TV Review: The Paedophile Hunter

Web vigilantes: The threat to civil society.

“You will be arrested, you will be charged, and you will go to prison for this,” Hunter tells the man sternly, revealing how he shared indecent images with them under the assumption of sharing them with an underage girl. – Stinson Hunter, 31, Unemployed Vigilante. (The Mirror, Online)

On Wednesday evening, disgraced television station Channel 4 aired a new documentary of a vigilante group of self-named ‘Paedophile Hunters.’ Three young men called Stinson Hunter who changed his original name from Kieren Parsons, Grime and Stubbs, the idea is that the young guys lie online and pretend to be underage teen girls to groom paedophiles. Once arranging a meeting, the group, led by Hunter, then hope to film them and chase them down the road screaming to expose them to police and on the internet as potential sex offenders.

On their website, the group are not shaming paedo’s in a new tactics mission for good, they are simply being unruly thugs in their attempt to tackle this growing crisis. While the need to expose paedophiles is necessary, where appropriate, ordinary citizens of the public cannot simply run around at free will doing as they wish. Certain acts they have done have also broken high protocol and laws which police should now investigate.

Wanting to catch a paedophile for ‘sport’ sends a terrible message to society which is aimed to encourage them to become vigilantes and abuse ordinary members of the public they disagree with because they have not analysed content thoroughly enough. Their only sole focus is to text someone online and ask them an initial question. Not listening or analysing their response which could be genuine, they aim to set out to expose every message as paedophilic and the like thereafter already assuming they are paedos.

These actions are as perverse as being a paedophile. But who will argue with them?  Everyone including press, police and politicians, who should be dealing with it will naturally, turn a blind eye. But they also shoulder some of the blame, too. For years these actions have encouraged people to become more obscure and think they can take matters into their own hands. When they should deal with such measures they instead ignore it for politically framed ideology often conflicting the job of an actual journalist/politician or investigative professional.

Three young lads running around amok, causing public anarchy akin to rioting and pub crawl mentality is simply abhorrent behaviour. Their actions directly influence the denotation of thuggish people to go out and attack people and cause harm to ordinary members of the public under their warped versions of suspicion.

It is the sole action of the police authority to deal with and act accordingly with these claims. Instead of a name and shame option, if the police are failing at catching them, then it is the police who need to re-train its approach. It is not down to three young lads on the prowl, using EXACTLY the same techniques as a, and therefore in retrospect, using the entire values of a paedophile instead.

Let’s be clear, this is no “To Catch a Predator” CBS Dateline likening. There is no invites, discussion or explanation of their misdeeds paedophiles could be causing. The three guys are as brash and sickening as they come. Calculated, coarse and crass, their actions threaten the very notion of liberal democracies and the subject of civil society.

Many cases in the UK have seen innocent men killed and abused by thugs because they “looked at a boy/girl” when passing down the street.

Let’s also be clear. This is another senseless ‘attack the internet’ rhetoric. Newspaper press, who are failing to sell and struggling to migrate online, have found an easy cause to target. Failure to adapt online and stuck in a 1920s – 1950s approach to writing, the internet, which no-one can regulate to profit from, is ‘a source of all evil.’ Yet as we all know from any type of media source, this is a platform for use, just as is television, mobile devices, radio and the like. It is neither good nor bad and a neutral platform.

Trying to gain a level of fame and re-integration into society since being a CONVICTED CRIMINAL, Stinson decides instead to interrogate his now victims, which causes some level thinking audience watchers to even have symphony for a paedophile. Hunter served time in jail six years ago as a convicted woman beater. This article is completely neutral in that respect, and we fully endorse what paedophiles do is wrong and sickening, but we cannot allow personal upset to allow society to call for a public destruction of immoral behaviour conducted by the aggressors of exposing those types of wrongdoers.

In an except from the Daily Mail, online, they added of Hunter’s past –

Parsons, 32, who served a custodial sentence for arson as a teenager, has been disowned by relatives.

His grandmother, who asked not to be named, said: ‘Keiren has caused a lot of trouble for the family. We have disowned him. When he was about 16 or 17, he ended up in prison for burning down a school.’

Next we will have people attacking ordinary citizens because they had a certain ‘look’ where they seem to be a paedophile. Any man with child could soon be accused of being one because a thug chav watching saw the pair playfully smile and touch each other. These are the intense problems this pitiful attempt at Stinson becoming a public hero/celebrity causes at large.

The way they attack people online, purposely going after random targets and tricking them by pretending to be underage girls/boys is immoral. On their site, they have exposed the conversations and other messages, which see them abusing services. They have decided to infiltrate gay dating sites as well, continually assuming that gay men are paedophiles, which is entirely wrong and inaccurate. Why, in the first place are you tricking gay men, who have been cast out of society, to boost your celebrity profile and destroy lives for a bit of fun?

