What Impact Will The Coronavirus Pandemic Have On Online “Predator” Hunters?

Back in 1994, Gérard Depardieu and Katherine Heigl starred in a film titled My Father the Hero. Gérard Depardieu played the role of Andre.  Katherine Heigl played the role of Andre’s 14-year-old daughter, Nicole, whom he was taking on vacation inasmuch as he and his daughter’s mother were no longer married and it was a chance for him to spend quality time with his teenage daughter. The mother, of course, was the custodial parent.

Nicole is physically and intellectually precocious for her age.  After she and her father settle into the island resort somewhere in the Bahamas, she becomes interested in a 17-year-old boy named Ben who is also staying there at the island resort.  In order to impress the young boy, Nicole misleads him to believe that she is 16 years old instead of 14 years old.  The comedy starts to take off when she also fools him into believing that her father is not really her father but rather her middle-aged lover.  She explains to the young boy that she gets people to believe that Andre is her father inasmuch as she doesn’t want him to have a confrontation with some of the “stupid laws” that would make such a relationship a crime.

Somehow word gets around the island resort that Andre is believed to be Nicole’s middle-aged lover, and people on the island become hostile with him, especially the elderly women. Ben gives everyone watching this film a good laugh when he is piloting a motorboat for Nicole and her father and he speeds up the motorboat to a dangerously fast velocity while her father is water-skiing.  Andre becomes terrified from the incident and Nicole keeps asking Ben to slow down the motorboat so that Andre doesn’t get injured.  Somewhere during the film, she also misleads Ben into believing that Andre is dying of a terminal illness in an effort to get the young boy to feel sorry for him.

While many people on the island cringe whenever they see Andre walking around with his teenage daughter inasmuch as they have been misled to believe that he is not her father but rather her middle-aged lover, there are some men who find the entire fabricated scenario to be intriguing.  For example, one of them comments on whether there could be something alluring about Andre’s French accent that would make a girl barely in her teens become infatuated with him.

Andre has a private conversation with his daughter, Nicole, regarding his concerns over how strangely everyone on the island has been acting with him.  She then discloses to him that she had lied to Ben and told him that Andre was her lover.  Andre gets upset and scolds his daughter for making up such a lie, because he is worried that people will think that he is some kind of “child molester.”

What made this same movie unique was that it injected the reality that many Europeans don’t appear to have any problem with a teenage minor seeking romance outside her own peer circles.  At the same time, this film acknowledged that many Americans disapprove of 14-year-old girls becoming involved in cross-generational relationships.  In a comical sense, this film created a situation in which the two worlds clashed with each other.

Movies like these were not uncommon back in the late twentieth century. Americans did not get worked up into a frenzy about comedy films like these back then as they do now. Back in the mid-1990s, you had your fair share of adverse opinions regarding adult/adolescent romantic relationships here in the land of milk and honey. However, Americans in general appeared to be a little calmer back in those days about this subject matter than they are now.  In that sense, a movie like My Father the Hero could probably not be remade today without sparking a great amount of controversy and uproar among Americans.

Instead of Americans eagerly watching Chris Hansen in “To Catch A Predator” and the likes on television and eventually on YouTube, back in the 1990s, Americans would occasionally see a television talk show that had a discussion regarding teenage girls dating older men.  On some television talk shows, the talk show host would be empathetic with the adult/adolescent couple on stage and attempt to get the audience to accept them as a sound and legitimate couple, whereas other talk show hosts would preach about how these adult men who dated teenage female minors needed to experience the full wrath of the law in order to understand “the wrong” of their ways. Experts would then make their grand entry onto the stage and elaborate on how they viewed these controversial relationships.

One of the most earth-shattering events in television-talk-show history was an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael that aired in 1996 in which a 20-year-old gentleman named Carl Carlson appeared on stage with his 14-year-old girlfriend and admitted with her that he had fathered a baby with her.  The young girl’s mother was fully in favor of her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend appearing on this same television talk show. However, little did anyone know that she had intended to obtain a taped copy of that same television show and send it to her local authorities to get Carl Carlson into trouble.  Shortly thereafter, Carl Carlson was arrested and charged with statutory rape. If you surf around the Internet, you will find that this man’s life has become a disaster since then.

