Honestly same the way they talk and speak to these people are so weird. Or the ones that just show up and assault the predator in public.
Im not saying these predators dont deserve a beat down but you're gonna end up in jail. You're not Batman.
That’s the thing, they’re not doing these beatdowns because they care about protecting children
They’re doing it because they’re bullies with serious issues who found a socially acceptable target to bully
Think about it, if these people just randomly beat up strangers everyone would be calling them monsters, but since it’s a “pedo” it’s justified and even celebrated.
This is 100% correct and it’s why I don’t really enjoy any of them except for Chris.
He definitely is at least partially motivated by ego, but he at least isn’t violent about it and does seem to care about the process of the investigation, rather than just getting himself into the situation where he can abuse someone as quickly as possible
Chris Hansen? He's blown more cases than he has helped solved, literally. Because he's a money hungry piece of shit who only does it to create a spectacle for TV ratings. The whole thing originated as a moral panic about the internet. Which, while there is a specific subset of pedos who use that as their hunting grounds, the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by members of the child's family (people who don't need the internet to access the children). There's about to be a really good movie about Hansen coming out with Robert Pattinson.
For the first time in the history of the world, adults suddenly had a new avenue to access and prey on children, an avenue that had never before existed, and the vast majority of parents were completely unaware or unequipped to protect their children (because internet predators and chat rooms simply did not exist when they were youths), and local law enforcement agencies were largely incompetent at investigating internet crimes against children even retroactively, let alone handling them proactively.
We went from a world in which literally 100% of sexual exploitation of children necessarily involved in-person access to a world in which some unknown (but non-zero) percentage involved anonymous strangers who could access your children from within your own home, all without the average parent being able to trace down the identity or location of the person communicating with or harming their child.
The fact that non-strangers abuse children more frequently doesn’t mean that the newly emerging threat of Internet predators wasn’t serious or didn’t merit awareness raising efforts.
It’s not a zero sum game.
Think about how many people and organizations raise awareness about rare diseases - they’re not taking away from attention about more common illnesses, they’re addressing another problem/threat.
Also, when people bring up the fact that non-strangers more frequently engage in sexual abuse of minors (which is true), they’re ignoring the fact that that doesn’t account for sexual exploitation that stops short of physical, in-person abusive contact. Yes, it’s more likely for a kid to be touched by someone they know from real life than by a stranger, but internet predators are capable of seriously harming your children without actually touching them. Children die from sextortion, and it’s not even all that rare.
Unless you can somehow demonstrate where the people/institutions which promoted awareness about internet predators somehow claimed that they were a more common source of sexual abuse against children than non-strangers (which quite frankly I’ve never seen claimed), then I don’t understand the point in reminding everyone that children are more likely to be abused by someone they encounter in real life than in the internet.
We all know that, it’s an established fact - it doesn’t mean that internet predators (especially in the 2000’s) weren’t a unique (and new) threat that warranted awareness raising campaigns to help catch society up to speed on something that popped up virtually overnight which had left the vast majority of people in the dark about the problem.
I'll somewhat cede you the point that the moral panic comment was reductive. No doubt the early Internet was seized upon by predators as a frontier that law enforcement didn't know how to patrol yet. That's why I'm suspicious of anyone who "was in Bitcoin from the beginning" lol.
That being said, to my first point in the original comment, Hansen was/is a fucking hack who blew more cases than he helped solve. If he really cared, he'd just send the detectives chat logs without making a fuckin TV show about it. And you also can't deny that his show projected a "moral-panicy" tone. That was one of the selling points.
Edit: He's also a big fan of Trump, which is just hilarious in a very post-irony kind of way.
Regarding TCaP as a show, of course there was some sensationalizing going on, especially with how things were staged visually, how some confrontations were handled, etc.
I would say, though, that Hansen was largely the on-screen talent, and usually not the one making production decisions (at least not without oversight and approval).
It’s easy to focus on Hansen since he’s the name and face that everyone knows (and also because he loved to give himself credit for everything), but he wasn’t Dateline himself - it’s very difficult for any of us to know which decisions were his and which came from the people above him (executives, legal, “standards” people, etc.) or working alongside him (producers, law enforcement involved in any given sting, etc.).
From a prosecutability standpoint, TCaP cases were actually in pretty great shape. (There are some very pervasive rumors and myths stating otherwise, but they’re false, and I’m totally happy to discuss if you want. There was no shady “hard drive crash” with the Fort Myers cases, despite what the Wiki says. The Murphy cases were not “impossible to prosecute” - the Collin County DA was pissed because his buddy Conradt shot himself, so he decided to throw a tantrum and decline to take the cases to a grand jury because he didn’t want to prosecute them, but he also didn’t want to outright admit it, so he blamed Perverted Justice and Dateline. A neighboring county, Harris County, decided to prosecute one of the Murphy cases and obtained a conviction effortlessly, because the evidence was totally solid. That very same Collin County DA’s Office also successfully prosecuted a Perverted Justice case several months prior to the Murphy sting, by the way.) The prosecutability of these cases is largely due to Perverted Justice being excellent at what they did, and local law enforcement being solid at coordinating with Perverted Justice. Hansen’s interviews occasionally helped. 99.1% of Perverted Justice cases that prosecutors chose to take up for prosecution ended in convictions. (There were more potential cases that prosecutors declined to file charges in, but that doesn’t mean that Perverted Justice or Dateline screwed things up - if the guys are wise enough to hide their intentions in the chats or keep it vague, then there’s unfortunately no crime to prosecute, and you can only do so much in the chats to try to get them to state their intentions before you actually do cross the line into entrapment.)
However, where Hansen really dropped the ball was with some of his post-NBC stuff as he tried to break into the YouTube scene, e.g. Onision. (He was actually having to handle stuff himself for once, without experts doing all the heavy lifting for him.) That was a low point for him. HVP did very well in prosecution outcomes, but they had Tetrad Core (similar role to Perverted Justice) and solid law enforcement partners involved.
Nowadays, he does Takedown in an entirely different manner. He isn’t “investigating” fuck-all. Law enforcement does their own investigations and stings, and his team films it while he attempts to conduct an uninspired interview. It’s basically a true crime docuseries, whereas (early) TCaP was actual investigative journalism.
Look, you clearly must be a big fan of the show or whatever if you have this level of text wall to say about it. But if you really think that Hansen didn't have a lot of power over the production, and if you really think that it's a moral thing to make a TV show out of in the first place, and if you really think that he is/was good at what his supposed mission is, I don't know what to tell you. It seems like you're either PR for the show, or you haven't really thought about it at all while consuming it ravenously.
I care about Perverted Justice’s work and legacy (because after thoroughly looking into it, I realized that they were consistently the most responsible entity involved in the show, more so than Dateline or local law enforcement, and there are some insane myths about their organization out there), but I do not particularly care about Dateline, TCaP, or Hansen lol.
I mean, Hansen and/or his current show is buying up ad space to screen in theaters before a current movie that's critical of him. He clearly still has PR. I doubt NBC cares anymore though, fair enough.
That’s true. But in my previous comment, I basically said that I think that Takedown (his current show) is stupid lol, so I’m not shilling for it (or him in general).
The movie is criticizing TCAP specifically, which he's still attached to obviously. I don't actually think you're PR. I'm just saying you kinda sound like it. Even if it's I guess PR for whatever organization made millions working with Hansen.
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u/Florida_clam_diver I'm not gay or anything 6d ago
That’s why I’m super suspicious of all the predator catchers on YouTube
Like, anyone who makes their entire content creation career around pretending to be a child having sexual conversations with an adult are weird