BRENDA POWER ON VIGILANTES

THE first thing that strikes you is how very ordinary they look. Casually dressed men, neatly groomed, they could be your neighbours, your workmates, your child’s teachers, your bank managers, your relatives. Even your heroes. Walking down the street, getting out of their cars, sauntering towards a cinema, they don’t look like monsters or perverts. They don’t embody the language we use to describe them, they are not animals or predators – they’re normal men doing normal jobs and, to their families and workmates and friends, leading normal lives.

The second thing that strikes you, when you watch one of the dozens of online videos of paedophiles being confronted by vigilante groups in honeytrap stings, is the air of baffled innocence that comes so easily to them. Some, of course, are defiant and belligerent, but most affect the same show of bewilderment and shock. Who, me? A nice, responsible family man like me? You’ve got the wrong person, mate, I’m just here for a business meeting, or a football game, or a quiet pint. Me, groom a child for sex online? You’re making a terrible mistake. I’m as horrified by the very idea as you are.

And the third thing that strikes you is that you’d almost buy the ‘Who, me?’ line, the plausible air of incredulity, because it’s exactly how any normal person would react to such a heinous charge. What else would you say, if you were wrongly accused of such a thing, but ‘Who, me?’ Watching Jimi Cee – now exposed as RTÉ producer Kieran Creaven – or ‘Mike’ or ‘Niall’ or ‘Dave’, or any of the other men snared by vigilantes, is like seeing an Escher painting come to life.

At first glance, the image makes sense: innocent man confronted with hideous accusation, reacts normally. Then you look again, and see the fiendish inversion of normality. You see a man who knows what normal looks and sounds like, because he has been faking it for so long. You see a man who knows how to parrot society’s disgust at paedophilia, and you see the profane façade of normality that has shielded their like for years.

The footage of Kieran Creaven’s confrontation and arrest, posted on Facebook by the Predator Exposure group after it lured him to a meeting with a ‘13-year-old girl’ in Leeds at the weekend, makes for deeply disconcerting viewing. On the one hand, you know you are witnessing a life ending, an existence imploding, an extended network of family and friends disintegrating before your eyes in real time. Creaven’s accusers posted the footage live, and at one point they tell him it has already had 4,000 views. They tell him his career is over, the footage will be viewed by his family and friends and ‘hundreds of thousands’ in Ireland, he’s lost his job, he’s going to jail, and they do so with a gratuitous measure of relish.

In spite of yourself, part of you pities him because he cuts such a wretched figure. His explanation when confronted is excruciating when you imagine the effect it will surely have on his wife. He doesn’t have children, he says, he always wanted to be a father, he was just looking to meet up with a child, talk, go to a match... it is wincingly, cringingly disturbing stuff.

Confrontation

And you do not find yourself liking, much less cheering on, his swarming accusers. In the video of another confrontation in Drogheda, posted online by the Silent Justice group yesterday, the accused man is treated with restraint, even as he is babbling lunatic explanations for his grooming of a ‘ten-year-old child’ and sending ‘her’ (in fact, another decoy) pictures of his penis.

But the Leeds vigilantes who tackled Creaven seem to take particular pleasure in taunting their captive. At one point, they throw him a lifeline, offering to let him go if he promises never to groom another child and he grasps at it like a drowning man, admitting his guilt, begging to go free. Then they snatch it away, saying: ‘Tough luck, you’re f****d, you f*****g dirty ... bastard... ’ – and remind him that the police are on their way, but ‘this is our little bit of fun time with you’.

But, for all that is disturbing about his exposure, entrapment and obvious terror, you cannot forget what this man had allegedly come to do. He is alleged to have made contact, online, with someone he believed to be a girl of 13 and sent her pictures of his erect penis. He had advised her to tell her parents she’d be staying the night with a friend. He’d come with tickets for a Leeds game and plans for cinema trips and meals out. And he was planning to take her to his room in the Hilton Hotel, and have her share his bed. Barely a month ago, Kieran Creaven must have joined in conversations about another sports journalist, Tom Humphries, who also groomed an underage victim. Did he express his shock and disgust at a fiftysomething man having sexual relations with a teenage girl?

Creaven works for the national broadcaster, who yesterday suspended him. Did he join colleagues round the water cooler as they discussed the latest Prime Time report on child abuse or paedophilia? Did he hear them mention a group called Predator Exposure that appeared on Claire Byrne Live just a few weeks ago?

That those who groom young children online feel safe is the fault of the online service providers and the social media behemoths that facilitate the grooming and stalking of children by men such as ‘Mike’ and ‘Niall’ and ‘Dave’ and the rest of them. Vigilante activity is a dangerous alternative to proper policing and justice, but it is hard to blame angry people for taking action when children at home in their bedrooms are at risk from paedophiles prowling unchecked in cyberspace.

The billionaire service-provider empires say they are nothing more than giant billboards and can’t police content, but that is not good enough. If the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest put as much effort into monitoring nefarious online activity as they do to minimising their tax bills, these paedophiles could be identified by orthodox detective work. How difficult could it be, for instance, to develop an algorithm that detects ‘dickpics’ in the content of 13-year-old users and sets alarm bells ringing?

We have monstered these paedophiles so much, in popular myth, that we think we’d know them at a glance – the losers, the loners, the dirty mac brigade, hanging around the school gates offering sweets to kids. They’re not the welldressed professional heading off for the ‘weekend conference’ or the high-profile hero offering after-hours sports coaching, not the family men with nice normal lives. Neither Tom Humphries nor Kieran Creaven, it is worth remembering, were caught by ordinary police work, but by their own errors and arrogance. We are indebted to those civilians who exposed them, however dubious the vigilantes’ methods may have been in Creaven’s case. But it is time for the internet providers, and the legitimate forces of law and order, to take it from here.