This is where blurred lines are becoming more and more intoxicated with public discourse.  Such actions are disgraceful and of high distaste. Anything could happen to these people who could well be innocent in cases of mistaken identity. All the hunters need is one text that is ‘suggestive’ to frame a certain way with a certain, calculated question from the paedo hunting cartel.

Stinson even admits he created a profile of a 15 year old girl to entrap people. They even get their phone numbers and label them ‘Nonce’ in the text as a contact to put online for exposure with pictures of them. The group also pretend to be underage boys ‘not out’ using the social inacceptance to homosexual men as a trick to cause comfort from others with such understood hardship from their perspective, which society continues to defame. They then take photos of their legally-aged sex life from profiles or texts and simply post them as levels of revenge attacks, which is again, unethically acceptable. This is also a level of what is actually called TROLLING. No-one has seemed to mention this at all. The art of trolling is when you lead someone on, and then hunt them down to post pics and information about them in which you get enjoyment from ruining their lives for own and group watching amusement.

When the group hear something they disagree with to their cause, they purposely choose to target them in response, which causes another level of muckraking abuse which is against the law and ethically incorrect which again exposes these vigilantes as anything but and causes them and their ‘cause’ to become entirely perverse itself. They even targeted a female ‘anti-child abuse campaigner’ too. She spoke out against the guys and tried to close them down. The group decided to post and attack her in a vicious revenge attack online instead. This can be classed as hate speech, which is also a crime.

What we as a society are dealing with here, is not the exposure of paedophile’s but the expose of a group of disillusioned vigilantes who want to attack anyone they dislike and use the premise of branding them the most sickening term possible. Yes, there are some who genuinely are and while that is a very high cause for good to bring into the national conversation, this is not up to, nor is it correctly implemented by this trio of hunters using the exact same measures of paedophiles themselves. Society is now going to become more obscure and an assumption that everyone who is genuine is one of these men, due to the insecurities of three lone rangers, distorted from society itself, with a one-way view that ‘paedo’s are all online’ which isn’t always the case as many are around schools and parks offline.

The choice to attack specific targets and gain their private information proves that this group are planning to cause upset and destroy people’s lives for the sake of their own satisfaction that they ‘f*cked up’ someone’s life with the highest stain on their name because they didn’t like their actions as a gay man or other type of life choice or religious belief, for example. That is also classed in a form of hate preaching defamation.

Hunter also again stigmatises the welfare pool of society as bad. Unemployed, a former drug addict and a convicted arsonist jail serving criminal brands all welfare claimants as bad, when many are good and in struggling poverty across the United Kingdom.

The chats are only shown from a certain point of the conversation, not the very beginning, which casts a shady view on the dark side of the vigilantes, carefully posting constructed messages that suit their cause. They don’t use any pictures as a profile on chats from their end, either. This is simply a method of wake up, who can we get today? Let’s try this chat site today. See if we can get anyone. They are not waiting to be approached; they are specifically targeting people for their fun game of sporting boredom. They have expanded to all platforms of Social Media, too. Even as these ‘kids’ the group send suggestive messages back to encourage a sexy or perverted conversation including kisses and talk of being “a virgin” to encourage sexual conversation. The group even send genital pictures, including penis pictures in their measures to entrap people. The pictures are not of the group and are sourced, clearly from elsewhere, possibly search engines and are stored on the group’s archives with mobile phones and ‘cloud’s’ which exposes their shady tactics. Another point made in the documentary was that a girl on an 18+ website contacted them. Underage people and including the Hunter using it as such, posing as teen girls, is also wrong on their part.

Dating itself, in today’s society is even more difficult as we develop over time, but having infiltrating abusers ready to meet people to attack them is not acceptable in any circumstance. This group need to be arrested and pulled down by Metropolitan police. Their actions are entirely wrong, even if they try to justify this as a good cause. This is the job of the police and all material should be handed to them to deal with. It is their job to deal with precisely and with the technology and capabilities to act or not.

Based on their assumptions only of how the dating world has changed and sending of explicit messages has become the state of societal change, segregation of communal groups and individuals. With a biased view from people like Hunter, who view it as not likable text content, is now the way others communicate, whether liked or not. It is not up to a lone ranger to react with a level of action that can place anyone in danger of substantial risk, even if there disingenuous ‘don’t harass them’ is going to encourage others to do so, which is their aim. Based on Stinson’s own views without any moral thought and simply a ‘hear one story’ scare tactic and also on the verge of stalking, is just as sickening. Uneducated vigilantes with nothing in their life attacking those who have something, to justify on a moral backdrop of ‘protecting kids’ which is the framework for such celebritism is just as disgraceful. Yet another question must also be discussed of the fact this country is entirely sexually repressed and this has stoked up the entire discourse with attitudes and actions with sexual interactions. Furthering the tactics of turning the screw is the same level, just in a pick a side’ mentality to excuse any abuse you can get away with because you were ‘on the good’ side. No-one is above the law.

