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.
Current methods of therapy aimed at reducing child abuse rates go very strongly on this - pedophiles should face message of them not being inherently dangerous, not the message of them being an immediate and imminent danger. Not only this is scientifically correct, it is actually useful in making these people safer for others.
That’s an interesting and reasonable take.
I’m actually surprised you are not down voted to oblivion!Guess this is what happens when you meet real people online who are not artificially enraged - a productive conversation!
Not only that, but it both reduces the chance of someone going to get help, because they don’t want to be hunted down, and reporting, because someone who knows of them might not want to see them be lynched, and won’t report them for that reason.
Absolutely!
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.
…or you do neither of those?
The pedophiles being attacked are actively hunting, otherwise, they wouldn’t be caught in a trap…
Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.
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.
Also, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16.
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.
Sure, but shows of this kind commonly imply that all pedophiles are child abusers and all child abusers are pedophiles, neither of which is true - and such equations have real-world negative implications.
In practice, I don’t see how I would even know someone is a pedophile if they didn’t act on their inclinations. I guess they could publicly declare it but that seems unwise.
I would be concerned if the Internet vigilantes ran with unsubstantiated rumors, like if say Elon musk just called someone a pedophile or of the blue.
This is one of the most problematic parts about vigilante justice and why it should be gone for good, regardless of what they are trying to achieve.
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Nope, I’m not getting there. Sure, ephebophilia is a thing, and so is hebephilia, but in a given context there’s no point in this distinction.
I’m only saying that many cases of child abuse do not involve pedophiles/hebephiles/ephebophiles/whatever. Children are the easiest to take advantage of, and this is what drives quite a few hypersexual non-pedophiles to become child abusers despite not being predominantly attracted to children/minors to begin with.
Regardless of reasons, whoever abuses children deserves punishment - although I would much prefer for the police, not vigilantes, to be involved in it.
Why would you expect rapists to punish rapists?
Alright bud, you went too far into angry trolling territory.
Gosh, what .today has become these days…
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 assume cops have any interests in punishing their cohort?
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.
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.
Look at how much conspiracy content especially after 2016 focused on pedophilia. A lot of it. That carried over into this
Unsurprising as most of the “pedophile hunters” are extremist by nature, so it makes sense why they would also subscribe to extremist ideologies like Nazism and queerphobia.
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.”
There’s one in the white house. Why don’t they seem to care about that one?
I always knew there was something wrong with that these people were doing but couldn’t exactly put my finger on it and never talked about it because people would’ve yelled at me and used false dillema arguments like many people who criticized them back them recieved “You support pedophiles you removed”
One of these groups that operate out of the Pacific North West employs psychologists to create profiles on people the contact online. They target non-sex related forums like grief or mental health related support groups online. They’ll spend as much time as needed to hook these men and make them dependent on their carefully crafted online personas and even drive away their outside support groups to isolate them.
Regardless of your opinion of these individuals, going out of your way to exploit a vulnerable person and turn them into something their not is incredibly fucked up.
Hell, KiwiFarms style tactics is becoming more and more common and mainstream. It’s on Lemmy too.
I had a friend who was visiting Florida, and this vigilante group from some church setup a Grindr account to catch gay men. They made a profile of a guy in his 20s, had convos and planned to meet, then asked him to talk on some other platform, where his profile said he was underage. Keep in mind, this is just a fictional person. And the Florida court loves to toss LGBT in jail, so beware out there.
You can use that against them, say they are in the church right now
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.
Or because the facade of “justice” is crumbling to reveal the truth of heirarchy behind it.
They should be stalking the Repuglicans in Washington. Make a ton of bounty I bet
So Conservative Pedo apologists are going to be using this to hunt Lgbtq people and the current culture war of “this is child indoctrination” despite everyone knowing that’s not how this works is open season pass.
Really makes me regret not arming myself two years ago
Does a criminal arrest and conviction not matter to anyone before ganging up to take someones life?
You would think an allegation serious enough to take someone’s life would be at least charged by some law enforcement agency, many of these crimes require they are reported by law, and a mandatory arrest must happen if it is reported. There should be no way for anyone to be free, needing to be hunted, without a criminal history. No distinction is made between someone with a criminal history and someone without, the allegation has become enough to destroy reputations, careers and lives. History is full of situations where an other type of label and class with no rights or due process is created. Then it is applied to people as needed to eliminate them. With LGBT stuff specifically, you see the lines between these labels being blurred. Even in Russia they have blurred the lines between LGBT, child abuse, domestic terrorism and dangers to national security. It doesn’t take much imagination to see it be applied in the U.S. QAnon was proof that anyone can be labelled by a large number of people with real actions taken to harm them, without any kind of formal process or charges. Just rumors that lead to vigilantes.
At some point, there is no difference between that, Daniel Penny, or Luigi Manigone. From every side, we all agree that summary executions are acceptable. The end result of this is a break down of civil society as the justifications for extrajudicial murder expand to include as many things as necessary… Even if you take something like the damage Kendrick Lamar did to Drake’s career and reputation, I believe his legal defense over defamation is that it was meant as a joke. How many people would consider using these methods if they saw Drake? A lot of time has passed since that song was released, where are the criminal charges to match the damage done to him?
This only happens because there is rarely justice from the state, in these cases.
How many clergy who are rapists still walk around, protected by the state?
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Except sometimes “pedophile” actually means “trans person just living.” The right claims all trans people are groomers.
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If someone shows up with the intent to fuck a minor, absolutely, but I guarantee those aren’t the only targets vigilantism catches.
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Likely, or are likely to mistakenly target a trans person who happens to be around while they’re hunting the person they cat fished. The people who are okay with extrajudicial violence are mostly conservatives. What’s to say the people willing to go to such lengths to hurt someone wouldn’t take the opportunity when they see someone they believe is a groomer and pedophile simply for being trans? It’s easy to expand the definition, and we’ve seen it happen in the past. It’s happening right now in rhetoric. Violence against trans people is already statistically high.
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Right. My lived experience doesn’t matter, nor the statistics. I’m not seeking attention, I, like the majority of people reading this, am alarmed. I’m seeing people I care about and the community around me hurt every day, and you think “gender rules my life.” Not a person worth listening to. When was the last time you got harassed in public for something intrinsic to yourself? For my trans wife, it was today. If you seriously think that trans people aren’t currently at the front of the culture war, you’re deaf, ignorant, or lying. Watch literally any pundit speak, any newscast, or any political debate around the country. Then tell me trans people shouldn’t be concerned about violent rhetoric aimed at people they’re increasingly being lumped in with. Bigot or stupid, I won’t debate you on the reality plain around me daily.
