Heeby Jeeby wrote:Entrapment or not, who cares? This show does nothing to help solve the problem. It is pathetic television that panders to the worst in human nature.
Burn 'em, hang 'em blah blah blah. Reactionary bullshit.
If you can't or won't take the time to fully understand problems then this is the show for you.
This is the party for you.
This is the TV station for you.
And this is for you too...
Some of the posts in this thread are fucking shocking.
I agree with this statement.
I don't think that adults should have sex with kids. I personally find that to be predatory and disgusting.
That said, I think the problem is nowhere near as black-and-white, cut-and-dried as the media and politicians make it out to be. They exploit the public feelings of outrage to their own personal and economic advantage and I find that to be just as repellant as the adult who seeks out sex with teenagers.
Let's face it, you cannot ignore the fact that the current US statutory rape laws are based primarily in a
cultural context. Sex with persons under the age of consent is illegal not because it's necessarily harmful in all cases, but because the majority of American society finds it to be objectionable. As others in this thread have pointed out, age of consent laws differ widely from place to place and have changed over time. Now I'm not saying that some guy seeking out sex with random kids on the Internet is not harmful, I'm just asking you to acknowledge the context that the age of consent/marriageable age laws differ greatly from culture to culture.
In addition to this, the sense of moral outrage in our society regarding these sorts of crimes is, in my opinion, out of all proportion to their severity when you compare them with other, more severe crimes that get relatively little media attention. If we're talking rape, why is there little to no public concern about, say, extremely violent and injurious cases of prison rape (which often go completely unpunished)? Probably because we as a society have taken for granted the notion that incarcerated persons don't deserve protection under the law because they have committed some action in their past (whether violent or not) which has necessitated their removal from society and therefore it's not our problem. My point is that we are fine with allowing, say, a convicted felon to brutally beat and rape a young first-time offender in Cook County Jail, but a socially inept twenty-something young man who chats on the Internet with a seductive, sexually-experienced adult posing as a 16-year-old, then agrees to meet them in a public place ought to have his entire life ruined. Call me crazy, but that seems like a fucked-up set of priorities.
Though I lack information to support this speculation, I have serious doubts that there are a whole lot of underage kids out there who really go on the Internet with the intention of actively seeking sex with some 40-year-old married guy. And what about the guys who fall for the sex chat ruse, but stop just short of actually driving out to meet the (supposed) minor? Might that experience not encourage him to be more bold in seeking out kids online in the future? By running these stings they might be actively encouraging the very problem they're supposed to be preventing. Then again, that does ensure there will always be plenty of material for future Dateline NBC episodes.
I find this kind of thing to be treading an ethical fine line, and the playing on hype and public outrage instead of common sense and understanding is symptomatic of some very serious problems within American culture.
