Maybe it's just me but I don't really like the tendency to treat pedophiles as if they are the devils themselves.
Let there be no doubt. I have two kids and there is probably no limit to what I would do to someone who did anything to my kids. But it's not as simply as just condemning pedophiles for being that and I ultimately think there is something morally or ethically questionable about this approach.
It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves and so I would like to see a less hysteric and more balanced response to the issue.
Just because he is helping catching the bad guys does not give him the moral upper hand as he seem to think he has. Too bad such a complex issue gets treated with such brushing generalizations.
Maybe I am reading too much into what he writes, but these honeypots to hit random people just feels wrong to me. Like snooping on someone else life.
I agree. I think people hate pedophiles in much the same way they hate(d) gays. Because it's disgusting and perverted, not because it harms people. The fact that some children do actually get harmed and that many people have children themselves that they feel very protective of fuels the emotion of labeling all pedophiles as "evil".
If viewing an image of child abuse is wrong. Isn't viewing an image of ISIS beheading someone also wrong? In both cases the crimes were committed and the images produced to satisfy an audience. But one is illegal because it's perverted while the other is legal because presumably far more people have blood-lust than a minority sexuality.
In Australia it's especially bad, with somebody being convicted for possessing hand-drawn Simpsons porn. There might be a copyright case there, but it's hard to make the connection between that activity and actual harm to any children. The defense argued that they weren't humans because they had 4 fingers and misshapen faces. This kind of case is what happens when the "evil pedophile" mindset overwhelms people.
You could go a step further and ask what's the difference between a parent taking photos of their naked child playing in the bath, and somebody doing the same thing but then having a wank with the photo later? I think the difference is that one is "normal" and the other is "perverted", so we make one legal and the other illegal. I probably appear in some baby bath photos and I certainly wasn't scarred by it. If they got onto the internet and people got some pleasure from them, is that really going to scar me for life, assuming I even know about it?
I've posited that the only law required is prevention of child abuse. Viewing/possession of an image as a crime seems inherently misguided - especially if criminality is going to be defined by assumed intent.
However I have never been able to avoid the counter argument that by allowing (implied consent) a market for cp imagery you may increase demand which will increase the incidence of child abuse in order to satisfy. The bath photo is simply one end of a spectrum.
Of course there's a market - people barter images to get access to more images.
This is one justification used to stop a paedophile from working with all children even if their particular interest is strictly not all children. If the paedophile is only interested in boys under 11 you still need to be careful when he's working with girls over 13 because he can use his access to those girls to get photographs which he then uses to get access to photographs of his target group.
Devil's advocate: if we accept that, then in effect the ban on child pornography could either be massively proliferating child abuse, or massively proliferating the collection of child porn. Maybe both.
> It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves
This point is oftentimes overlooked. Also, the word "pedophile" is oftentimes conflated with "child molester", which makes it impossible to distinguish the individuals who are pedophiles but have not (and have no intentions to) act on those desires.
The war on drugs didn't work out as intended. The war on pedophilia seems much safer.
Except of course for teenage sexting. Where the legal system has ruined lives for no reason. Or the weird edge cases it introduces. Such as a theoretical case where someone wearing Go Pro comes across a pedophile actively abusing a child out in the wild. The good samaritan Go Pro wearer is now guilty of both production and possession of child pornography. The laws do not leave any room.
800,000 people in the US are now on the sex offenders registry [1]. I think it has become clear to at least half the nation that the laws have gone too far on things like teen sexting or getting put on the registry for public urination.
A friend of mine, her boyfriend is a trucker. He had pulled over to urinate along the side of the highway late at night, in the shadow cover of his truck. A state trooper had pulled over a speeding vehicle, a distance behind him along the road. The trooper proceeded to then pull in behind the trucker, and threatened to put him on the sex offender's registry for public urination; the trooper spent 10 minutes reaming him out for it before letting him go.
> The war on drugs didn't work out as intended. The war on pedophilia seems much safer.
We don't have a war on pedophilia. We have a war on "child pornography". I put "child pornography" in scare quotes because it's abundantly clear that many of the laws that aim to target child pornography really only use it as a bogeyman to obscure some other agenda.
Also, as for "safer", whatever we're doing now is clearly putting children at risk. In many countries (including the US), pedophilia is exempt from typical confidentiality laws regarding mental illnesses[0]. This makes pedophiles less likely to seek professional help, and I can only imagine that this means that they are more likely to harm or abuse a child.
