This video is a, of all places, Vice.com creation.

From the website:

Justin Payne is a self-proclaimed vigilante who spends his nights pretending to be a 13-year-old boy online. He is intent on shaming every pedophile who falls for his trap. With help from his cameraman Gerry, the duo have publicly shamed hundreds of sexual predators and have been a thorn in the side of local law enforcement. 

Watch the video.

So: is the man right or wrong for doing this?

Is this nothing more than abject and horrible entrapment?

Or is he justified and warranted in conducting himself in this fashion?

My opinion is this: unless breaking a very specific Canadian law, then he is fully justified in doing this on behalf of children whose lives were on the cusp of being utterly destroyed.

Let me step back for a moment.

In the 1990s I was a detective in my department’s Child Abuse Bureau. I was recruited by other detectives to work in that unit. While there I learned what an enormous scourge was pedophilia, how rampant it is and how persons you might not have suspected were pedophiles, to include Lewis Carroll and Arthur C. Clarke. Perhaps even your friend next door or your uncle.

America’s worst pedophile was a Delaware pediatrician named Earl Bradley who, on June 23, 2011, was convicted on 24 counts of a consolidated indictment (which originally contained 529 counts): 14 counts of rape, seven counts of assault, and three counts of sexual exploitation of a child. Note: he was a pediatrician. Perfect placement. He could have been your pediatrician.

Whilst in Child Abuse I acquired lengthier sentences upon conviction there than I did in Homicide. [I did, at one time, hold the California record for longest sentence obtained in a case when a man, on multiple, multiple counts of serial robbery, received 800+ years.]

Child abusers are particularly despicable because they not only utilize their superior physical strength against children — up to and including murder — but even perhaps a more evil and insidious element that I term the “mindfuck” aspect of child abuse. That is to say, willingly and cunningly utilizing the clever and devious adult mind against the undeveloped and defenseless mind of a child.

That is why organizations such as NAMBLA are beyond loathsome, but they are not the only organized effort to norm sexual relations with children. There are many more. While writing for the AbsoluteZeroUnited website in the 1990s I was sued by a pedophile who compiled my personal information and then released it on the internet. He did not win his suit.

Frankly, I would recommend you browse through the back history of the AbsoluteZeroUnited site, an anti-pedo point in the blogosphere, so that you can see (if you’ve the stomach) how strident and insistent and depraved are advocates of pedophilia. And to what ends they will go in order to justify, norm and reconcile pedophilia.

It is an axiom in Child Abuse: “not everyone who was abused will abuse, but everyone who abuses was abused.”

Please weigh in.

BZ