Sean Young?
Posted on 12/13/2006 6:53:03 AM PST by 68skylark
Last month, the Web site Perverted-Justice.com posted news of the conviction of Sean Young, a Wisconsin man sentenced to 10 years in state prison for soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl. According to a transcript of an online chat posted on the site, at one point Mr. Young had asked the girl, identified only as Billie, what she was wearing. When she answered “sweats,” Mr. Young typed back that if she were his daughter, “i’d make u wear sexy clthes.”
Billie turned out to be an adult volunteer for Perverted Justice, an anti-pedophile group, and when Mr. Young drove to a house where he expected to meet the teenager for sex, he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.
The conviction was logged as the 104th that Perverted Justice says it has been responsible for since 2003, a tally that as of yesterday had reached 113. What started as one man’s quest to rid his regional Yahoo chat room of lewd adults has grown into a nationwide force of cyberspace vigilantes, financed by a network television program hungry for ratings.
“It’s a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource,” said Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.
Perverted Justice is best known for putting its online volunteers at the disposal of the television newsmagazine “Dateline NBC,” which has broadcast 11 highly rated programs in which would-be pedophiles are lured to “sting houses,” only to be surprised by a camera crew and, usually, the police.
Despite that publicity, the inner workings of Perverted Justice and its reclusive founder remain largely a mystery, even as the group has emerged as one of the most effective unofficial law enforcement groups in the country, a kind of Neighborhood Watch of the Net....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It sure beats the heck out of "WifeSwap".....
"Despite the sordid and pathetic subject matter, I've seen a few of these Dateline shows and found them to be compelling TV."
***
Frightening too when you realize how many predators are out there and who they are. They could be anyone -- teachers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers -- the last Dateline I saw had three military men. Could be the guy next door --that grandfather you know from church, the guy who coaches your child's Little League baseball team. What the heck is wrong with these people?
Being in the military, that part bothered me -- Dateline really seemed to relish any connection they could find with the U.S. military, no matter how weak, and they repeated it over and over.
They didn't dig into the background of any of these perps to find out if they ever worked in journalism or broadcasting.
Funny, I didn't make that connection. I've been a fan of Sean Youung (the actress) since I saw "Blade Runner." Man, she was hot in that one.
I got a kick out the COPS-style arrest of these perps. They had 5 people literally clobber each guy as he walked out of the house... it almost looked as if they had SWAT teams, sniper units, the works going after these people.
It makes for good TV, of course.
WifeSwap?
It's worse, at least the one time I wasted an hour of my life that I'll never get back.
Molesters getting their ass kicked?
That's good TV. I've seen parts of it and it was great. There are a lot of idiots in the world.
It shouldn't. The military is simply a microcosm of society as a whole. Society has a criminal element, therefore the military will--however, the military has a mighty fine screening process to filter out most from getting in and has shown spectacular success at rooting out criminals and other dirtbags.
Now, I didn't get the impression that Dateline relished the fact that these were military men, but maybe I just wasn't sensitive to it. I know from past shows that they have emphasized the occupations of many of these suspects, but principally to point out that they are often men who could be in close contact with your own child.
I don't particularly like network news and news programs, but this particular series of Dateline episodes is really good. I just wish that the guys they catch could stay in jail forever, or if I had my druthers, be executed. Instead we slap them on the wrist and let them out so they can prey on other children. Something is terribly wrong here.
When I said "it bothered me," I meant to say I was bothered by the way the Dateline folks tried to discover and amplify any connection between the perps and the U.S. military. Why do these overpaid, coddled, effete NY journalists have to pick on the military that protects them?
In the few episodes I've seen, they use both boy and girl decoys throughout the show -- not just "in the beginning."
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