Yes this has long been my concern. Is pedophilia something that can be rehabilitated? Is it mental illness? A sexual orientation? By providing people with no choices are we creating underground networks? To me there are echoes of drug prohibition here. I go fucking crazy thinking about my kids getting taken. When I watched true detective i was seriously ready to throw up. Particularly chilling was the last line: "we'll never get them all". Since law enforcement can never possibly eradicate a problem, and since we provide no way for someone to get help without being incriminated, aren't we just leaving the opportunity wide open for this to fester under the surface?
BBC Panorama had an excellent episode exploring these very questions. At least I think it was Panorama. I tried searching for it but all I get are hits about Jimmy Savile.
They found a young man who selfidenties as a pedophile, who was actually willing to go on camera and talk about his desires and urges. It was quite fascinating, and I do see many parellels not just to the war on drugs but to homosexuality as well.
We aren't treating these people in a humane way, and IMO we are making the problem worse by perpetuating a Wich Hunt.
That you can read the law such that your hypothetical Go Pro wearer is guilty of those things, doesn't mean that prosecutors would ever bring such a case. Laws are drawn more broadly than they're enforced, and even an overzealous prosecutor has to get through a judge and jury.
> even an overzealous prosecutor has to get through a judge and jury.
No, what they do is threaten you with some hypothetical 30 year term if they were to charge you will all the broad interpretations of the law. This fear of hard time is then used as a carrot to get you to plead guilty to lesser charges that you may not have even done.
They get around the "judges" by the minimum sentencing laws: "sorry, my hands are tied, I have to lock you up for ____ years because I have to follow federal sentencing guidelines."
Furthermore, there is a huge incentive to prosecute "sex crimes" because that's a gold star for the prosecutor/judge. At the end of the year, or at election time they can say "We locked up N sex offenders this year for a combined total of X years".
Jury's often make immoral rulings because the law is the law as they're following instructions. Prosecutors are notorious for being overzealous shitbags. So that leaves the judge. They probably react fairly more often than not. Maybe even in the vast majority of cases. I wouldn't wager a single dollar, much less my freedom, on a judge acting fairly or rationally. Far too risky.
Even if a prosecutor wasn't going to bring a case (and I've seen other just as stupid situations involving prosecutors going full force that I am not convinced they wouldn't), it still ends up having a chilling effect.
This meme is repeated a lot about posession of child pornography, and is absoluely incorrect. Perhaps this is because in the UK the law had to be amended to include an exception, so that deliberately 'making' otherwise illegal images solely for the purpose of law enforcement was allowed as a defence. But (again, in the UK, but true for most other common law jurisdictions) there is still a 'mens rea' (that is, guilty mind, or intent) requirement, as with any crime.
EDIT: Also, there are no 'edge cases' in regard to sexting, at least in the UK at present, as the law allows the obvious defence that the images are of ones partner.
What's interesting is that most people these days would agree that sexual orientation is not a choice. This is fine when we are talking about equal rights for homosexuals, but for some reason is abhorrent when we are talking about a orientation that is undesirable for society. (And thus classified as a mental disorder).
Even if there is no crime involved, and there won't ever be. I blame the media for misusing the word "pedophile" to mean child molester.
Could you yield that the potential for one party getting abused is alot higher if it's a 10 year old and a 50 year old vs two 50 year olds? Seems pretty obvious to me but trying to be specific for the sake of argument.
> Maybe it's just me but I don't really like the tendency to treat pedophiles as if they are the devils themselves.
People don't know what the prevalence of paedophilia is, or the ratios of paedophiles that never act on that vs paedophiles who do act on it.
If someone commits multiple offences it's easier to catch them, so the statistics of convicted offenders are probably skewed towards frequent offenders. That may make paedophile offenders appear to be riskier.
It's important to remember that child abuse does cause very real, often severe life-limiting, harm. We've come a long way from the 1970s thinking of "making a fuss is what causes the harm" to recognising that it's the abuse that causes most of the harm.
I disagree, and I think the problem is the framing. Call it rape porn, because it is. What would you think of someone trading files like "REAL video of ISIS soldiers gang raping and beheading girl!" Child porn, especially the "hard core" sort alluded to here, is in the same category.
I do dislike the OP's guilt by association and vigilantism though. There's a reason we have a proper justice system. Imagine if someone like this was mistaken about one of those email addresses. You could sue him to hell but the damage might be done.
