Melissa and I just watched a couple of hours of To Catch a Predator, a series of Dateline special investigations about so-called "child predators." Feel free to check out the site and watch some videos. Ultimately, though, I believe this series is doing more harm than good.
Here's how it works:
1. Random guy starts talking to police decoy online.
2. Decoy pretends to be a 13 year old girl (or boy) and starts talking about sex.
3. Random guy starts to enjoy the fantasy, starts saying stupid things.
4. Decoy gets guy to agree to meet.
5. Random guy, in a moment of sheer stupidity, agrees to meet.
6. Random guy goes to decoy house.
7. Guy gets busted by Dateline and then the cops.
8. Guy's life is essentially ruined.
In 90% of the cases, I'd say the guys were in a moment of stupidity. I doubt any of them would have really done anything with a child. They were scared out of their minds when they got caught, not like the smug serial killers or rapists who say they'd do it again. One of the men was a doctor who was probably just having a mid-life crisis. Now he has probably lost his medical license. Just reading stories of child molesters shows you the kind of people who really do the molesting. Most of the time, they are pretty deranged and a lot more clever than to fall into the trap of a sting. A lot of them also prefer sex with minors (shudder), whereas most of these men were just playing around with a fantasy - like playing with fire. Yes, it's a sick fantasy, but the internet is a pretty sick place.
Most of these men were completely normal. They weren't smarmy, shady creeps. They were normal guys. Guess what? They had sexual addictions. And guess what else? Odds are that the cops arresting these guys have a sexual addiction as well.
According to one site, there were 27.5 million U.S. visitors to adult-oriented pornographic Web sites in January 2002, of which about 72% of visitors were men and 28% women.
Did you catch that? 27.5 million Americans in 2002. And that's five years ago, folks. According to US News and World Report, the pornography industry takes in more than $8 billion a year (I've seen higher figures elsewhere), which is more than rock and country music, and more than all Broadway productions, theater, ballet, jazz and classical music combined.
So here's the problem. What on earth is randomly throwing in prison a bunch of normal guys going to accomplish? A 2002 study determined that Hollywood currently releases 11,000 adult movies per year – more than 20 times the mainstream movie production. You get the idea. You can find more of these shocking statistics here (at a site which is a particular favorite of mine). I'm betting that given enough prompting and begging and goading, a lot of men in this country would succumb to the temptation of illegal sex. If you don't believe me, go read up on sex tourism.
Maybe we should start working on the root of the problem. You know, like the fact that there was a Victoria's Secret ad on the Dateline web site when I was working on this post (see screenshot). My point is precisely the title of this post: what do you expect? In a country where the revenues of the porn industry are more than those of the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined, is it any wonder when women have become degraded so much that children are being sought after as the next "sexual high"?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending any of these men. What they did (or intended to do) was wrong, and with Proverbs I ask: "Can a man take fire to his chest and expect not to be burned?" I am saying, though, that simply generating criminals through baiting ordinary sex addicts and then throwing them in jail isn't going to solve anything. How can we only condemn the illegal aspects of these cases without condemning first the widespread problem of infidelity through porn?
That's enough for tonight.
Peace,
Sam
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