Now, we can all argue whether or not everyone would have been better off if the criminal justice system had kept their noses out of the situation involving Carl Carlson and his 14-year-old baby mama.  I know that there are many of you out there who believe that Carl Carlson got exactly what he deserved.  I’m not going to pretend that he was a goodie-two-shoes back when he was trying to get a 14-year-old girl pregnant while he was in his twenties.  However, I’m also not going to rule out the possibility that if the criminal justice system had stayed out of the situation, he may have straightened himself out after his 14-year-old baby mama gave birth to their child; and, in doing so, he would have stepped up to the plate as a good father to their baby and as a good husband to his baby mama in the event that he had married her.

Nobody can really predict the future on how those situations are going to turn out. However, I don’t only make that statement in reference to individuals who may have an optimistic perspective on what could have been but also in reference to individuals who believe that criminal punishment was the only answer to the situation involving Carl Carlson. It is no secret that we Americans live in much more reactionary times nowadays than we did in the 1990s.  Online vigilantes and Chris-Hansen wannabes are everywhere on YouTube and throughout the Internet, crusading to do what they believe to be right.

A.  Online Vigilantes Are Endangering Others By Ignoring The Quarantines In Their Respective State Jurisdictions

As I have indicated in my Steemit article titled “Can Children Sexually Victimize Adults?”, I have not posted an article here on Steemit specifically about my opinions and impressions regarding online sting operations and vigilantes who seek to expose adults publicly who attempt to meet up with teenage minors for sexual intercourse after contacting them on the Internet, because I have mixed feelings about these crusaders, so to speak; and I know how explosively crazy they can get with anyone who may even slightly disagree with them on juvenile-justice-related issues. However, it does greatly concern me that many of these online vigilantes have been conducting their business as usual outside their residences despite that governors across the United States of America have imposed quarantines to compel Americans to stay inside their residences except to go grocery-shopping and the likes.

Another major concern that adds to my overall concern about these online vigilantes is that some of their sting operations on YouTube appear to be scripted and fake.  Notice in the title of my Steemit article here, I have placed the word “predator” in quotations.  I did so, because I question whether some of these alleged suspects are really actors rather than strangers who are actually seeking out liaisons with minors.  Below is a YouTube video of an online vigilante questioning a 76-year-old man who appeared at a given location to meet up with an 11-year-old girl.

An Online Vigilante Debates With A 76-Year-Old Man Over A Prospective Internet-Related Liaison With An 11-Year-Old Girl

I have to say that this YouTube video appears to be strictly for laughs, because nothing about it seems real to me at all.  If a 76-year-old man got caught meeting up with an 11-year-old girl to serve his ulterior motives, somehow I don’t envision such a man being as calm and collected as the one in the above video was with the vigilante while that vigilante was yelling at him and nearly losing his temper.  You’ll also notice that this elderly man’s face is almost completely in the shadow.  Therefore, his identity is not really revealed to the viewers other than that his name is Harry.

The conversation between the 76-year-old man and the vigilante has most of the clichés you encounter whenever you listen to one of these kinds of conversations in a YouTube video of this nature.  Notice that the 76-year-old man walked away from the vigilante before that vigilante was finished speaking to him.  If that conversation were real, the vigilante would not have allowed him to walk away from the conversation as so.  Moreover, I have not known of any 11-year-old girls in my lifetime who have developed crushes on 76-year-old men.

I do remember a story from several years ago about a former governor of Michigan admitting that he had gotten a 17-year-old girl pregnant while he was in his seventies.  Of course, that is a whole different ballgame, because that girl was almost legally old enough to vote when she had become pregnant with the elderly man’s baby.

Online vigilantes and Chris-Hansen wannabes are everywhere on YouTube these days.  They believe themselves to be experts in adolescent development and adolescent behavior, when some of the nonsensical statements that they make to the people that they entrap demonstrate how very little they know about the adolescent subculture or even the mental-health profession.  What is really bothersome is that some of the people these vigilantes entrap look more clean-cut and straight-laced than they do. Many of these vigilantes present themselves as having a less-than-perfect background insofar as I question whether they have any kind of moral high ground to be doing the kind of work that they are doing.

So far it appears that YouTuber 21^st Century Man is the only online vigilante who actually has a private investigator’s license that permits him to perform online sting operations of this nature.  The other online vigilantes found on YouTube often show themselves to be out of control and to be poorly educated in their proclaimed area of expertise.  Many of these online vigilantes appear to concentrate more on promoting needless hatred and hostility against all adult/adolescent romantic relationships that have ever existed than on preventing another teenage girl from becoming the next Amanda Todd, and they thrive off the misconception that everyone wants to live in their make-believe world of age-appropriate perfection.