I support the fight against child pornography - but I can't support making certain types of media illegal to possess or watch. For one (small) thing you get into the absurd case were the court will have to commit the same crime to verify a crime was committed.
> For one (small) thing you get into the absurd case were the court will have to commit the same crime to verify a crime was committed.
That doesn't seem like a strong argument, because it applies to a lot of other things as well, like illegal drugs. (And if the court relies on witnesses to establish that drugs were possessed, they could technically do the same by cp.)
Haha, photographs of consensual sex between high school seniors is rape porn I guess. Good thing high schoolers never have sex, since it would be rape.
What do you feel is the important distinction between "touching" and "actual penetration"? I'd think they both would fall under the same category of "child molestation".
A kid touching a mans penis maybe barely aware that the man is getting aroused vs. a man penetrating a little kid.
They both fall under the same category but they are two very different things.
Also don't forget that a big part of the issue with pedophilia is actually society which because of the tabu and inability to distinguish between the different types of them ends up making the experience even worse and further adding to the problem.
And again I am not in any way defending this behavior, I have kids myself. I just believe that the very thorny subject requires more careful thinking than just calling evil.
I agree. Pedophilia is a sexual preference for pre-pubescent children, not an act. The vast majority of pedophiles are likely sad and lonely people condemned by a freak of nature to live with the burden of a sexual preference that in Western society carries the ultimate stigma.
Even discussing pedophilia calmly and reasonably opens one to the charge of being a pedophile or a "pedophile apologist." Taboos can reveal a lot about a society but I'll leave that discussion for another time.
I don't completely trust the motives of guys like the author of the linked article. Others have already pointed out technical errors in the article and questioned the soundness of his methodology. His irrationally labeling Tor as "the devil" is a bit odd too (and highly illogical), to say the least. He even admits he has an irrational hate-on for pedophiles.
What is this guy actually achieving with his "honeypot" other than wrestling with his own demons (more on this later)? He set out to entrap ostensible pedophiles and gather their IP addresses etc. Not child abusers or child pornographers but people that clicked on his link offering a "community of like minded individuals." He explains in detail the technical aspects of his operation and what he learned about the people he interacted with and draws some very dubious conclusions. (Such as "Many visitors to the site were active pedophile predators." Maybe this is the case, but he offers no compelling evidence other than a few lines of a chat room transcript. Not once does he mention even contemplating contacting the FBI or his local PD or any other LEA. Rather, this seems to be mostly about him.
There have been a few high-profile cases over the years where crusaders dedicated to fighting things they found morally reprehensible (e.g. prostitution, narcotics, pornography, homosexuality, child pornography) were outed as being voracious consumers and/or practitioners of that which they vehemently opposed in public at every opportunity. One of them was a DA who made a name for himself with his aggressive prosecution of alleged prostitutes and child pornographers. There is a term for this in psychology which I can't recall at the moment. Basically, there are some people who deal with the cognitive dissonance and the associated shame and guilt of being attracted to something society or their religion condemns morally by venting against it publicly while indulging in it privately. A guy who has an anti-porn website, say, and publishes anti-porn literature for distribution in schools who travels the country speaking out against porn and attending and organizing anti-porn conferences while fapping himself raw to internet porn every night after work.
I am *not saying I think the guy in the article is a pedophile or harms children. I am saying that I don't think his prime motive for doing this project is empathy or compassion for victims of child abusers and predators. He sets up a "honeypot" that serves no practical purpose. No suspected child abusers were investigated, no children saved from harm, police and LE don't even get a mention. Nothing new and useful was brought the table.
Yet based on his two-week escapade "Tor is the devil." That seems like a very odd statement, especially coming from an engineer. Is his computer the devil's sidekick? He does admit that he is motivated by personal reasons and it very much shows. After reading his piece I don't know what the take away is supposed to be. Pedophiles use the internet? Tor is used for illegal activities? Anyway, it's late and this is going in circles. I mean no disrespect to the author but I am left feeling very puzzled.
You can turn on showdead in the settings. As far as I'm aware it's also not downvotes that make posts disappear: It's them getting flagkilled, which happens when a lot of users click the flag button.
You guys crack me up. It was a facetious parenthetical comment that seems to have become the focal point. I run Tor, operate a legit hidden service, run an anonymous proxy on several of my machines, and use encryption all over the place. In no way whatsoever do I think Tor should be shut down. It has a purpose - but is being abused by criminals which is disappointing and potential detrimental to those that use if for a legitimate purpose.
