To think more men than we think are undercover paedophiles

[josil]

Watching the pedophile hunter on Netflix - in summary it is about a vigilante group who go onto dating sites 18+ but post pictures of girls who look underage and then when the guy chats to them tells them they're 11 or 12 etc.

The men carry on chatting and then arrange to meet - they don't tell the girls they're too young.

This is so sad and troubling. These men were originally looking for women and then got drawn in by children. How many husbands, sons, work colleagues are doing this - what can we do as society to better sniff it out?

Sad and sickening. What can we do to protect children from this?

@PlasticineMeg
Did you see the program?
Nothing about them came across as "Blood thirsty thugs"
I'm guessing no.

No. You are feeding into a media frenzie and paranoia

I don’t agree. Most of the time vigilantes have no legal training and will contaminate evidence or break the chain of custody thus resulting in a case that is unprosecutable and the peadophile isn’t even charged. They then get even sneakier and harder to catch. For example they steal identities.

It’s best to leave law enforcement to the professionals. And if you want to do any law enforcement, you should pursue a career with the police or other government agencies. It’s never right to take the law into your own hands.

I think you are correct. I have a few close friends and sadly there is more that have disclosed childhood sexual abuse to me that haven’t.

I was raped at 15 by a man in his late 50s on a school trip.
He was mayor of our small town and very highly regarded.
Had I ever told back then (he convinced me it was my fault), I’m sure I would’ve been the one targeted and shamed.
Then, in his 70s, he committed suicide and left a note confessing to my rape and years of continued harassment.
Without that note, I don’t think even my female relatives would have believed me.
Sick effing bastard.

Than haven’t*

My own abuser was finally sent away when I was 21 so I think this is why people open up to me about this stuff as most of them haven’t told anyone but myself.

It's all so grim. What nobody wants to think is is that it's MY husband, my partner, my brother, My "lovely" Dad, my uncle, my (vom) grandad.

The market for sexual exploitation is global and massive and worth billions. So - who exactly is buying in? There's a "product" and a market and it's not just sad fucks in bedsits buying it.

who are buying this/these people/children/women/girls/babies

Vigilante groups will often impede police proceedings because the paedophile can claim unfair trial as it's all in public.

Stinton Hunter is the guy behind this Netflicks documentary (which was originally aired on TV in 2014) was abused himself. Thats why he does this. Not that I agree with it. They don't use pictures of kids, they use, with concent young looking adults.

I work in Social care. Many pedophiles out there.

I haven’t seen it but IME one vigilante groups is as much the same as the next and I have no desire whatsoever to watch something like this. The police carry out very similar operations, and they’re professionals. these groups would be better spent leaving it to the experts and doing something to help victims, such as voluntary support work, but then they wouldn’t get the glory they clearly seek for that so that’s probably why they don’t do it

Netflix. The company that produced this absolute travesty of a film:

www.bustle.com/entertainment/netflix-cuties-controversy-explained

I am all for anything that protects children from being harmed.

I agree OP as growing up I was regularly hit on by older men when I was in my early and mid teens. I remember when I was 13 a man of around 30 told my friend (17 year old who worked with him) that he would love to ride the fuck out of me. At the time I took it as a compliment. It chills me now. The brother of one of my friends had an obsession with me when I was 14, he was 27. Again, I thought it was because I was pretty. Even grown men on the street would hit on me and my friends when we were in school uniform. This was the late 90s. I honestly didn't see anything wrong with it as the time, I thought I was worldly but I was really naive, I knew I was under age of course but I thought of myself as a woman not a child. Very very naive.

As a mother of daughters it concerns me how many creeps are around, nothing has changed since the 90s, they just have to be a bit more low key. Although I can't stand these vigilante groups, I can't imagine what sort of man would want to do that, either they are trying to hide something themselves or as a pp pointed out they love the power trip. The police have already said it actually hinders their cases. It's all well and good catching a paedo but bringing him to justice might be another story. Leave it to the professionals.

these hunters may think they are doing right, but it encourages others to do the same without skills, training, etc. also whips up a bit of a frenzy in the media/social media and can have very negative consequences such as failed prosecutions. Remember the stories from a few years ago when people were attacking pediatricians. leave it to the proper authorities

filmdaily.co/news/cuties-wtf-moments/

I can remember watching the programme on Shannon Matthews disappearance. Police interviewed all known sex offenders, not just paedophiles, in the local area . In a 20 mile radius of her home there were 1400 registered sex offenders. And those are just the registered ones!

