I don’t get what some posters upthread are really saying here. What did they think should happen with this case? What did they want to happen?
This twice-convicted paedophile brought the challenge. He, a man who we know without a shadow of a doubt to be a predator who has already committed a form of sexual abuse against at least one actual child (the boy he sent “explicit photos” to, for which he had already been jailed before the Groom Resisters group caught him), wanted to claim the “human right” to pursue his criminal acts in private. He wanted to be free to groom and sexually abuse children in private.
What on earth could the court rule in this case? “Yes, of course you should have that right, crack on!” Really?
He brought the case. He forced the issue. And the only sane, just response was to say no, you don’t have any right to expectation of privacy when your clear intent is to commit a crime and hurt children.
What is the point of safeguarding if we would be prepared to sweep it aside because “privacy”? We have seen so many cases recently where safeguarding of children - and women - is being steamrollered out of the way, and that show that safeguarding is still not nearly well enough embedded in our society; any other ruling than this one would have been a massive, massive setback for what culture of safeguarding we do have. As it is, it is a much-needed boost to that culture of safeguarding, it is a clear message that the right of children not to be harmed by abusive adults takes precedence over abusive adults‘ “right” to privacy.
Why on earth would anyone conflate what happened here with the tragic murder of Bijan Ebrahim? He wasn’t murdered by people who had actually set up any kind of organisation with the specific intent to catch paedophiles. He was murdered by a vicious gang of neighbourhood bullies, who used the pretext of false accusations of paedophilia as an “excuse” for their hideous violence. No doubt he had been bullied by some of these people for years: the fact that local youths got their kicks out of destroying his hanging baskets just because they were something that a vulnerable, disabled man took pleasure in, and no adults were stopping them, is telling.
How can anyone try to frame that as equivalent in any way to what happened to Mark Sutherland? As AskingQuestions and Imnobody say, these groups are only going after people who are quite clearly not innocent at all, because somebody who wasn’t a predator wouldn’t take the bait in the first place.
I’m not even sure if they qualify as true vigilante groups; don’t vigilantes usually take “justice” into their own hands, as Ebrahim’s murderers did? These groups are holding the men they catch and turning them over to the police to be dealt with by the justice system.
I too am very grateful for the court’s decision here. Whether these anti-grooming groups need to be better regulated or somehow monitored is another issue for debate. But he opposite decision would have been absolutely catastrophic for children’s human rights, and I am very, very relieved it didn’t go that way.