The group further their spin calling themselves ‘investigative journalists’ which is nothing of the sort pertained to the title and is therefore fraudulence. This is not journalism at all. They are in no shape or form NGO’s and the like. They are clear, outright vigilantes, hunting for sport and fame. Malicious and unreserving at causing risk to those who may or may not be offenders from Stinson and Co. do not care about anything in society other than being a paedo hunting machine. This machine removes them from understand what is a ‘right or wrong’ process and their only defence is without any rationale to say ‘they are paedos’ including those hounded who may not be. Assumptions do not guarantee truth. This neglect places the trio in the same bracket only one tier above the paedophiles themselves. We have to talk and act about cases in rational debate, not sole one man missions, removing himself from all responsibility.

This is simply another act of scaremongering.

From Channel 4’s perspective another attempt to buy into their brand of ‘Born Risky’ is tacky at best. This, like stigmatising people on benefits with inaccurate portrayal (where a second series is on its way) was only for ratings. The failing TV station with low ratings in general since new management overtook the once popular channel a couple of years ago, has no shame in accelerating its ‘creativity’ with programming. Uncreative and simply perverted, 4’s creative bigwig Jay Hunt has continually destroyed the inside halls of Channel 4. Her and the team’s approach is all about ratings and not ‘being risky’ in the slightest.

From the perspective of the media, any story that helps to attack the internet and raise statistics for the struggling industry doesn’t make them insightful or unique. People will read the story because it is around, not because it was new and original. If you are ever going to sell and raise stats, that’s what they want. They only read it because it is there. Then they don’t have anything than a mild reaction or rant, before it is fish and chip wrapper.

Clearly what we need to address, is why girls and boys as young as this age, have sexual tendencies. Then we have to understand why the UK has the highest rate of teen pregnancies. Why girls have such low self-esteem and are ‘prepared’ to sleep with anyone at first sight is alarming. With over-sexualisation in TV shows such as X-Factor, and the continual struggle with poverty in the UK with benefit cuts, continue to keep families and people in this position. None of these issues have been addressed in this programme, nor pockets of wide spread media. Why it is now considered by some as the norm to sleep with underage kids who are ‘giving it away’ needs to be addressed as much as any potential paedophile. And then there is the final question. What constitutes a paedophile? Are women not paedophiles too? Only men? This archaic approach continues to prove that Britain as a society and a country in the world, will continually remain backward, with a lost generation who never achieve, because all is held down or put back on ‘shock factor’ tendencies without taking a two way perspective to any debate or situation. Only fuelled with personal spin and assumption of disgust, with lack of information, this country is being pulled further into the depths of despair for many a future to come. These pitiful shows for a ratings buzz do not help, nor support this under any measure. It is in every word, shameful.

Whilst chaperoned on a sting, police officers found the interactions of these hunters a disgrace and had huge concerns over his methods.

The domino effect mentality also rained down as the three, chasing one suspected paedophile down the street called him “paedo” encouraging motorists to stop and join in, in a mob mentality of defamation based on no evidence whatsoever. Whilst the show might have it, the street collaborators did not. Once the evidence is collected, there is no full sustainable proof that some are paedophilic and that any are built with strong clarity or credibility. Unreliable chance opportunities from the lowest common denominator in society have not helped criminals who seek a second chance in society.

This has branded all criminals as ‘once a criminal, always a criminal’ with such mind-set values thanks to Hunter’s loose portrayal of sustainability. Convicted criminal Stinston broke down in the documentary after the chase, crying adding this was “vindication” of his own previous crimes. If the trio cannot reform their attitude, then perhaps behind bars is the best place for them.

Many people who do these actions are usually people who have been involved with or had an instance with something they felt is paedophilic. As a result they ‘turn’ on everyone around them, distrusting of all in society because of their own insecurities. They need counselling, not internet and TV shows. He later adds he witnessed abuse while growing up in a children’s home. What a surprise. While this is not acceptable, you cannot go off on your own crusade against people of the public without any evidence at all. Then you cannot simply ‘create the evidence’ much of which is highly linked to being viewed as fabricated or uncredible.

Former chief executive of CEOP, Senior police officer Jim Gamble, said to the company filming, “Some people with very low training have proven just how easy it is to go out there and catch individuals. Very quickly they are shooting fish in a barrel. The fact of the matter is this – that needs to be done by law enforcement.”

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The Mirror

Daily Mail

Channel 4