Nevertheless, the purpose of my Steemit article here is not to elaborate on the moral compass and alleged legitimacy of these online vigilantes’ activities in general but rather to focus on the problems that they are going to cause themselves and others if they do not suspend their activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering that the world has suffered deaths related to this coronavirus pandemic in the six figures, I strongly doubt that any teenager is currently thinking about sneaking out of their residence to have sex with a complete stranger, no matter how young that teenager is. Therefore, if these online vigilantes were to cease all of their operations during this pandemic, probably none of these individuals whom they normally trick into meeting up with them would even cross paths with any teenage minor on any of the dating applications or on any of the websites where such incidents are most probable to happen.

Political leaders across our nation have stressed to us all to practice social distancing.  However, in watching YouTube videos of Chris-Hansen-style online sting operations, I have noticed that many of these online vigilantes have failed to follow that same protocol.  What these online vigilantes are doing is promoting the needless spread of COVID-19 by ignoring the legal directives that political leaders across our nation have devised for everyone.  It surprises me that police officers have not ordered any of these online vigilantes to go home and discontinue their activities until the pandemic is over.

It baffles me what these online vigilantes are going to accomplish in their sting operations during the pandemic.  Courthouses are now accepting fewer cases to be tried immediately, and this same event has, therefore, backed up the court dockets.  Criminal suspects are not going to hang around town to await their trials. There have also been reports all over television and the Internet about human rights organizations pressuring political leaders to empty out our jails and prisons and to allow for convicts to go home so that they can remain under house arrest until the pandemic is over. Therefore, when all of these self-proclaimed child advocates and self-appointed pedo-experts who frequent these YouTube channels with videos of such sting operations post comments that the authorities should lock up these suspects and throw away the key, they do so in vein.  Not before long, there is going to be no place in which to lock them up.

The biggest complaint that foreigners have had about the United States of America during this pandemic is that too many Americans appear to be living their lives the way they did before the pandemic struck, and this apathy among these same Americans is what is putting the rest of the nation at risk.  Online vigilantes and Chris-Hansen wannabes are definitely not helping the situation, to say the least.

To all of you online vigilantes and Chris-Hansen wannabes who may be reading my Steemit article here, you need to suspend all of your activities for now inasmuch as you are endangering others by continuing on with your operations.  Take my word for it.  If you continue on doing what you’re doing, there will be more teenage minors dying from COVID-19 than there will be teenage minors dying from having sexual intercourse with someone outside their peer circles.  In other words, teenage minors are not going to die from having sexual intercourse with someone outside their peer circles unless, of course, their older sex partner has a deadly venereal disease; and they could catch something like that just as easily from someone their own age as they could from an older adult.

Now, some of you may be arguing that teenage minors could still catch the COVID-19 from these alleged “predators.”  Well, there is a possibility there.  However, as I stated previously herein, I seriously doubt that any teenage minor is currently thinking about sneaking out of their residence to have sex with a complete stranger that they met online amid this worldwide crisis.  Moreover, most of the deaths from the COVID-19 have happened to older individuals.  There has been only one teenage minor that I know of who has died from the COVID-19.  Correct me if I am wrong. Also, if a teenage minor is going to contract COVID-19 from having sexual intercourse with an adult, they are going to do so from having sexual intercourse with someone their own age.

B.  My Conclusion To This Topic

Now, some of you online vigilantes out there might argue with me about your concern that teenage minors who have sexual encounters with older men are going to commit suicide sometime in the not-so-distance future.  Well, that is another Steemit article for another time.  Currently, there is a major pandemic going on throughout the United States of America and the world.  Online vigilantes?  Your hero, Chris Hansen, has even been doing programs about the pandemic on his YouTube channel.  Maybe if all of you online vigilantes out there watched those same programs about the pandemic, you might actually learn something and save many lives.  In any event, you need to do what your governors tell you to do rather than continuing to perform your so-called heroics on camera every time you come across a 21-year-old man on a dating application or the likes who arranges to meet up with a decoy of yours posing as a 15- or 16-year-old girl.  This pandemic is no joke, and people are dying from it every day.

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