Vigilantism

NewgonWiki's series on
MAP culture war
and war of adjacency

Template: Adj - This template

For some localized information about Vigilantes, see List of CSA/anti-pedophile proponents.

Vigilantism is self-appointed "policing" and doing of "justice", outside of the usual law enforcement and criminal justice professions. In the minor attracted community, the term is especially used for people that practice legal entrapment, out various people as "pedophiles", or try to make people's lives miserable or unbearable.

Examples of vigilantism

Over the years, Newgon has collected many extreme examples of vigilantism, including brutal hammer attacks and registry-abetted murders. We reproduce them at the article - Adverse effects of hysteria.

In research literature

CSA prevention program researchers complain about vigilantism as a barrier to MAP's access to professional help^[1].

Briggs, P. Simon, W.T. and Simonson, S. (2011) An exploratory study of internet-initiated sexual offenses and the chat room sex offender:Has the internet enabled a new typology of sex offender? Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. 23, 72-91.
"The chat room sex offender presents a significant clinical issue to treatment providers as a live victim does not exist. Thus, it is unclear if Internet sex stings prevent incidents of child sexual exploitation and may result in convictions of individuals who may never have abused a child."

Are vigilante attacks on pedophiles a hate crime?

The question of whether sting operations and/or physical attacks which are motivated by the alleged offender being perceived as a minor-attracted person, and/or belonging to the MAP community, should be considered a hate crime under law, has been discussed in scholarship.

Laura Haas. (February, 2022). 'The boundaries of victim protection criteria: should the victimisation of people with paedophilia be recognised as a form of hate crime under criminal law?', in Broad Street Humanities Review, Issue 6 (21 pages).
Abstract excerpt: "People with paedophilia are a highly stigmatised group - even more so over recent years in which reports of child sexual abuse have risen, and sensationalist media coverage intensified. For people with paedophilia, whom many assume to also be sex offenders, the risk of exposure to prejudice-driven crime is high. In this article, I pose the question of whether people with paedophilia should be included in hate crime legislation across the world. I conclude that they should be included under the so-called vulnerability-and-deinvididualisation approach that I suggest in this paper. According to this approach, groups should be protected by hate crime legislation, if they are discriminated against significantly more often than groups who only experience prejudice-driven crimes on a rare basis (vulnerability). Furthermore, they should only be protected if the crime is targeted towards a whole group instead of a specific individual (deinvidualisation)." [...] "I conclude that PWP [people with paedophilia] should be included in hate crime laws." (p. 17).

Joe Purshouse. (2020). 'Paedophile Hunters’, Criminal Procedure, and Fundamental Human Rights', in Journal of Law and Society, 47:3, pp. 1–28.
Abstract: ‘Paedophile hunters’ have attracted global media attention. The limited literature on paedophile hunters, which documents their emergence in contemporary liberal democracies, pays scant attention to how their use of intrusive investigative methods may threaten the procedural rights of suspects and undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system. This article fills this normative ‘gap’ in the literature. It draws upon media coverage, criminal procedure jurisprudence, and criminological scholarship to analyse the regulation of paedophile hunting in English and Welsh law. The article suggests that domestic law does not afford adequate protection to due process and the fundamental human rights of those falling under the paedophile hunter's purview. Unless paedophile hunting is constrained by a narrower and more robustly enforced regulatory regime, it should not be permitted, let alone encouraged, in contemporary liberal democracies.

David McDonald. (2014). 'The Politics of Hate Crime: Neoliberal Vigilance, Vigilantism and the Question of Paedophilia', in International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 68-80.
Newgon: Discusses cases such as "Bijan Ebrahimi – a 44‐year‐old Bristol man – was beaten, set alight and murdered" (p. 72) in July 2013, after local residents mistook his attempts to photograph young people vandalizing his garden and branded him a pedophile (see below abstract)

Abstract: "This article examines vigilantism and the question of hate crime. Broader shifts in penology have occurred in tandem with changes in the ways in which child sexual abuse has come to be understood. Using these shifts as a contextual backdrop, the article examines vigilance against the fear of crime where it manifests into vigilantism against real or perceived paedophiles. In doing so, the article attends to the politics of hate crime: namely, whether these actions belong within the confines of hate crime provisions or, alternatively, whether such provisions should expressly exclude the category of paedophilia. In its entirety, the article interrogates the dimensions of disgust associated with paedophilia, and explores issues arising from an alignment between paedophilia and hate crime."

[...]

"When police did finally intervene, it was to arrest Ebrahimi and take him away for questioning. Upon this, locals gathered to chant ‘paedo, paedo’. On inspection of his camera, the reality of the conflict within this public housing complex was revealed. Ebrahimi had been taking photographs of locals damaging his garden hanging pots, which he himself had complained to police about, and explained that he had taken the images as evidence. Ebrahimi’s family have since described him as ‘a quiet, disabled man whose only joys in life came from his horticultural interests and his cat’ (cited in Farmer 2013: no pagination)." (p. 72).

"Another relatively recent case – albeit far less devastating in its consequences – was heard before the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal in 2007. In this case the court was required to give consideration to whether such acts – vigilantism motivated by perceived paedophilia – may be considered hate crimes. In 2005, Darren Brian Dunn and Ibrahim Arja were neighbours in a complex of public housing units in the Sydney suburb of Riverwood. In the early hours of 29 August 2005, while Arja was overseas, Dunn set fire to chairs on the porch of Arja’s unit [... resulting] in significant damage to the complex of units, which were subsequently deemed uninhabitable."

"While Dunn’s belief that Arja was a paedophile was found to be erroneous, the sentencing judge held that a significant factor motivating Dunn was his ‘feeling s of antipathy towards his neighbour Mr Arja who he believed without justification at all, was a paedophile’. These findings, the judge ruled, constituted a significant aggravating factor [...] The court’s ruling was unambiguous. It found that:

Applying s21 A(2)(h) it is clear that the offences come fairly and squarely within it. The offence was motivated by a hatred or prejudice against Mr Arja solely because the applicant believed him to be a member of a particular group, ie paedophiles.

The consequence of this finding was the recognition that a belief that an individual is a paedophile is sufficient to constitute an aggravating factor in sentencing: that is to say, the belief an individual is a paedophile may give an act the character of a hate crime." (p. 73).

Joseph S. Fulda. (2002). 'Do internet stings directed at pedophiles capture offenders or create offenders? And allied questions', in Sexuality and Culture 6, pp. 73–100. [See Fulda (2007)^[2] for an update to this article.]

"[T]he prosecutors engaging in sting operations make sex with minors trivially easy. Said one prosecutor, "We've been able to go online and do an actual physical meeting within a two-hour period. That's pretty scary." Actually, the only thing that's scary is that you can be put in jail in two hours for something that a real attempt at would require two months of painstaking effort or violence, that when it comes to sex as opposed to murder, we are arresting people for pressing red buttons on black boxes. [...] Well, what does arresting people for pressing red buttons on black boxes amount to: In my opinion, it amounts to preventive detention. Once that e-mail is intercepted and the $1,000 is paid and the red button is pushed, the person is labeled dangerous, even though he may be incapable, desperately incapable, of anything like a real attempt at murder, and we are locking him up in anticipation of what he might actually do if given a real opportunity. Having exposed Internet stings for what they really are - preventive detention - I think it suffices to conclude our theoretical consideration by saying that this is America and that preventive detention is contrary to the American way. It presumes both omniscience and guilt in the accused, which only totalitarian states presume. Internet sting operations directed at pedophiles are bringing us one giant step closer to such a state." (p. 88).