Dateline Report on Child Predators

Some of you may have recently seen a piece on Dateline about child predators in online chat rooms. The website that Dateline used for help in confronting the child predators was called Perverted Justice.com (more information can be found here). The goal of the website, which can be found in their FAQ section reads as follows:

Our goal is rather simple and specific, actually. A lot of people will say "hey, you guys aren't ending pedophilia." Well no, we don't "end pedophilia as we know it." That's not our goal. The goal of this website and our endeavors is to create a "chilling effect" in regional chat rooms and other easy targets of opportunity online. Simply stated, we want to poison the well of these rooms and places by covering enough of them that even if you're looking for underage females, an extra bit of paranoia will cross your mind.We believe that regional chat rooms are the most ready and easy way for an individual to try to "hook up with" underage females. Many parents don't understand the harms and dangers their child faces by going into those rooms. Basically, you're letting complete strangers into your child's bedroom or frontroom. And since it's "regional," these people don't live that far away. A kid goes into this cesspool, they're basically at the mercy of chance. Our goal is to help reduce that chance by covering these rooms to a point where we have an impact and create an atmosphere where such happenings become rarer and rarer. Additionally, we have the goal of turning the website into a conviction machine with as many information first agreements with police as possible. As of this writing, our Information First agreements cover over 90 million people across the United States. These agreements have been invaluable in our endeavors to toss as many people in jail as possible.

An article about the show on Dateline can be found here.

If anyone knows any sites or resources devoted to treatment for people who do this please post in the comments section. Clearly pedophiles and child predators should be punished, but since most of the people who enter prison will one day be free, it seems to be in society's best interest to stop them from acting in a way that prison time will probably not cure. Please post any comments.


--Tom Hayes