Vigilante paedo hunting groups should leave law enforcement to the professionals

Child abuse sickens everyone but street justice and public shaming makes the job for the authorities even harder

IT IS one of the most abhorrent crimes in society. Child abuse.

Nobody can deny it makes you sick to your stomach when you hear of yet another child victim.

The dismay and anger you feel when the courts hand down soft sentences in the form of community payback orders or prison sentences that last weeks rather than years.

A quick glance at social media comments underneath newspapers stories show the public anger and despair and cries of out-of-touch judges and sheriffs being weak.

“Hang ‘em, castrate ‘em, just lock them up and throw away the key” are some of the most repeated phrases you see.

As the social media juggernaut rolled into our lives and changed the channels of communication forever, with it came a “new” phenomenon – public humiliation as “punishment”.

In medieval times, it was common for criminals to be publicly flogged or put to death in front of a baying crowd – but this was usually after a court of law found them guilty.

The rise and rise of vigilante paedophile hunting groups around the world has created a new movement. Not a day goes by without someone sharing a video of another person being accused of deviant sexual behaviour against minors.

In the name of street justice, those groups – who all have catchy sounding names – will stage sting operations and carry out public confrontations naming and shaming the suspected abusers while an eager public can watch it all going down live and throw in their comments.

Criminologists have said it’s like the town square execution – crowds gathering round to shout slurs at the evil doer while calling for his death.

There’s no doubt online grooming and child sexual abuse has grown with the rise of the internet.

It seems like danger lurks on every street corner for our children, or their iPads or computers. Nowhere is safe, therefore those groups are doing us all a favour.

But are they? For me, here’s the rub. Police and other law enforcement officials are trained in the art of tracking down and apprehending child abusers. They stay within the confines of the law. It’s a global effort and often requires skillful and long inquiries that take time and patience.

With hunting groups, it seems their main tactic seems to be luring people into believing they’re communicating online with a child.

They confront them in their homes or on the street or they set up meetings where the alleged abuser believes he’s meeting the child he was talking to.

And from there it spirals into a powerful public shaming where the universally abhorred abuser becomes a spectacle of public entertainment.

While there is no doubt some groups have had their successes and brought paedophiles to the attention of the authorities, there have also been a lot of failures.

Using social media to name and shame alleged abusers can bring with it a whole heap of problems for police and prosecutors alike. They can be counter-productive, ongoing investigations may be jeopardised and the evidence they obtain can be legally unsound. It has descended into violence and we just don’t know enough about the facts and context of the stings.

Cries of entrapment could be forthcoming if the hunters aren’t careful, which then sees a clearly guilty offender walk free. It’s a minefield of legal dos and donts.

It’s hard to argue against their cause as a moral human being but as one police officer told me: “We can’t let emotions dictate our actions. We have to be methodical and objective to do our jobs properly.”

Reverting to the shaming parades of medieval times is a step in the wrong direction. We should leave it to the professionals.

We can’t let emotions dictate our actions.. we have to be methodical