As for LE, I mentioned in the article that I contacted them, as a courtesy, twice during the project. The last time was a few days before the hidden services were shut down. I let them know that I had a pedo honeypot running and was about to take it offline, giving them the opportunity to take over the VM or scrape the data gathered.
As for personal demons - we all have them and I won't argue that I may have more than most - it's all a part of life experiences. I've dealt with LE and CPS on child abuse issues for years and it has certainly tainted my view. Then again, I have a vantage point that most do not have - a much closer, clear view of the problem.
It's another of those causes like clean water or treating people equally.
Who wants dirty water? Who wants to create second-class citizens? Who likes pedophilia?
As humans we love these issues where you'd be either an idiot or extremely asocial to oppose. We like slogans. We like to feel superior. We do not like nuance, or having to think a lot about things.
Just as heterosexuals don't rape people all the time, most pedophiles probably don't either. I think an estimated 2% of the population are pedophiles. I feel sorry for them.
However, if they prove to be a danger to the kids, they have to be locked away or something. It's just because we don't know a better way to treat the issue.
Ah, but I believe that they do often act on their impulses. Mayo reported that more than 3/4 of persons who were arrested for child pornography were found to have molested a child. A federal prison study actually estimated even more.
> It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves …
Wouldn't that mean, that he is not only trying to catch pedophiles but actively curing pedophilia?
I think what is going on in the US with the public shaming of offenders in databases is wrong, but I am fine with honeypots to catch them. Legally he is in no position to do so, of course.
There is no "just be watching". If you watch a child getting raped, you are committing a crime and better have a very convincing argument why you had to do it. It is in fact that simple.
Of course they need help, too. We need both prosecution and prevention.
If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other. You are committing a crime.
See how that's silly?
There are people who watch animated child porn and they are ruled as criminals even though no actual child was directly harmed.
There are people who watch snuff films, where people actually are killed, and the viewers are not breaking the law in most states.
Perhaps you would argue that snuff film viewing should be illegal, or that watching Game of Thrones should be illegal because it portrays rape, violence, murder, etc.
To me, it's clear that there is a distinct difference between watching that content and in producing it. Sure, if you actively encourage it to be produced you're breaking the law (same as if you try to convince someone to make a snuff film, you're breaking the law).
It's really not that simple and the laws are not consistent here.
Having done a small amount of volunteer work with children, I've had some exposure to child protection issues. Often, its a spiral downwards (IIRC its typically called the spiral of abuse), where the person in question erodes mental barriers so that they see the behaviour as normal. I don't accept the "just watching" argument - it is child abuse.
What you must understand is that it normalises the behaviour in that persons mind and then we're onto other barriers to be eroded - i.e. the person moves onto physical acts.
The blasé attitude on this thread is beyond belief.
Good reasoning is not a blasé attitude. It's an approach of setting aside personal feelings and instead having a discussion to get to the root of the problem and discuss the merits of opinion.
The fact is that anyone who simply goes around arguing that something is morally good or bad better have solid reasons for doing so.
~No, no, no. That's not what ancestor post was saying at all.~
~Watching Game of Thrones leads to playing Grand Theft Auto, and doing that will make you a murderer. When you're sliding down the slippery slope, you have to hit every rock on the way down.~
The theory reverses the arrow of causality.
If the Army uses simulation and gaming as part of its psychological conditioning program to not only get its soldiers to fire their weapons, but also aim at and kill the enemy, that does not imply that those games or simulations, used in isolation, will necessarily result in desensitization to violence.
I seriously want to design a contagion that imparts to individuals an intuitive understanding of conditional probabilities, and how to reverse one.
If you know that 99% of child abusers viewed images of child abuse prior to engaging in that activity themselves, you only know P(A|B), where A is viewing photos, and B is taking action. You do not know P(B|A), which is the likelihood that someone that someone who has viewed photos has done abuse, unless you also know the unconditional probabilities for P(A) and P(B). You can probably infer those two from crime statistics and investigative activities like those described in the article. But given the existing legal prohibitions and resultant secretive behaviors, I doubt you could determine either with a great deal of precision.
If (hypothetically) P(A|B)=1.0, P(A)=0.001 and P(B)=0.0001, then P(B|A)=0.1 . That means that even if you know that everyone who did A also did B, you can't assume that everyone who has done B has necessarily done A.
We could more easily calculate for the Game of Thrones and murder hypothesis.
