I am really surprised at all the negative reactions in here. Let's get some things straight:
() Entrapment is when the police induce someone to commit a crime they were not otherwise predisposed to commit. That did not happen here. The only reason anyone would have to visit these chat rooms in the first place (other than to see what was going on in there, as the author did) is to buy child webcam sex.
() The individuals caught in this sting thought they were talking to a real child and had every intention to solicit a real child for sex. We are not talking about a thought-crime here.
() They had almost certainly done it before, and will continue to do it until stopped.
There are no difficult questions here. This is a good thing.
EDITED to add: By the way, I don't think artwork -- drawings, paintings, computer animations, whatever -- should ever be illegal per se, no matter what it depicts. I don't think that artwork of any kind should be illegal to produce or to view, for any purpose including sexual stimulation, so long as no actual children or other unwilling victims were involved in its production.
But that's not what we're talking about here. This isn't just about viewing synthesized materials. This is about people offering to pay for what they think is a real child to perform sex acts on camera.
You're making some assumptions that simply aren't backed up in the story. The story doesn't go into detail about where Sweetie was setup online or who initiated contact first or how the alleged pedophiles knew that Sweetie was only 10 years old. So entrapment may have occurred. And I have no idea why you believe that the alleged pedophiles had almost certainly done it before as that also wasn't mentioned anywhere in the story.
What we're dealing with here is a vigilante organization running sting operations where they may or may not be operating in a diligent law abiding manner. As much as I would like to catch pedophiles, I don't think that's the sort of thing we should be encouraging.
The article is maybe not as explicit about some of these things as it should be, but I've read about this operation before. My understanding is that they set Sweetie up in a chat room, just like the room that the author describes. The people they caught had to come to that room intentionally. I am reasonably certain Sweetie's operators were well aware of entrapment concerns and structured their interactions carefully to avoid them. (It certainly would have been a phenomenal waste to have gone to all the trouble involved in creating Sweetie and then to have blown everything by doing something stupid in the chat rooms. I don't think these people are anywhere near that stupid.)
> And I have no idea why you believe that the alleged pedophiles had almost certainly done it before
Then you know nothing about child sexual abuse. Perpetrators who are not caught are extremely likely to keep doing it. Even among those who are caught and prosecuted, recidivism is extremely high.
"Vigilante organization"? All they did was collect information and turn it over to the police. A "vigilante" is someone who attempts to enforce the law themselves, by violence. The term does not apply here.
They did more than collect information. They went to great lengths to create information to be collected. A vigilante is someone who takes the law into their own hands. Violence is often a part of that but not required. While they may not be taking on the judgement part of law they are taking on the policing part by organizing a sting operation which is why I labeled them a vigilante organization. You're painting it as if they're simply some sort of community watch program that collects information and turns it over to the police. In truth they're somewhere in between.
You're right. I don't know much about child sexual abuse. I don't doubt that sexual perpetrators are extremely likely to continue being sexual perpetrators. But I worry that the alleged perpetrators caught in this sting operation might not all be pedophiles, that the completely unsupervised, unregulated sting operators may have been so overzealous in their pursuit of pedophiles that they may not have made absolutely certain that everyone knew they were talking to a '10 year kid'. I read in another article that the age was in the fake user's profile. Is that the only place the age was listed? Are we sure every perpetrator knew the fake user's age?
And what about the quality of graphical rendering of Sweetie? Are we positive that all of the alleged perpetrators thought it was a real person and not a computer generated avatar they were talking to? Maybe some of them realized that it was an avatar. Should it still be a crime then?
As for how much trust you have in the operators behind Sweetie, I just don't get it. Intelligent people do extremely stupid things all the time. Perhaps they initiated the sexual advances because that's what they experienced with the 8 year old boy. Perhaps they initiated the advances because in some countries entrapment isn't a concern. The article stated that the alleged offenders were from 71 different countries. I find it hard to believe the Sweetie operators would be well versed in that many different countries' laws. Or perhaps they carefully worded everything exactly as you believe. I have no idea because the article didn't go into it. I've looked for articles that provide more detail but haven't found any. If you have any links, I'd appreciate it.
I think the question you have to ask is, is anyone going to be prosecuted solely on the basis of the evidence gathered by this organization? Such a prosecution would be impossible in the US and EU, and I would hope, most other places as well. The police cannot in general trust evidence they did not collect themselves.
What can happen, though, is that they can open investigations on these individuals and get search warrants. If they find evidence of any other crimes, as I think they are likely to, they can prosecute on that basis.
That sounds better and I'd be more likely to be on board with the program if I knew nobody was being prosecuted solely on the information gathered from the sting operation. I'd still have 2 worries: 1) that the Sweetie organizers might accidentally (or purposely) leak the information of the alleged pedophiles to the public, potentially shaming and humiliating an innocent party, and 2) that other organizations might run their own sting operations but fail to do so in an ethical, responsible manner.
"> And I have no idea why you believe that the alleged pedophiles had almost certainly done it before
Then you know nothing about child sexual abuse. Perpetrators who are not caught are extremely likely to keep doing it. Even among those who are caught and prosecuted, recidivism is extremely high."
The initial statement was that "because (A) they are attempting it now, (B) they had probably done it before".
That is, a high P(B|A).
You are asserting that a high P(A|B) (which is well established, I believe) implies a high P(B|A). I'm not certain that's true even as a generality, much less as a strong logical implication. Certainly, there could still be a high P(B) in this case, but I don't think it's well demonstrated.
I think there is good reason to believe that the population divides into a large majority who have never done this and a very small minority who have done it repeatedly. You would be right in general, but with such a bimodal distribution the correlation goes both ways. If most of the people who have ever done it have done it several times, and hardly anyone else has done it at all, then the odds are small that anyone you catch is doing it for the first time.
I think you also need an assumption that the criminal population is not growing (or is growing sufficiently slowly). Of course, that also seems plausible.
() Entrapment is when the police induce someone to commit a crime they were not otherwise predisposed to commit. That did not happen here. The only reason anyone would have to visit these chat rooms in the first place (other than to see what was going on in there, as the author did) is to buy child webcam sex.
() The individuals caught in this sting thought they were talking to a real child and had every intention to solicit a real child for sex. We are not talking about a thought-crime here.
() They had almost certainly done it before, and will continue to do it until stopped.
There are no difficult questions here. This is a good thing.
EDITED to add: By the way, I don't think artwork -- drawings, paintings, computer animations, whatever -- should ever be illegal per se, no matter what it depicts. I don't think that artwork of any kind should be illegal to produce or to view, for any purpose including sexual stimulation, so long as no actual children or other unwilling victims were involved in its production.
But that's not what we're talking about here. This isn't just about viewing synthesized materials. This is about people offering to pay for what they think is a real child to perform sex acts on camera.