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warped good intentions
People "get" that just fine. But it's not the way to go about it, and nor do I think it's really true.
The desire to "out" sex offenders is of course a very negative thing, in a way the News of the World and co. will never take the time to think about - considered thought doesn't sell newspapers. Most serious sex offences are committed by people known to the victim - either family members, partners, or close friends. One of the most common child sex offenders is the 'serial boyfriend', a man who dates a vulnerable mother in order to reach and molest their children without fear of reprisal - because they're in with the mother, they manipulate and threaten the children easily. They are unlikely to have prior convictions. Incestuous relatives are unlikely to have prior convictions. These things happen behind closed doors, and naming and killing the exceptions does nothing, absolutely nothing, to help anyone.
Additionally the idea that "outing" convicted sex offenders does anything positive is ridiculous because it drives the ones thinking of offending again underground - off the radar, and statistically far more likely to offend again. The ones who have served their time and are trying to rebuild their lives in a world full of people perpetually suspicious that “theyre not actually rehabilitated/cured” and angered that they are not “dead”, when their pictures and names are printed and passed around by morally bankrupt newspapers or sanctimonious mobs, they too are much, much more likely to offend. Read any good literature on the subject and you’ll find that out, but briefly, it’s due to a circle of rejection, isolation and self-loathing created by the unhelpful “outing”, which can lead someone who will forever be considered better off dead by some posters in this thread to see no options in life, no way of socialising, and so much more likely to return to crime. It’s the recidivism lesson that you get from all criminals – when society rejects them and does not allow them to return into it even after they’ve served their time, they are out of options and do what they know how to do, which is reoffend.
Brutal mob vigilantism has an illustrious history: the lynching of black men, for instance, in similarly gory rituals to today’s paedo-killers including castration and other forms of torture. Throughout history the murder is then celebrated by the vindicated community, who think they’ve rid the street of its scum for another day. The community comes together to celebrate its bloodlust. You either think that’s okay, that it’s a healthy impulse to stab and cut off people’s genitals, and you think it’s a positive force in society that should be allowed free reign, despite the consequences, the hypocrisy, and the demonstrable fact that it does not effect the number of sex offences. Or you don’t.
The trouble with the lawyers, the CPS and the judges is that they don't have to suffer at the hands of any of the people they deal with. They are so far detached from the reality of life, in their gated houses in the countryside, how could they?
I've always been a firm believer that magistrates/judges hand out punishments that would scare them, and not a punishment that actually fits the crime.
3 months for having sex with a 13 year old girl, consensual or not is woefully lenient and is the sort of sentence you'd expect to see handed to a shoplifter.
What the mob did was wrong, but it's the sort of thing that will continue and get worse until the judicial system starts handing out punishments that protect the rest of us and actually punish the person who has comitted the crime.
Thats exactly what im trying to say.
Mob lynching people is barbaric and totally the wrong way to go about it, but on an emotional level I can kind of get why people would feel like if the justice system wasnt going to protect them and their children from predators, then they would do something themselves.
I know about the stranger vs someone known to the family, but i dont see that has much to do with it considering we dont know the relationship this guy had with his victims - didnt someone say he WAS doing the grooming and getting close to victims first, so he WAS that sort of "known to the victim" predator anyway. People believed, rightly or wrongly that he was grooming more children - he had a history. I dont know what the police were doingor were able to do until after something had actually happened anyway which for a lot of people was too late.
What the vigilante group did was bloodthirsty and savage - If some concerned parent had taken a shot at the guy to do away with him, iod have been more sympathetic
Exactly. It will mean that people who have, in the eyes of the British Legal System, paid their due to society for their crimes against it, can never truly be free citizens once again. Sadly there are far too many fuckwits in this country for such a thing to ever be possible.