Let's say A is "committed murder in 2014" and B is "watched GoT in 2014". From crime statistics, I estimate that P(A)=0.000045 . From ratings estimates, P(B)=0.063 . Now, I'm not entirely certain how many new murderers in 2014 had watched GoT, but I'll guess that P(B|A) = 0.063 . That makes P(A|B)=0.000045 . Huh. It looks like I assumed they were independent events....
If you went and did an actual survey of 2014's murderers, and discovered that P(B|A) was actually 0.12, that's a great find, but it still only means that P(A|B)=0.000086 . That's not a convincing argument that watching GoT causes actual murder. It just means that 0.0086% of GoT watchers committed murder. That might be explained by GoT inducing violent behavior in its viewers, but from the numbers, it's not bloody likely.
It's based on his work with child abusers - he's one of the leading academics in the UK on this issue, I don't know what kind of evidence your expecting.
Really? I understand the point you're "attempting" to make, but to claim that what is acted on TV is the same as what actually occurs is such a stretch I didn't think anybody would attempt to make it.
I don't equate animated child porn with actual child porn, much in the same way I don't equate the beheadings in GoT with the beheadings of IS. But to insinuate that the poster above would extend their 'committing a crime,' in the case of actual child rape, to something that is acted out for TV is an injustice to what they actually said. In essence, you just threw up a strawman and attacked it as a way of validating your final point (which, by most accounts, I agree with).
> If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other
No, you're watching fictional people pretend to kill each other.
You would have an argument if you used snuff films as an example. And yes, if watching a child being raped is illegal, than watching a real murder should be.
You are assuming that just because the prefrontal cortex sometimes knows the difference between reality and fiction, the rest of the brain must as well.
If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog.
_O \O/ ...meaning this ASCII art of
' |\+-@- one guy stabbing another guy
/ \ /| with a sword would be illegal.
Believing in such suggests that Ludovico's Technique from Clockwork Orange is real, it works, and that humans can be effectively reprogrammed by presenting the appropriate images to the visual cortex and somehow zapping the limbic system, in exactly the same manner that Pavlov's dog was reprogrammed to salivate at the sound of a bell.
So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen? At least a violent video game provides some virtual reward for virtual murders, such as glowing green stacks of cash, or mission advancement, or some stupid little thing that produces a squirt of dopamine.
That part of our brains does not know the difference between reality, dreams, and Hollywood trickery. Certain mirror neurons in the brain will fire whether you are actually doing yoga, thinking about doing yoga, or watching a yoga instructor do yoga. Your reward center doesn't really care if the image is a product of good photography or good GPU rendering. It doesn't even care that it is a 2D image rather than 3D reality.
Fortunately, there appears to be no causal link provable flowing from watching something done to doing the depicted act yourself. Instead, it appears that those who are predisposed to do something, or have already decided to do it, will very often model, simulate, and practice that action--using whatever means they have at their disposal--before going on to do it. If any one tool or strategy becomes unavailable, another would be substituted.
> So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen?
Rather than direct chemical triggers that stimulate the brains reward system ("tiny darts of cocaine"), they typically use other triggers to the reward system, like music. Same effect, less additional machinery.
But simulated CP is illegal too. In many jurisdictions you can get locked away for drawing something on a piece of paper. This is probably what OP is addressing.
If watching a crime is a criminal offence, you better lock up the viewers of CNN, Fox News, and the BBC.
I do think their ought to be laws against the distribution of this kind of material (there probably are?), and there is no question that producing it is a criminal offence, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Watching a report about a crime is not the same as consuming a product that was produced and shared or sold by the criminal that committed the crime. You are actively supporting the criminal, either through money or through community.
On a different note: There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders. I know this argument is hard to make on HN, because free speech, but I think privacy is an important right, too.
ISIS produces their beheading videos specifically for them to be shared and viewed by as many people as possible. By watching these videos, you are actively supporting ISIS by paying any attention to what they are doing and therefore granting them legitimacy. If videos of rape are illegal,then videos of murder should be too.
> There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders.
Right! That's how it starts. In the end we have "there's nothing wrong with censoring 28 pages of a 9/11 report to protect the security of all Americans because it doesn't really matter who funded it, the government told us who the bad people are so we don't really need to keep the government on check on this".
That sort of thinking ends really well. /s
Remember, the citizens hire the government. They work for us. Would you allow your employees to censor some parts of your financial reports?
