Caught in the Web: Exposing To Catch a Predator
By Mark Magidson
B.A. in Sociology, May 2009, Brandeis University B.A. in African and Afro-American Studies, May 2009, Brandeis University
A Thesis submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
August 31, 2012
Thesis directed by
Fran Buntman Assistant Professor of Sociology
© Copyright 2012 by Mark Magidson All Rights Reserved
ii Abstract of Thesis
Caught in the Web: Exposing To Catch a Predator
The dramatic undercover sting operations depicted on Dateline NBC’s hit series
To Catch a Predator, have entertained, excited, and captivated audiences by bridging ideas of criminal justice and forms entertainment. This research examines what messages are communicated in each episode and how it is communicated to audiences. Content analysis of four episodes revealed how To Catch a Predator functions to reinforce historical methods of punishment, define boundaries of sexual morality, and provide avenues for social cohesion through collective condemnation of labeled sexual deviants within society. To Catch a Predator’s portrayal of justice, through specific methods of undercover surveillance and public punishment through shaming, articulated how partnerships between private and public institutions can function to communicate messages of the state, define moral threats within society, and identity the need for social control on the Internet and within local communities.
iii Table of Contents
Abstract of Thesis……………………………………………………………iii
I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………1
II. Theoretical Framework………………………………………………….... 4
Construction of Sexuality…………………………………………..…7
IV. Methodology……………………………………………………………..12
V. Findings…………………………………………………………………...15
Creation of Predator………………………………………...….…….15
Confrontation………………………………………………….……. 21
Public Punishment…………………………………………...... …….26
Shaming………………………………………………………...……28
Promotion of Sexuality………………………………………...…….33
Role of Police………………………………………………………..36
Policing the Internet……………………………………..…………..40
Moral Panic…………………………………………….……………42
VI. Conclusion………………………………………………..……………..47
References……………………………………………………...……………48
iv Introduction
In the opening seconds of each episode, a man appears in a quiet suburban neighborhood and enters the open door of a house, apparently unnoticed. A young woman’s voice calls out to say she will soon join him, after she has completed some domestic task, like making cookies or folding laundry. This man is the perpetrator or suspect.1 He makes himself comfortable inside the living room or kitchen. Suddenly, another adult male enters, asking the suspect to explain his presence in the home. A revealing and uncomfortable conversation ensues. The suspect is told he is speaking with
Chris Hanson, an investigative journalist working with Dateline NBC, making a television show. Hanson confronts the suspect with sexually explicit chats he has sent to solicit sex with an underage girl, and the fact that he is in this house to have sex with that girl. That girl making the cookies and folding laundry is actually the decoy, working for
Dateline NBC. Cameramen soon emerge upon the scene. The suspect is offered an opportunity to speak directly to the cameras, and encouraged to leave the decoy house.
As soon as the perpetrator exists the house, he is confronted by waiting law enforcement.
With weapons drawn, police officers place the suspect under arrest.
These dramatic undercover sting operations are what is depicted on Dateline
NBC’s hit series, which ran from 2004 to 2007. Such scenes have entertained, excited, and captivated audiences by bridging ideas of criminal justice and entertainment in each episode. As the narrator, Chris Hanson explains Dateline NBC is “doing a story on adults
1 This thesis’s reference to both the perpetrator and the suspect reflects the conflict between To Catch a Predator’s assumption and framing of foregone guilt and the author’s desire to preserve the theory and practice of assuming people innocent of crimes until found guilty in a court of law.
1 who try to meet children online for sex.” The show’s depiction of adult men attempting to have sexual relations with children they met online is facilitated through undercover cameras, the participation of Perverted Justice (whose volunteers pose as children online), and partnerships with local law enforcement agencies.
Analysis of the content of each episode revealed broader social implications for what is being communicated throughout the course of the show, and how it is being communicated to audiences. To Catch a Predator’s portrayal of justice, through specific methods of undercover surveillance and public punishment through shaming, reveals how partnerships between private and public institutions can function to communicate messages of the state. Further examination of the episodes provide insight into how the relationships between private citizens including Perverted Justice, local law enforcement, and institutions of mass-media can communicate message of sexual morality, punishment, and the need for social control within the United States.
