RedHanded - ShortHand: Should We Support Paedophile Catchers?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

To some paedophile catchers like Chris Hansen are online superheroes, protecting children and putting predators behind bars. To others they're vigilantes who enforce their own form of justice while putting people in danger. But do they have a place in the system? This week Hannah and Suruthi are jumping into the murky waters of self styled sting operations, hidden cameras, and entrapment to find out.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hi. Welcome to red-handed colon short-hand. Colon, pinoes. Colon, semicolon, ampersand, in Terabang. Welcome to Red-Handed Shorthand where you can listen yourself interesting in 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes we go over because we get over excited, but that's not your business, so shut up. So, yeah, you've read the title. You know what this is about. Let's get going. Since the mass adoption of the internet in the late 90s, message boards and social media, media have created a virtual hunting ground for paedophiles. Last year, the NSPCC revealed that online grooming cases have increased by over 70% in just three

years. In fact, 2021 was the worst year on record for child sexual abuse online. And the Internet Watch Foundation has said that increased internet use over lockdowns has left children more vulnerable to predatory groups. The FBI has estimated that half a million paedophiles are online every single day. The issue obviously needs to be addressed. The question is how? With police budgets being slashed at every opportunity

and more predators looking for children online than ever before, it's almost an impossible task. So it's unsurprising that the surge in online grooming over the past two decades has seen a rise in another phenomenon. Vigilante paedophile catchers or paedophile hunters. This tactic is used both by law enforcement and civilian groups. It involves posing as a child online to catch potential predators who make contact.

For anyone who spent any time on YouTube, your mind will have gone straight to the best known of all the self-styled pedophile hunters, Chris Hansen. Hansen's segment on Dateline NBC called to Catch a Predator, debuted in November 2004 and lit the Tinderbox for civilian pedophile hunting. The show featured Hansen working closely with a group called Perverted Justice, which in itself, like if you think you are reining down justice, don't like slightly change the term perverting the course of justice, which is an offence. It's illegal. That makes no sense to me.

Like I get what they think they were trying to do, but actually it just makes me think of perjury. Yeah, it just makes it seem like what a lot of these people understand. up doing which is perverting the course of justice. Exactly. Members of perverted justice would pose online as underage children waiting to be spoken to by an adult with sinister intentions. When a potential predator began chatting, it would be reiterated that they were talking to a quote-unquote child.

And then the fake child would carry on talking to the predator, gathering evidence, quote-unquote, and eventually organising to meet up in real life. So once the potential predator agreed to meet, the stage was set for them to arrive at a house full of secret cameras. There they would be met by an 18-year-old drama student posing as the child and later ambushed by Chris Hansen. Have you watched these? I'm not convinced I've seen specifically to catch a predator.

However, I've seen something very similar, and there's one particular clip where this guy is at train station. But the police who are talking to him are British, so I don't think it's the same thing, but it's a similar situation. And it's just this guy, and he is terrified. like he's shaking and like it's so uncomfortable yeah we'll obviously get into this later about like obviously nobody's saying you should be a child sex fender on the internet trying to lure children out but often a lot of the men that they end up sort of baiting into these situations are typically found

to have like quite a lot of learning difficulties and not really understanding what's going on and there's just a gross level of like negligence to these shows but the chris handsome one in particular, like, it was so, like, formulaic. And I haven't watched, like, whole episodes of it, but I've definitely seen clips on the internet. And he'd always, like, knock on the door while the students, since, like, the 18-year-olds inside with him. And he'll, like, have a pizza delivery or something. So he'll pretend to be, like, a pizza delivery man or something. Oh, that I have seen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And as you can imagine, to catch a predator was, like, everybody's, like, fucking wet dream of a TV show to watch. And so, it was an absolute ratings dream.

And millions of people tuned in to watch would be something. And so, you can't be, sex offenders being grilled and humiliated. And it's clear to see why. To catch Predator was easy watching. There was a clear bad guy in every episode. And a cause that everyone can throw themselves behind. There's no sort of ambiguity behind it. There's like, this man, bad.

