“It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven’t fully grappled with.” The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. (They also paid Perverted-Justice more than a hundred thousand dollars per instance.) When a man arranged a meeting with a supposed teen at the sting house, he would instead be confronted by Hansen, and by a squad of local cops ready to charge him with online solicitation of a minor, a crime punishable by between five and ten years in prison.Īlthough there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it’s “this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with,” Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of “ Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State,” said. NBC producers gave the group’s operations a prime-time makeover: renting a house and rigging it with cameras, and hiring young-looking actors to pose as decoys. The segment’s host, Chris Hansen, had heard about Perverted-Justice, a watchdog group whose members posed as teen-agers in chat rooms. In 2019, NBC identified about thirty predator-catcher online groups scattered across the country recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year.Ĭam was eight years old in 2004, when “To Catch a Predator” began airing on “Dateline,” on NBC. (Earlier this year, a sting operation spiralled into a fistfight in a North Carolina Target, ending with a predator catcher shot in the leg.) The most popular examples have hundreds of thousands of views, and have inspired people to bring the trend to their own town. They typically follow the formula made famous by the TV segment “To Catch a Predator” in the early two-thousands, but with a more chaotic, D.I.Y. In the past few years, they have become a minor YouTube phenomenon, one of the platform’s proliferating subgenres that can feel ubiquitous in some parts of the online universe yet invisible in others. Predator-hunter videos take an enduring social-media trend-performing stunts for clout-and add a dash of vigilante justice and participatory true crime. (Cam asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because she fears retaliation.) “And I’m, like, ‘O.K., sure, I’ll follow.’ ” “They were, like, ‘What if we do something like this locally?’ ” Cam, who lives in Odessa, Texas, told me. Her husband and her brother-in-law were inspired. And here were regular people, not cops or television journalists, actually doing something about it. The thought of adult men attempting to meet up with children got Cam’s blood boiling. Eventually, the man walks or runs away, as his name and license-plate number flash on the screen. The predator catchers pepper him with questions and accusations: “Why are you chatting with kids online?” “You’re a pervert, you’re nasty.” They announce that they’re going to call the police, or that they’ve already called the police. He denies everything, or prays to God, or buries his face in his hands, or starts yelling. The man’s face betrays what is about to happen. “Did you come here to meet a kid?” they say loudly. The predator catchers approach, phones up, cameras already recording. The camera zeroes in on a man standing by himself, furtively checking his phone, his posture betraying anxious anticipation. Then, the scene shifts to the fluorescent-lit aisles of a Target, or to the parking lot outside a Dollar General. The pair arranges to meet up-after school, the “teen-ager” might say, I can get my mom to drop me off. After some brief hesitation-Do you mind my age? Your parents won’t know?-the adult’s messages turn more explicit. The videos, which were made by groups like Dads Against Predators, the Predator Catchers Alliance, or the Alabama Predator Poachers, tend to follow a similar template, opening with screenshots of flirty messages exchanged between an adult man and someone purporting to be a teen-age girl or boy, set to an ominous soundtrack. A couple of years ago, when Cam, her husband, and her brother-in-law would sit around watching YouTube, a certain kind of video kept popping up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |