Using decoys (full grown adults who have really tiny bodies and voices), Dateline would monitor online chats between the predator and his illegal, then when he finally made the big stride to go meet the child in person, Hansen would be waiting there at the house to read the transcripts of the illegal conversation – “‘I want to BLANK your BLANK while your little BLANKS bounce around,’ did you write this to a 14-year-old, sir?” – while the busted fool crumbled in fear thinking Hansen was his love interest’s father. Hosted by Chris Hansen, To Catch A Predator worked to bust men for arranging sex with underage boys and girls in online chatrooms.
If you are still in college right now, you probably won’t remember this legendary show. “Compulsive sexual behavior is treatable,” he says.Sometimes I really miss Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator. “There are a lot of things at play for those men - problems that exist and things that happen to an individual - before they end up showing up at the Dateline house,” he says. He says that the clinic has received numerous calls from people who, after watching the Dateline reports, identified with the problem and feared they could be potential predators. Perhaps this is why for many, including for those us working at Dateline, it is more upsetting to see people like teachers, doctors, and rabbis - people who are expected to protect youngsters - walk into the house.
Any attempt to make that kind of fantasy into a reality is predatory.”Īlso, the person must be taking advantage of an inequity of power – due to age or the nature of the relationship. Predators take it to the next step by seeking out images, chats and eventual meetings with kids. Weiss says, “You’re not a predator if you have occasional fantasies about underage teens and don’t take it further than that. So what makes a ‘predator’? For Weiss, a man or woman truly needs help if the desire to have a sexual relationship with an underage teen turns into attempts to do so. He adds that men tend to me more visual (which is probably why pornography often factors into potential predators’ online chats with decoys), and men tend to be more comfortable with sex detached from relationships. They’re just less likely to seek someone out randomly online.” “Women, in general, seem to look for relationships and not necessarily sex – although female offenders will have sex with a minor. , executive director and founder of the Sexual Recovery Clinic in California (and who has been featured in one of our episodes), says that while their center treats both male and female offenders, sexual compulsions on the Internet do seem to be a male-dominated thing. The contributors use decoy profiles that are of girls and boys, but only men have shown up for meetings with what they thought to be underage teens. Perverted-Justice has only ever encountered one female predator, according to Del Harvey, who has been a Perverted-Justice contributor since 2004 and who has acted as a decoy in the group’s investigations. “I find it hard to believe given all the teacher scandals that there are no female Internet predators.” “They are out there,” one e-mailer wrote.