Grow some principles. If people are sick that they need to look at sick images then offer to help them. Enabling tyrants does not help keep children safe. Incidentally, not spanking them does. If you really care about protecting children, get off your bureaucrat high horse and start helping educate people on the impact of spanking.
The "this is how it starts"-narrative is not necessarily true. While Germany has strict privacy rules for victims and criminals - media cannot show their faces or their last names and so on - I do not see that it is the country that has problems with its agencies and military-industrial complex being out of control and censoring stuff on their behalf.
If there were photos of me being raped as a kid I would want to see the rapist get punished and like-minded people forbidden to watch them. I do not think that it is moral to hurt people in concrete cases because of an abstract (debatable) threat to the values of a society. What do these values even mean if you do not have the mercy to grant victims this right?
You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
> You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
Let's say society makes a fund for people that were abused as kids (horribile dictu). Those funds are there only to benefit those people so we'd better be able to prove they were really victims of what they say there were, otherwise people can just say "yeah that happened to me" and collect the money without ever proving they were victims.
You may want to forbid people from seeing the evidence for your abuse but then you can't expect people to believe you. When we believe in tales of rape without proof we smear the name of the accused.
You will get quite a different punishment for watching child porn than from raping a kid. So yes there is "just watching" That doesn't make it less disgusting but it's not the same.
You might be surprised. I'd say that child pornography is often punished more harshly than child rape.
The justice system weights the crime of consuming child pornography by the number of images the defendent is in "possession" of. I guess laws vary, but at least in my jurisdiciton, you can be sentenced to years in prison per image. It would be easy for a single wank session to result in -- potentially -- life in prison.
The issue is confounded by widespread lack of techical acumen among judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and even the forensic "experts" who investigate and testify (on both sides). For example, would you consider it reasonable to charge someone with a separate crime for every copy of the exact same digial file present on a hard disk? For both an image file and an automatically-generated thumbnail image of that same file? Do you meaningfully posess a file in your browsers temporary cache? How about a file deleted from the filesystem, but still present in residual form on the disk? Some of the issues are nuanced, and it's difficult to even have an intelligent conversation about the evidence.
I am normally a pretty level dude, but in this case I really do believe we are dealing with something supernaturally evil. This isn't snooping on randoms, it's exposing demons for what they are. (Atheist, but science just doesn't have the words for this.)
A a fellow atheist, I agree that evil is a real thing, but I still don't see the need to call it "supernatural".
Evil is the opposite of good, so if we agree that actions to promote life, liberty and happiness are good, then actions that promote death, slavery and misery are evil. Simple as that.
Evil and good are not real things, those are abstract, subjective and high level concepts that exist only in our brains. You can easily reprogram a human ("teach" or "brainwash" using the subjective terms) to classify death, slavery and misery as either good or evil.
All that matters in nature is whether something works or does not work, not whether it's good or evil.
Recently I noticed that most people I would consider evil, are actually people doing what they think is right but with the wrong information - as well as people giving into basic animal instincts that as a society we aim to rise above.
Saying that, I have definitely met people with malicious intentions, who are definitely 'evil' (or lacking a severe amount of empathy for their fellow beings). I am not sure people with challenged sexual instincts are these people, however I am sure there are people with a combination of both behavioural traits.
I consider a modern, secular definition of "real" evil to be based in the malicious or intentional "taking" of something from someone else for your own gain. That could be stealing for profit or taking life for non-defensive reasons or it could be forcible rape or other coercion that takes away someone's right to control what is done to their person.
Not a complete or concise definition but the general theme I notice when I think about what I personally consider "evil" is the elevation of your own desires over the safety or well-being of others. In a way, evil (for me) is based on what helps humanity/society or hurts it. It's based in our natural instincts for empathy and the ignoring of those "higher" motives in favor of more primitive drives to take, hurt, kill, rape, or enslave.
For me, good versus evil is not so much about religious or Hollywood ideas of light vs. dark or god vs. devil but the more familiar battle between our "animal" side and our "human" side.
Let there be no doubt. I have two kids and there is probably no limit to what I would do to someone who did anything to my kids. But it's not as simply as just condemning pedophiles for being that and I ultimately think there is something morally or ethically questionable about this approach.
It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves and so I would like to see a less hysteric and more balanced response to the issue.
Just because he is helping catching the bad guys does not give him the moral upper hand as he seem to think he has. Too bad such a complex issue gets treated with such brushing generalizations.
Maybe I am reading too much into what he writes, but these honeypots to hit random people just feels wrong to me. Like snooping on someone else life.