Get him. Like pitchforks, etc. But the show was, of course, even back then, not without its critics. Everybody's favourite social critic, Charlie Brooker, described the show as having an overpowering whiff of entrapment and said, quote, when a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.

And that's like National Treasure Charlie Brooker, like enshrine him as a saint, a writer of Black Mirror, if you didn't know that. Also has to do a public statement about the first episode of Black Mirror where the Prime Minister fucked a pig and then it came out that David Cameron actually didn't fuck a pig and he had to do a press release being like, I genuinely didn't know that David Cameron fucked a pig.

He's just hysterical, I love him and he's so, he's married to Connie Huck. Big fan of them as a couple. Me too, big fan of both of them. I completely understand what he means And I was talking about the clip of the guy at the train station, that's exactly what I mean. It's like if I am emoting for the person who is potentially, you know, there to rape a child, something's off there.

Like, and I can't remember, I wouldn't even know how to tell people how to find it, but he's just, he's standing and he's arrested and like, he can't even talk. He's so scared. And the police are trying to talk him down there. Look, like, no one's going to beat you up. Like, nothing. Like, no violence is going to happen here. Like, do you want to sit down? Do you want some water?

Like, blah, blah. And he's just like, I'm just so. scared. And like, I'm not saying that he's in the right. It's just like, I find it difficult to understand why anyone would think that was easy watching. No, it's not. I don't find it easy watching at all. I think I'm very much on the same side as you that that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable because I'm like, you're saying that this person is a bad person and we're going to, you know, catch them or whatever. But do you not feel like we're sinking as low as them by berating people like this and then publicly airing it? Before there's been any sort of conviction either. This is pre-conviction.

is just filming and broadcasting a sting operation essentially. But it's not a sting operation because it's not the police. Yeah, yeah. A sting operation carried out by unqualified civilians. Yeah. So it's not just Charlie Brooker and true crime podcasters who have a problem with paedophile hunting shows. Various legal officials have also criticized the shows, methods and motives. Several cases were even thrown out of court when judges deemed the evidence against the predators

to be insufficient or to have been gained through entrapment. So it actually just doesn't really do any good at all. Entrapment is when a law enforcement agent induces someone to commit a crime they otherwise would not have committed. For example, if an undercover police officer tries to push drugs on someone and then they arrest them for accepting the drugs, that's entrapment. Have you heard of 21 Trump Street? No.

So it's like a 50-minute musical by Limamor Miranda, the guy who wrote Hamilton. And it's a story of this undercover cop who gets sent into a high school to catch people selling weed, basically. And she approaches, and it's true. Like, obviously it's embellished, but like she approaches this like 14-year-old kid who's in love with her. And she's like, hey man, like, can you get me like an eighth or whatever? And he's not involved in any of it, but like he knows someone who knows a cousin or something and he's really trying to impress her. So he gets hold of it, gives it to her and he gets arrested and he loses his university placement. It's heartbreaking.

Look it up. It's like it's 50 minutes of your life. And that cute one who plays Lawrence is in it. Moving on from Hannah's musical corner. When we're talking about entrapment among vigilante pedophile hunters, things get a little bit blurry. Firstly, civilian paedophile hunters are generally not working alongside any kind of law enforcement.

So legally, their methods can never be classed as actually entrapment. Secondly, all paedophile hunters, including perverted justice, claim that they never initiate contact with a predator. In theory, they always wait for them to make the first move, the predator that is. They also claim to never initiate any kind of sexual conduct. If all of that is true, then, so far, none of what I've just said is legally classed as entrapment. If someone completely, under their own steam, talks to someone they fully believe as a child and they choose to pursue sexual behavior with that child,

then it is an attempt to sexually abuse a child and obviously. Obviously, that in itself is illegal. However, this all starts to fall apart when someone is baited or encouraged to come to a specific location to meet up, especially when it's done for TV. And often on the show, this was left pretty unclear. By chopping hint after hint that they were home alone, or in some cases outright asking the predator, the potential predator, to meet up, this pretend child, the group like perverted justice whoever's running this operation,

they were baiting their target into making a decision that they may not have otherwise made. And this only becomes grosser when you realise that just chatting sexually to someone you believe is an underage child is already illegal. The only thing gained by getting them to arrive in person is the entertainment value of ritual humiliation. So they could take that person's details, hand it over to the police, job done. So to lure that person into coming to meet up is for no other reason than what we just said. It is to film them. It's to humiliate them. It is to scare them. And to make money.

