Dateline NBC
Chris Hansen of “Dateline NBC,” which has worked
closely with Perverted-Justice.com, filming
“To Catch a Predator” in Petaluma, Calif.
Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along
By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: December 13, 2006
Last month, the Web site Perverted-Justice.com posted news of the conviction of Sean Young, a Wisconsin man sentenced to 10 years in state prison for soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl. According to a transcript of an online chat posted on the site, at one point Mr. Young had asked the girl, identified only as Billie, what she was wearing. When she answered “sweats,” Mr. Young typed back that if she were his daughter, “i’d make u wear sexy clthes.”
Billie turned out to be an adult volunteer for Perverted Justice, an anti-pedophile group, and when Mr. Young drove to a house where he expected to meet the teenager for sex, he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.
The conviction was logged as the 104th that Perverted Justice says it has been responsible for since 2003, a tally that as of yesterday had reached 113. What started as one man’s quest to rid his regional Yahoo chat room of lewd adults has grown into a nationwide force of cyberspace vigilantes, financed by a network television program hungry for ratings.
“It’s a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource,” said Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.
Perverted Justice is best known for putting its online volunteers at the disposal of the television newsmagazine “Dateline NBC,” which has broadcast 11 highly rated programs in which would-be pedophiles are lured to “sting houses,” only to be surprised by a camera crew and, usually, the police.
Despite that publicity, the inner workings of Perverted Justice and its reclusive founder remain largely a mystery, even as the group has emerged as one of the most effective unofficial law enforcement groups in the country, a kind of Neighborhood Watch of the Net. But the group is also criticized by some legal and law enforcement experts, who accuse it of entrapment, making mistakes that ruin innocent lives and, paradoxically, disseminating its own brand of child pornography.
Peter D. Greenspun, a lawyer who defended a rabbi from Rockville, Md., caught in a “Dateline” sting arranged by Perverted Justice, said that by posting online transcripts of conversations between would-be child molesters and volunteers posing as 12- and 13-year-olds, Perverted Justice was encouraging, rather than deterring, pedophiles.
“They are putting out for unfiltered, unrestricted public consumption the most graphic sexual material that they themselves say is of a perverted nature,” Mr. Greenspun said.
You could argue that it was entrapment, but here's the deal: these filthy motherfuckers aren't only looking for sex from kids, they SHOW UP AT THEIR HOUSES.
These men all are online, they're being told up front that they are chatting with teenagers, and they continue to proposition them for sex. I mean, you're told that you're talking to a 13 year old, and you ask her about blow jobs and plan to bring her beer?
Then to top it off, they SHOW UP AT THEIR HOUSES. Yes, they go from chat to sex sometimes within hours.
Entrapment is trying to entice someone to do something they might not have done. These men are looking for sex from minors. That's why they're online, to solicit sex from children. And everyone one of these men would have assaulted a child if given the chance to do so.
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