This research does not aim to defend, justify, or promote consensual sexual contact between an adult and minor, nor does it seek to deny or delegitimize the trauma of any sexual victimization, especially – in this context – the sexual exploitation of children by adults. Instead, this research attempts to offer insight into how To Catch a
Predator, as a source of news and information, also creates, reinforces, and reflects ideas of contemporary society, particularly that of the United States. In particular, late twentieth century and early twenty-first century of Western-influenced ideas of sexuality and punishment, specifically within the United States, are produced and policed in this show. This research will aim to articulate how messages of state and society – from a small group like Perverted justice to the giant media corporation NBC – including desired
2 social norms and necessary social controls are communicated and what methods of communication are utilized.
3 Theoretical Framework and Literature Review
Previous sociological and criminological theory provided frameworks for analyzing how To Catch a Predator communicated codes of sexuality, forms of social control, and messages of the state. Emilie Durkheim’s Division of Labor and Society helped articulate how the episodes serve as a tool for social cohesion for audience members. Durkheim argued that the rule of law helps maintain cohesion through the communal condemnation of individuals not adhering to social norms. Application of Durkheim’s theoretical framework of punishment revealed, “moral rules,” become effective guides and controls of conduct only to the extent that they become internalized in the consciousness of individuals, while continuing to exist independently of individuals” (Coser 2003: 129).
Moral panics are a contemporary iteration of Durkheim’s theory.
Examination of the creation and perpetuation of moral panics within society, as seen within Philip Jenkins’ findings, allowed for a modern day articulation of the social, political, and cultural implications of To Catch a Predator. Defined as a “condition, episode, person or group of persons [emerging] as threats to societal values and interests,” a moral panic is communicated through the lens of socially accredited experts, in this case within each episode (Zilney 2009: 68). To Catch a Predator’s methods of communication, with the help of law enforcement, selected psychologists, and private citizens, function to define, as well as defend against moral threats within society.
Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s theoretical frameworks for defining deviance were also important in understanding how the suspected deviants on To Catch a Predator oftentimes justified deviant behavior, resisted socially constructed definitions of
4 deviance, and attempted to avoid the feelings of guilt or shame. Sykes and Matza’s research, defined through techniques of neutralization, provided an avenue to identify and analyze the communication within each episode, between the suspect and individual(s) confronting him. Erving Goffman’s research, on stigma and identity negotiations in the social world, helped articulate how each episode functioned to construct individual identities of the featured suspects. Consistent research and theorizing from scholars, including Edwin Lemert and Howard Becker, expanded on methods for illuminating how social interaction and labeling influence one’s identity within society.
John Kitsuse’s analysis of deviance complimented Lemert and Becker’s previous research by providing a framework to analyze ways in which To Catch a Predator defines what is deviant and what methods are appropriate for controlling deviance.
Michel Foucault’s insights regarding sexuality, deviance and punishment provided a historical background for contextualizing To Catch a Predator’s contemporary role.
David Garland’s study of the death penalty, Peculiar Institutions: America’s Death
Penalty in an Age of Abolition, offered an important theoretical roadmap for understanding how historical cultural, legal, and political shifts influence public attitudes towards punishment within the United States. Garland’s analysis provided a theoretical framework for understanding how American attitudes towards punishment of sexual deviants can be best defined as political theatre, representing cultural consumption more than it is an instrument of the state.
Previous academic studies examining the relationship between the Internet and sexual offenders provided a foundation in understanding ways in which media, sexuality, and law enforcement have historically come together to define and combat online
5 deviance. Findings from Dennis Howitt and Kerry Sheldon’s research, entitled Sex
Offenders and the Internet (2007), revealed that pedophiles use cyberspace as a tool for contacting and networking with other sexual deviants, sharing sexually explicit content, and soliciting sexual contact with minors. The role of the Internet in facilitating an anonymous forum for sexual deviants was further analyzed in Ian O’Donnell and Claire
Milner’s findings, Child Pornography: Crime, Computers, and Society (2007). This research revealed the technological limitations faced by law enforcement in controlling and punishing individuals producing and distributing child pornography over the Internet.