And to make money. And again, look, I'm not trying to sound like sympathetic to people who like sexually abused children online. We know that there is a huge crisis of that. You don't even in this day and age need to meet up with children. There have been so many heartbreaking cases of children who have been exploited into sending sexually explicit images and videos of the themselves to strangers on the internet that then get shared, they get put up on porn websites, they get put up all over the place. Sometimes the child is then blackmailed using that image or video that they shared with the predator or abuser saying that they're going to share it with all of their family and their friends at school. And children have ended up killing

themselves over things like this. I am not defending these people. What I'm saying is, what are your motives in this situation? Because all of the research shows that when paedophiles, when potential child sex offenders are placed under huge amounts of stress, they are much more likely to offend. And in this country, in the UK, we don't really have a system where if somebody is worried that they are going to offend against a child, there's not really anywhere for them to go with that information. I believe that Germany is one of the few countries that does do this well, that you can go speak to a therapist and that they have some form of like a treatment courses. But again, it's because we have very little research on this in terms of therapeutic

treatments because nobody really wants to fund this shit, which is incredible because if you were able to fund it and you were able to offer people a way out if they were feeling this way. And here I'm talking about paedophiles. I'm not talking about child sex offenders who were not paedophiles. It seems alarming because if we put aside our emotional feelings about it, you might actually end up saving more children. Well, this is it. I think, and I talk about this article once every three years and I can never remember what it's called, but I will desperately try and find it and link it in the notes. It is the best piece of journalism I've ever read. And it makes the argument that, so in this country, it is my impression that if you were to

speak to a therapist, they don't legally have to report you to the police. In quite a lot of places in the United States, they have to. Yes. Here, I don't believe they have to report you, but there isn't anywhere for them to refer you for a tried and tested, rigorous, proven course of treatment, let's say. If you went and you were like, I am a paedophile, I am scared about what I'm going to do, I need someone to help me. The therapist doesn't have to report you, but they can say I don't want to treat you. And sometimes that happens. But there's definitely no proven route that they can just sort of refer you on to. No, until they offend. And that's the problem. And that's what the article was saying. The journalist spoke to multiple sort of like,

quite like, you know, non-offending pedophiles, whatever, but people who were scared that they were going to do something. And they were explaining how, you know, there's nowhere for them to go until they offend. Until they offend, there is nothing they can do. And they don't want to. And I will find it because it's beautifully written. Yeah, no, there's a really good documentary as well that I watched that actually showed that all of the statistics show that after a high profile case in any country, but the documentary was about the UK, after every high profile case of, say, a missing child that's taken by a predator and all of the sort of backlash that comes with that and, you know, predators and armist, blah, blah, blah, that actually the rate of child sexual abuse peaks

immediately after because the level of like stress that that brings about to potential predators in the community actually makes them more likely to offend, which is really horrifyingly interesting. But, you know, we're not trying to be like, oh, these poor people, what I'm saying is like, you've got to think about what your end goal is. And if your end goal is that fewer children get hurt, we might need to think about how we invest in making sure that the people who are hurting them maybe have somewhere to go before they do that. Another term that comes up a lot when you're discussing paedophile hunting is vigilanteism. As most of you will know, because you're very intelligent, vigilanteism is law enforcement

undertaken without legal authority. So technically speaking, any investigation done by a member of the public is a vigilante investigation. So that would also apply to a journalist investigating the government or a member of the public investigating the welfare of a child. But that's not what we think of when we think about vigilanteism. It's just a technicality, really, and there's not much glory in it. Where paedophile hunting falls down is that they can't help but extend their vigilante investigation into vigilante punishment. And I would argue even vigilante investigation is incredibly issuous because we've talked about

