A good read.
I highly recommend this article in Esquire Magazine by Luke Dittrich on the NBC Dateline show "To Catch a Predator" in which cops in various US towns team up with a civilian group called Perverted Justice to conduct sting operations on internet child predators. The article recounts events leading to the suicide of Bill Conradt, who after flirting online with a Perverted Justice member posing as a thirteen year old, opts out of coming to meet his would-be lover at the PeeJ bait house and ends up with a swat team entering his own home.
The blow-by-blow is harrowing and the characters rounding out the tragedy fascinating. But most affecting is Dittrich's conclusion:
Is it possible that Bill Conradt, an adult pretending to be a teenager, might have suspected, correctly, that “Luke” was also an adult pretending? Yes: Everybody knows that the Internet is a swamp of false identities. And is there any evidence that Conradt had ever acted on the longings that his chats illuminated? On the contrary, he chose not to when presented with the opportunity. Was it morally wrong for Bill Conradt to engage in online sex chats with an apparent child? Of course. But did his actions merit the response to them? Before answering this question, a man should take stock of the history of the desires he’s never acted on, and whether he should ever have to defend that history in court, or see it detailed on television.
It really boils down to whether we look at child sex offenders strictly as criminals or - like heroin addicts - partially as victims of their awful, but potentially surmountable, addictions, worthy of an attempt at understanding if not of sympathy. In this episode, the creators of the show insisted on treating their unconventional hunting of an obviously miserable and conflicted pedophile as just another story of good confronting and diminishing evil, with the only twist being the evil predator's refusal to play his assigned role and accept his humiliation and punishment. My flatmate points out that pedophiles are one of the last groups in society that it's totally safe to hate on, and that's exactly what makes the zeal of the pursuers in this story so sinister. There's no intellectual or social risk involved with persecuting child predators. But there's a lot that's ugly about the idea that some groups are so loathsome that in dealing with them we're justified in closing our minds completely to any details that might compromise our righteous image of ourselves.
p.s. Since these are dog days for TNR, I'd be remiss in not pointing out this Sasha Zimmerman critique of "Predator" from almost a year ago.
The blow-by-blow is harrowing and the characters rounding out the tragedy fascinating. But most affecting is Dittrich's conclusion:
Is it possible that Bill Conradt, an adult pretending to be a teenager, might have suspected, correctly, that “Luke” was also an adult pretending? Yes: Everybody knows that the Internet is a swamp of false identities. And is there any evidence that Conradt had ever acted on the longings that his chats illuminated? On the contrary, he chose not to when presented with the opportunity. Was it morally wrong for Bill Conradt to engage in online sex chats with an apparent child? Of course. But did his actions merit the response to them? Before answering this question, a man should take stock of the history of the desires he’s never acted on, and whether he should ever have to defend that history in court, or see it detailed on television.
It really boils down to whether we look at child sex offenders strictly as criminals or - like heroin addicts - partially as victims of their awful, but potentially surmountable, addictions, worthy of an attempt at understanding if not of sympathy. In this episode, the creators of the show insisted on treating their unconventional hunting of an obviously miserable and conflicted pedophile as just another story of good confronting and diminishing evil, with the only twist being the evil predator's refusal to play his assigned role and accept his humiliation and punishment. My flatmate points out that pedophiles are one of the last groups in society that it's totally safe to hate on, and that's exactly what makes the zeal of the pursuers in this story so sinister. There's no intellectual or social risk involved with persecuting child predators. But there's a lot that's ugly about the idea that some groups are so loathsome that in dealing with them we're justified in closing our minds completely to any details that might compromise our righteous image of ourselves.
p.s. Since these are dog days for TNR, I'd be remiss in not pointing out this Sasha Zimmerman critique of "Predator" from almost a year ago.
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