sexual abuse

Pedophile Hunter Podcast

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

To start on a light note, and at the risk of making a series of incredibly bad puns, I wish to note that in our American linguist Inc. lexicon we have had fortune hunters, Easter egg hunters, the infamous and racist “Great White Hunters,” sunken treasure hunters, and especially in America which probably still is one of the preeminent shopper cultures, the ever famous “bargain hunters.”

To this list I wish to add a new phenomenon that took me somewhat by surprise a very few days ago when one of my trusty search bots which brings me legal, psychiatric, philosophical, social policy related terms having to do with the infamous topic of pedophilia, turned up a one episode installment of The Guardian British newspaper’s podcast series which focused on a group in Scotland known as the Wolfpack, and specifically a housewife who lives east of Glasgow who heads up a loose network of citizen pedophile hunters.

I have enclosed herein the URL link to this single podcast episode which features the reporter Libby Brooks and her profile of the housewife “Cici.”

The loose-knit pedophile hunting organization, Wolfpack apparently has been in existence for at least 18 months according to the podcast. Their sting operations have resulted in prosecutions on an impressive frequency of approximately four per month. This group apparently consists of ordinary citizens who pose as underage minors on social media websites and make themselves available in disguise and “pick up” pedophiles who frequent such sites and make online overtures to the hunters. The hunters then reel them in with a series of back and forth social media texts and posts and eventually meet up with the predatory pedophiles in person. The hunters take care to identify themselves as underage and state their ages variously as below the age of consent in the United Kingdom. This is an effort to give the predators every opportunity to back out of the interaction, I suppose to avoid the taint of illegal entrapment. I make this tentative assertion out of knowing ignorance, as I have NO idea about how the concept of entrapment is handled in the UK.

The podcast is sort of fascinating because these interactions are not only recorded but are also streamed live (!) on Facebook and have gobs of interested persons who view them live. The reactions of the pedophiles when they realize they have been nabbed and apprehended ranges from dishonest excuses to actually emotionally breaking down crying etc. as the police are called and close in to arrest them.

There is commentary that is very well done to give the listener a great deal to think about and reflect upon. I, for instance, found myself still wondering from an American’s point of view with a cautious backdrop of respect for an individual’s legal rights even when being arrested, of worrying that this still constituted a degree of entrapment. But the other moralistic, ethical, and mental health side to me, still felt that this was probably a legitimate enterprise although a very novel and unique one. Part of me could not help but applaud the efforts of these citizen anti-pedophile crusaders.

I don’t know of a similar effort in my home country the United States. I have no idea how this would be accepted in legal circles and how law enforcement agencies at any level whether local regional state level or federal–national would accept and work with such an effort. I have known for years that with the rise of the Internet many law enforcement agencies have begun to go after sexual predators utilizing the Internet as a platform to draw these individuals out, and utilize similar techniques of posing as underage vulnerable individuals and to gather enough proof, evidence and confirmation of the identities of such individuals thereby making possible legal arrests and prosecutions. I have not known of citizens undertaking such efforts though, for all I know, such efforts have been ongoing for years and I just haven’t run across them.

But this podcast episode is fascinating since it tells all in that it records the face-to-face interactions once the pedophiles are revealed. And the technique of streaming and broadcasting the interactions with the ped for pedophiles live on Facebook was quite startling to me and perhaps altogether a new phenomenon in this arena.

I leave it to the reader to listen to this podcast episode from The Guardian newspaper and render their own judgment.

Josh Duggar reportedly enters “treamtnet”

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I posted painfully after much professional self deliberation on one segment about the evolving soap opera of “America’s Family,” the Duggars, the TLC channel tv family with “19 and Counting,” children. This show had been on for years and as it turned out was too  good to be true. It emerged earlier this year that the eldest son who molested young girls outside the family and as a teen had incested reportedly two of his own sisters. The family concealed all this from the TLC folks and just about everyone else. They referred the lad for “treatment” {and truly I use that term very loosely and with the greatest of reservations] to a friend of the family, a law enforcement person who put him to work for three months, had no mental health experience and as far as is known this lad received no real counseling, and was not reported as sex offender which the media seems to have forgotten would have been the legally mandated duty of this officer. The family waited until the statute of limitations was expired for such a crime of an adolescent, then the story started to emerge when the son was the front man for a Christian morals advocacy organization and his escapes even as an adult were emerging.

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But He Came From Such A “Nice” Family

~ Frank ~ Leave a comment

The above title to this post is actually a favored euphemistic comment offered by Southerners, and perhaps in other regions of the the USA, when perplexed observers, especially small townsfolk, offer to explain the seemingly inexplicable, ‘when someone goes bad.’ I think in the history of the Old South, it was used to describe people’s reactions to news that a well regarded person in the community had surprised if not stupefied everyone who knew that person, by doing some totally out of character bad deed. The local long time lawyer embezzling an elderly lady’s fortune, the head of the local town and sometimes only bank in the 1930’s making off with the bank’s funds and bankrupting the entire town etc. But much more often the scenario would involve that old bugaboo of sex. A scandalous affair, murder of a previous secreted paramour, backsliding into “sin,” and committing some crime “under the influence.” The reason/excuse/rationalization or just plain befuddled explanation offered to one’s friends or even if only to oneself, was the shibboleth, that ‘he [still] came from a nice family.” This harkened back to the days of the Antebellum South where good taste, being racially true and pure, whatever that was, always opening doors for ladies, always being polite and courteous to your worst enemy of romantic rival, having :good rearing,” by a “respected family” that was very successful, as somehow in most societies, perhaps perverted to an extreme in our modern business emphasis of greed and wealth as the only true standards of measure of a person, success equaled inviolate certainly of a steady moral compass in that person.

This past week we have had two nearly simultaneous scandals involving on the one hand, one of our lauded and over-idealized families of the national psyche, and a former highly regarded, middle America, salt of the earth, pillar of the community politician and warmly regarded former leader of Congress, emerge under new undeniable clouds of nefarious and to use a dated perhaps non “PC” [politically correct] phrase, “perverted’ circumstances. Of course I am referring to the public plights and perhaps overly well deserved media lashings now being suffered by Joshua Duggar of the “19 Kids and Counting,” TLC family reality television show about the now famous Duggar family, and, the former and longest serving in USA political history’s Speaker of the House, the former Honorable Dennis Hastert of the Midwest, the moral center point of our nation’s moral center if there is one.

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