this before on the show often when people who are civilians, and I'm not talking about journalists here, obviously we need investigative journalists to be doing their job, but they are genuinely investigating. Random members of the public just using public, just using public information that already exists to go down rabbit holes and make random accusations about people as we saw with things like the documentary about Elisa Lam for example. That just is a surefire way to ruin people's lives. That is not investigation. That is just poor research and stone throwing and that's an incredibly dangerous thing. Especially when you live in a glasshouse. Yes. So the real line that's crossed by paedophile hunters is that they cross that line

even further into vigilante punishment. The entire premise of To Catch a Predator was about public humiliation on the biggest scale. People's names, faces and professions were broadcast to an audience of millions. In some cases, the people who arrived were even tricked into getting naked before they walked into the house,

only to be met by Chris Hansen and his film crew. At the end of their grilling with Hansen, they were normally told that they were free to leave, only to be taken down by whichever over-enthusiastic local police force had been roped into the show that week. Again for police, like, why are they getting involved in shows like this? I think it's because it's a very easy way to be seen to be doing something. And we saw the clip of one episode of To Catch a Predator, where a police officer hid in a hedge, dressed like a bush,

and jumped out to tackle the predator as they walked away. Kind of like some sort of weird, sadistic, hidden camera, paedophile prank show. And we loved it. People loved it because it was like, this guy's a bad guy, so it doesn't matter that his life is destroyed. Even though the level of evidence that has been collected by this investigation in no way matches that required by this country's criminal justice system. But who cares?

Because his face is now out for millions of people to see. And this is the problem because often the episode of To Catch a Predator was released before the potential predator had even faced a jury. with the show ending on a mugshot of their face and words popping up labelling what they had been charged with. Not convicted of? No, charged with, yes. This shoot first, asked questions later approach

eventually led to the show's demise. On the 5th of November 2006, Chris Hansen and his camera crew arrived at the House of Texas Assistant District Attorney, Lewis Conrad. He had been caught by perverted justice, the group working with to catch a predator, talking to someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy.

Perverted justice and the To Catch a Predator team had been working alongside the police department of the small town of Murphy, Texas, and they're luring in paedophiles and improving the local police force's arrest numbers. Sir Lewis Conrad, who was posing as a 19-year-old university student, asked for pictures of the boy's penis and sent back pictures of what he claimed to be his.

He also had two conversations with the decoy over the first. During these conversations, Conrad arranged to meet with someone he thought was a child before asking if they would fuck and trying to initiate phone sex. Despite all this, Conrad didn't come to the pre-arranged meeting place, leaving the To Catch a Predator crew and the local police force with nothing for the cameras. But his absence was no matter, as Bill Merrick, Murphy's chief of police, explained to Hansen in the episode. Conrad had already broken the law.

The Murphy Police Department hurriedly put together an arrest warrant for Lewis Conrad, along with another warrant to search his property. Both warrants were rushed through the night and arrived at Conrad's house in Terrell, Texas, full of mistakes, including the wrong date and county. By the time the warrants arrived, Chris Hansen and his camera crew had been waiting outside Conrad's house for over five hours. The Murphy Police Department, working alongside the Terrell Police Department, then made various feeble attempts to knock on Comrade's door before giving up and calling in an action movie style, SWAT team.

Conrad was in the house the entire time watching the police, camera crew and SWAT team lurking around outside. When the SWAT team eventually bashed his door down and ran in along with a film crew, the inevitable happened. Upon seeing the police, Conrad said something to the effect of, I'm not going to hurt anybody and shot himself in the head with a handgun. The incident caused outrage in the town of Terrell. And things only got worse after the episode aired.

I'm staggered. They released the episode. Oh my God. Jesus Christ. My God. And this episode featured an interview between Chris Hansen and Murphy Police's chief, Bill Merrick, in which they went to great lengths to stress their innocence.

They insisted that to catch a predator and the police had run simultaneous investigations and the Hansen's team had in no way influenced their decision to raid the house. Several news outlets ran investigation. into the Lewis Conrad instant. One report by Esquire even managed to get hold of raw footage from the day in question. And this footage, according to Esquire, painted a picture in which Hansen and his crew from Dateline NBC were effectively in control of the operation. Allegedly, one police advisor who had spoken up against NBC executives was told, you work for Dateline now. What, no.

