By Niylah Hardy
Recently, there has been much controversy about child predators and catching pedophiles online. If you have not seen or heard, there is a group of men that pretend to be young girls to catch known pedophiles by luring older men into meeting them. These groups of men that catch pedophiles have information on them already, such as their past records. When meeting the pedophiles the men act up as young girls and present aggression against the pedophiles by calling them names, fighting, and even by drawing public attention to their conversation. People have had their opinions on whether or not these men that go out their way to catch pedophiles are beneficial to the world and if they spread awareness.
The controversy that comes along with this topic is why these men come together to catch pedophiles live on the internet. No one tells them to catch pedophiles, instead they just do these activities on their own. The catchers do tend to upload videos on the internet to spread awareness, but people disagree with the men and what they are posting. Though many will agree and laugh at the video. It’s the motivation of these men to interact with pedophiles to build an organization that will cause police arrest to be more divided. The catchers want the pedophiles to pay for what is not always seen and does not have much awareness.
There are videos all over social media, such as Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram reels, news sites, and articles on “Catching Preys.’’ Seen in the videos, the catchers will confront the men and taunt the pedophiles. They will slap, punch and throw things at the pedophiles, making them reveal they are texting young girls and why they have such a desire. The group called “Predator Catchers” have been running their business for a long time and still say that they do what’s necessary. A member of the group has stated that in an interview with USA today, “We want to catch the sickest of the sick. We want to catch the worst guys.” That group has posted videos on social media and even have their own website that explains why they do it and how you can be a part of the community.
There have been numerous comments on social media platforms that say the men that have the time to do this are good people or that it’s a waste of time because pedophiles can get caught by police. A conversation on the platform Reddit was made by anonymous people who stated their opinion on the situation. One commenter has stated, “I dislike vigilantism. I accept people needing to defend themselves outside the law when the law has failed them, but I do not support preemptive attacks without due process,” referring to pedophile catchings and the process of attacking them. Another comment stated, “Extremely low brow entertainment, but whatever.” The comment that was made sounded very bland but it was their way of saying they don’t prefer to say whether they agree with or disagree with actions shown through predator catchings.
When looking into predator catching you’ll see more men being a part of it rather than women, and it looks more gender qualified on the viewers side watching. These men say that this is a good thing to be involved in catching pedophiles out in the world. When things get out of line, there is no reason to beat on the men they do catch. It’s never a positive outcome because not only are the men that take the time to catch these pedophiles in danger but the pedophiles get attacked and put both parties in risk of getting into trouble with the police.
Finding pedophiles and confronting them makes a good impact but when attacking and making one look bad for their doings doesn’t justify the attacks or words choices made. Overall, predator catching holds a negative impact that is normalized by social media when in life there can be different ways to go about certain situations with catching pedophiles.
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