Absolutely this. There is no place for vigilantes in this world, that's why we have the police. They can fuck up investigations, biais juries, target innocent people, and target people based on their own biases instead of the evidence. Look at the mob that attacked a paediatrician in the 90s because they were too fucking stupid to realise that was a job title. Look at the number of black men killed in America because they don't fit in or behave 'as they should'. If you think vigilante justice is a solution to anything, you're a moron.

Oh 100%. Hence 1 in 7 children being victims. It's horrific and in some places relatively accepted I'll never forget watching a documentary where in Japan there were companies making sex dolls of children. Just awful. At least two teachers were convicted from my secondary school.

Don’t ask me why I did this because I don’t really know/remember why - A few years ago when I was about 19, me and my bf made a tinder account as a ‘joke’ and I matched with a 40+ year old man in my local area. I told him I was actually only 15 just to see if he would still meet up with me and he said yes (I used a photo of myself at 18 on the profile but I look a lot younger than my age). I told him to meet me at a certain location in my town to have sex. He went to the location (obviously I wasn’t there) and sent photos of where he was and asked me why I wasn’t there. It was incredibly easy for me to find this person and we had a few mutual friends on Facebook. I wasn’t even originally trying to bait a pedophile I just wanted to test him..

So yes I definitely agree with you

I watched this too and it’s floored me.

I wonder about some of these vigilantes as well, I find them very odd

Yes, there are more sex offenders out there than most people think (I know because I often had to house them when I was working). I don't agree with vigilantes, as we then descend into anyone taking the law into their own hands for anything. I understand that many have very strong feelings and ,I am no apologist for any sex offender, but I still think it is better to let the rule of law prevail. There have been lots of cases of 'weird guys' being horribly abused for nothing. And, again, can no-one remember when a paediatrician was assaulted, or maybe it was that their house was surrounded by a mob because some idiot didn't know the difference between paedophile and paediatrician?

There are not necessarily more paedophiles it's just that the Internet and freely available child porn has given more people easy access to view children being abused.

This ^^

Anyone remember the 1980s? The 'newspaper' with the largest circulation had half naked children on p3, Mandy Smith was groomed in public and her abuser is still out and about.

And some of those pics would now be illegal.

Look at the way women / girls are treated in mainstream films, the original True Grit film has a spanking scene that I'm sure is only there for the male audience.

More recently countdowns on when certain girls would be 16, legally they would still be children but hey that's a detail.

Stonewall and other groups falling for 'MAP'.

It's all around us, we warn our children and clutch pearls when a neighbour is arrested but the only way to get treatment is to commit a crime.

I am not for one second saying it should be normal, or 'just a thing' it never should but there needs to be a way for people, mostly men, to access help before they touch a child.

No. Your suggestion is supported neither by statistics nor by heresay/people’s experiences. Men are undoubtedly almost the sole perpetrators of this crime. There are exceptions, but these are very rare.

Perhaps as accomplices to men, but those impulses just aren't as common in women. I'd wager that 99% of all sexual perversions are the province of men.

My youngest daughter is 12. Her best friend of the same age is TINY. She probably looks 10 or 11, whereas my daughter is about 5'7" and looks older. My daughter tells me her friend gets eyed up by men in the street all the time.
So yes, I think many more men are attracted to children than you'd think.

My ex went on a chat site for 18+ years ago. A "girl" started chatting with him, and then said she was 15 or something. Too young. My ex said that she shouldn't be on this site, there are some wrong'uns about, and she should go and talk to her mum and dad. After a few more exchanges, she levelled with him and revealed that she was in fact an adult pedophile hunter. So, as much as I don't like my ex, and he was a shit in other ways, at least he wasn't a nonce.