Fucking out. What in the network television? Like I just, no, I'm sorry, no. And this is the thing like, again, if anybody is feeling like, but he was talking to a child, he sent a picture of a penis, he was trying to have phone sex with this child. I am not denying those things. What I am saying is we cannot allow the police or civilians, anybody, to be running roughshod over the justice system, to be running rough shot over people, especially in a world now

where you have things like extreme deep fakes, right? You just don't know. And this comes back to arguments people make like when they say, oh, let's introduce biometric ID cards. And I'm like, fuck, no. Why would you want the government to have that level of information on your people? Like, well, if you haven't done anything wrong, then you don't need to worry. Are you fucking stupid? Why would you hand over that level of information?

And this is a thing. We must protect these kind of institutions. Like there needs to be rigorous investigation. That needs to be like the standard bear for people being convicted. not just random TV shows being made like this and ending up with somebody shooting themselves in the head. And also, you're completely destroying the right to a fair trial, which is a human right.

And like, you know, if you're so desperately protective of being a democracy and you're so desperately protective of your legal system, then the right to a fair trial is afforded to everyone. And that's just, that's a baseline that I'm sorry, that you can't. Actually, no, I'm not sorry. I've never been less sorry in my life. Everyone has the right to a fair trial. It doesn't matter what you think of them. And putting them on TV before they've even been charged is not doing that.

No. So following the infamous Conrad episode, in late 2007, Conrad's sister Patricia sued NBC, saying that they had been responsible for the raid on her brother's house and therefore his death. While the majority of her case was thrown out, a federal judge concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Hansen and his dateline NBC crew had pressured the local police force into using unreasonable and unnecessary tactics. In early 2008, Patricia Conrad and NBC settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. And shortly afterwards, Chris Hansens, to catch a predator segment on Dateline, NBC, was cancelled altogether. But this most certainly wasn't the end for online paedophile hunting.

The group that the show had worked with, perverted justice, continues to operate, baiting potential paedophiles and then posting their details online. And thousands more groups have popped up across the world in the last decade and a half, since to catch a predator was axed. Various paedophile catchers have made names for themselves by outing potential sex offenders on social media. Some of these groups do appear to have improved,

working anonymously to simply collect the details of potential abusers and hand that information to the police. But these kind of groups that show that level of restraint are few and far between because the vast majority do not stop there and still perform their own forms of vigilante punishment. From uploading the private details of the people they sting to Facebook and even confronting them in public while live streaming their encounters

and inevitable arrest for all to watch. I did actually watch an episode of Dr. Phil where he had a bunch of people on who were paedophile hunters. The thing that shocks me is that there are someone, well not shocks me, that's not the right word. There were someone there who were like, we have a very strict code of ethics. We have a very strict code of morals. A paedophile has to do this, this, this and this before we'll do anything. And I'm like, that's still fucked up.

but it's this overblown sense of power this overblown sense of like virtuous morality like I am the man to save the children save all of the children from these predators and I'm like you don't know what the fuck you're doing and you're going to get somebody killed and you probably already have

it's that kind of overblown sense of morality which was just smacking you in the face and quite frankly very very high levels of narcissism oh my god delusions of grandeur abound So yes, I'd like to say that we'd come a long way since the likes of To Catch a Predator, and I'd like to say that if they made that show now and put it on TV, that people would be horrified. But the fact that this kind of thing is thriving online, especially on places like YouTube,

kind of proves me absolutely wrong before I even say those words. So I just won't. I don't know what to say. It just is, it's dangerous business. You know, I can't remember if it's like, it must have been a tweet that I thought. It's just like, do not play Devils. advocate unless you are legally representing the devil. It's like that, you know, like, just fucking keep out of it, unless you are at the police. Yes, I think, yeah, that's all we'll say on that.

So that's it, guys, that is your shorthand on paedophile hunters. Hope you enjoyed it. I don't know. I'm going to say leave your thoughts in the comments below, but that's not how this works. So do what you want. Yeah, and also, please don't because you're going to be nasty to me. So cool. So we'll see you next week with your usual episode of Red Handed.

Plus, another fabulous shorthand. All right. Bye.