More on sex offenders

Been watching more sex offender stings on TV. Dateline and the local station with John Mercure. I really feel sorry for the wannabe sex offenders who have to get lectured on air by that fatuous scumbag. To lose a battle of wits to John Mercure -- how humiliating!

Some observations:

1) You really have to wonder whether these stings are reeling in real perps or just creating new criminals by their existence. You constantly hear of the NIH study claiming that child sex offenders are super-recidivists who on average claim scores and scores of victims. If the sting operations dipped their lure in this pool, then they should be coming up with a high proportion of repeat offenders. After the sting, the cops should be able to get warrants and find out that the internet hookup represented by the sting was, for the average person caught, number thirty in a series of attempts, of which a dozen were successful, and that the sting is leading to multiple charges. It appears, however, that this is almost never the case. The broadcasts loudly exclaim that one or two of their captures appear to have previous records, while the fact that they trumpet these exceptions so loudly itself suggests that scores apparently do not. Add this to the fact that the captures are often young and contrite, and that the bait is exceptionally alluring, and you really wonder how many of these guys, if nature had been left to its natural course, would have gone about their lives without ever being tempted to arrange a hookup with an underage girl. Don't mistake me -- some of these guys are clearly creeps. But as to the proportion that would actually, left to their own, have committed criminal acts? It may be under fifty percent.

2) Some of these guys travel hundreds of miles for the date. What does that say about the logic of laws that require past sex offenders not to live within 2000 feet of a school? The real threat is coming from farther away, right?

3) A friend of mine observed that not a lot, but a significant minority of sting victims appeared to be younger men of foreign background who seemed genuinely confused about what they had done wrong. Recall that the age of consent at common law was 10, that it remains in the low teens in many places (and under certain conditions in the U.S. -- locally, for example, I believe the law is that with parental consent, a 13-year-old can marry and have intercourse). Most cultures have a taboo against going after extremely young boys or girls sexually, but their view of teenage sexuality is not as ostrichlike and they have nothing approaching the current mass hysteria over supposed sexual predators (and neither did we a few short decades ago). Whether or not as a matter of law these captures can be prosecuted, they clearly lack any real felonious intent. You almost expect these guys to ask the pretty face from Dateline, "What, you never had sex with a 15 year old? And also, at what age did you lose your virginity?"

Also, just a little more on that smug asswipe Mercure. When he says, "what he said on the internet then was so graphically disgusting, we can't say it on TV," well, first of all, I don't trust that it's even true. You can say a lot on TV. In part, I think the failure to air the details is an acknowledgement that Mercure is a hack whose tone is too cheap and sensational to let him air what could be aired in a tone of seriousness. In court room dramas, you hear sex crimes described in graphic detail, but the censors let it go because the presentation is so fraught with high tension and seriousness. Mercure smirks through every broadcast like a corrupt hawker of patent remedies, which essentially he is. Also, is it "disgusting?" I doubt that, too. Throughout his broadcasts, he feels he has to remind the audience, "Remember, he thinks he's talking to a 14-year-old girl." If you're prone to forget that the subject of a sex act is a juvenile, then what is left from the description of a sex act that supposedly makes it so disgusting? Is the guy into scat or something? My bet, based on how they treat other sexual descriptions on these broadcasts, is there's nothing particularly gross about what was said online. Probably Mercure is just titillated himself and has to remind himself, "John, this girl is 14." In fact, it's somewhat ironic that with his plump goofy face, Mercure looks like the stereotype of the kind of guy who would lure little girls or boys with free cotton candy. He's actually quite creepy. If I were as into the whole pedophile panic as the rest of the country seems to be, I'd worry about his little boy. Anyhow, the claim that what was said was so disgusting looks to me like a way of sensationalizing and inserting Mercure's protesting-too-much value judgments instead of just telling us the facts, which as I noted, if they were really graphic, would force John to stop smirking and seeming to almost giggle through his broadcasts. I can't believe this bozo pulls in journalism awards for his crap spectacles. The awards judges could be collectively ashamed. What happened to journalism?