I just read old article in Columbia Journalism Review about Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” Douglas McCollam casts a skeptical glance at whether “sting” shows like this are really a “public good” or a modern approximation of the gallows, and makes a compelling case for the latter, with which I am prone to degree.
The article contains IM transcripts from some of the “predator”-baiting that took place — alleged 13 and 14 year old girls enticing men into meeting up with them. Not that grown men who agree to meet up for sex with a 14-year old are ever completely blame free, but it seems like in many of these cases the men may have been the harmless internet perv sort who never would’ve acted on their desires had they not been provoked.
Also, in two of the cases detailed, the men are 20 and 21. I remember being a young teenager (13, 14, 15) and having guys in their late teens or early 20s (18, 19, 20) trying to hang out with me and people my age. These were mostly loser-ish guys in tommy hilfiger shirts and scumstaches who hung out at local fourth-of-july festivals and hit on young teens because they couldn’t get a woman their own age to look at them. It was less pedophilia, more desperation and power trip (and, for the record, they often hung out with 14 and 15 and 16 year old boys as friends, too, instead of having friends their own ages). So in cases like these (21 year olds hitting on 14 year olds), I think it’s often probably less about being turned on by little girls and more about not being able to meet grown women.
McCollam is sure to point out that he is not exonerating the actions of men who chat up young teens in chat rooms. But are they “dangerous predators?” Some, yeah, sure, possibly. But many of them, hardly. And Dateline’s whole public penance, scheudenfreude-laden, moral panic hoopla of a show is just disgusting.
Elizabeth Wood at Sex in the Public Square (which I think is my new favorite blog, p.s.) points out that shows like To Catch a Predator are designed to unite the “good” against the “bad” a la Stanley Cohen’s “folk devils” concept.
I think we’re in the midst of a moral panic around sexuality. In our current situation, the folk devil is the sexual predator, (and by association, any “sexual deviant”) and these folk devils are useful for at least a couple of other purposes, aside from generating solidarity-through-exclusion.
1. We can use the sexual predator’s behavior, and our exposing of it, as a way to indulge in the sexuality of children without admitting to any actual interest in that sexuality.
2. We can direct attention away from real, likely, sources of harm that are hard to face and instead focus on those “bad guys” that we can lock up.
But, while indulging these two desires, we hurt ourselves in serious ways.
1. We fail to truly protect children from abuse. A majority of sexual assault cases involve parties that already know each other. The stranger/sexual predator is the exception, not the rule.
2. We generate so much hostility toward the sex criminal that we hamper our effectiveness in dealing with them.
In other words, our fear of sexual predators and the moral panic around protecting children from all things sexual makes it easier to ban the sale of vibrators, support the sale of guns, and lock people up for consensual sex, all while actually reducing our ability to actually deal with sexual violence.
