cocaine.
The pedo-hunter who was onto him decided the best thing to do wasn't to call the cops, but to harass him in a target and make a scene. So much so that the Target staff thought the hunter, not the pedo, was the criminal.
Police were called and they wound up arresting the pedo upon realizing the situation, but due to the harassment, the way the evidence was collected, and all that...
The only thing they could get him on was a traffic violation when the pedo was driving away from the Target.
My advice for people is this - Don't be a pedo-hunter, while it is noble that you wanna fight back against the cruelty of the world.. The truth is you're going to wind up doing more harm than good unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing. If you let your anger control how you do investigations, you're not that much different from the killer cops that butcher the innocent.
Especially since sex crimes are ones where the mere accusation is enough to ruin people's lives. I should know, I was nearly expelled at my Community College because a guidance consular blanket accused me of attacking a woman at her car. It was luck, a phone call to her boss, playing the autism card, and calling the bluff... asking her to prove the attack, provide witnesses, show me the police report, and she basically dropped everything and apologized when she couldn't. And I knew she couldn't, because I do not attack people, Hell, I have the muscle mass of Melvin Junko BEFORE he became the Toxic Avenger, even if I wanted to I'd just get my ass beat.
Later she tried it again over me using a female restroom as a transwoman, thankfully this was after Obama amended Title IX to cover transpeole so I once again had an Uno Reverse card. So I just got a call from her boss telling me to use whatever restroom I wanted and to ignore her.
I don't know what's wrong with that person or why she was so hellbent on getting me kicked out of school, but.. I think of her a lot, not only because she traumatized me with her false accusations, but because thanks to her, I do know that false accusations do indeed happen, and sometimes they come from powerful people.
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People get called things over fanfics and stuff. Innocent people have plenty to be afraid of
As a writer myself, I can only imagine how many the "All characters are 18 or older unless specifically said otherwise" blurb has saved. I feel like that blurb has become standard in fanworks and web original stories, even when they don't involve sex. If there's even the slightest chance anything that happens could be interpreted as someone's kink, you better believe it's there now.
I actually have one character from a series I wrote ages ago, I kind of abandoned it because I'm not edgy anymore, but I still use the lead character from time to time for art projects; commissions mostly, as she did have a fun character design being an undead gerbil and all.
I've retroactively upped her age from 17 to 19, just to be safe.
Though as I said, I was REALLY edgy when I wrote the book series (I was around 19 myself, I'm 33 now), so this is a change I'm actually happy to have made.
It wasn't pornographic, it was based on the movie "I Spit On Your Grave", only if the lead character was killed and got revenge from beyond the grave, so there was a sex scene with her, but it was intended to be immorally wrong and disturbing... and mostly talked about how this otherwise fearless street tough was suffering.... It was also over quick as the point of the book was that she died horribly, but was given a chance at revenge in the afterlife. (There wasn't even a content warning, because this was so long ago that "CWs" weren't a thing)
I've actually considered doing a reboot of her story and making it lighter and softer, maybe removing the rape from her death entirely.
Not because of fears of being targeted mind you, but because I like the character I created and would love to tell more stories with her, but I'm not the edgelord I was when I first wrote her and if I wrote about her today would never have handled her story the way I did.
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Cops are well known to be rapists, ignore rapists, and even protect rapists. Not to mention the rampant domestic violence they engage in.
Why would you assime.cops have any interests in punishing their cohoet?
Wow, such a "hot" take. No wonder people are afraid to seek help, moron.
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What this ultimately amounts to is the worst actors using a blanket justification to carry out revenge fantasies against whatever marginalized group they're fixated on.
If you happen to be part of any of these marginalized groups, now would be the time to get armed and get dangerous. It would be great if we lived in a functioning society where this wasn't necessary, but the failure of so many of our institutions is slowly rewinding our social fabric back to wild west times.