These findings depicted law enforcement agencies as one step behind online sexual predators, often unable to protect innocent children from victimization.
Review of dramatized narratives of well-intentioned police winning over evil sexual predators provided a current-day link between the global child sex industry and methods of state-sponsored regulation of sexual morality. Investigative journalist Julian Sher
(2007) exposed the dramatic struggle between prosecutors and online child predators by depicting real-life international child sex abuse cases. Such examples of elaborate sting operations conducted to save child victims of sexual abuse emphasized the local, national, and global partnerships necessary for exposing and controlling sexual morality.
Similar to Sher’s dramatic depictions, To Catch a Predator’s portrayal of confrontations with sexual deviance exposes the realities faced by law enforcement through both an entertaining and titillating narrative.
Further analysis of the role institutions of media assume in influencing public opinion provided examples of how television, news, and entertainment institutions function as advocates for dominant definitions of sexual morality and produce knowledge within
6 society. Thomas Gaeta’s analysis of the legal procedures of To Catch a Predator explored methods employed by mass media to entertain, educate, and shape an audience member’s moral attitudes on sexual deviance (Gaeta 2010: 542). Previous research of other television programs depicting moral transgression, including the Jerry Springer
Show and MSNBC: Lockup, highlighted how news and entertainment programming can both influence knowledge production and facilitate social cohesion through collective condemnation within society (Grabe 2002: 315).
Construction of Sexuality
For this research, literature specifically focusing within a contemporary framework, within the United States, was utilized to provide a foundation for understanding how To
Catch a Predator communicates messages of sexuality, deviance, and social control.
Comprehension of dominant Western definitions of sexuality, and how punishment is utilized to define and control sexuality and moral threats, are fundamental in understanding how To Catch a Predator connects different social institutions.
In Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America,
Jenkins argued that “all concepts of sex offenders and sex offenses are socially constructed realities: all are equally subject to social, political, and ideological influences, and no particular framing of offenders represents a pristine objective reality” (Jenkins
1998: 4). Foucault’s theoretical framework for understanding power as a discourse further revealed that sexuality is itself a social construct, and serving “as a dense transfer point for relations of power” (Foucault 1978: 103). Specifically during the Victorian era, as well as many other periods of time, it was the patriarchal family that represented the basic unit of organization, the key institution of transferring wealth and power (Fisher
7 1995: 6). The discourse of sexuality provided a code of conduct concerning sexuality in order to maintain family and kinship alliances, preserve bloodlines, and provide further distinction between classes within the industrializing Western world. Sexuality, therefore, helped regulate alliances, seen through a “system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions....built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit”
(Foucault 1978: 106).
In turn, sexual codes of conduct were passed down through family lines, and became imbedded and practiced in all parts of society. This deployment of sexuality reflected new subtle ways of controlling and regulating procreative and non-procreative sexual behavior (Foucault 1978). Regulation of sexuality further exposed how disgust, contamination, and impurity associated with sexual deviance functions to provide distinction between good and evil, permeating various institutions (Lynch 2002: 539).
For example, “in America the earliest colonial law codes contained lengthy lists of sexual offenses meriting punishment, with fornication, adultery, bestiality, and homosexuality all drawing severe physical penalties” (Jenkins 1998: 22). The regulation of what is considered to be a perverse sexual pleasure in modern-day society is deeply imbedded in methods used to control and define sexuality within Western culture.
The increasing role psychology and psychiatry assumed in defining concepts of perverse sexual pleasures reflected an increasing role scientific technologies assumed in classifying and defining nontraditional forms of sexual pleasure as a mental illness in modern-day Western societies, including the United States. By using the clinical model for classifying sexual behavior, the United States defined sex offenses as mental health
8 issue requiring medical intervention. Despise the decades-long tradition of defining such behavior through clinical models, the United States has seen a shift towards defining sexual perversities through criminal justice and punishment models. Although the historical association between sexual deviance and mental health are discussed on To
Catch a Predator, the show uses a criminal justice approach in each episode to define and punish suspected predators.
Media covering the victimization of children and high profile sexual murders against children, as seen in the 1970s and 1980s, also assumed an active role in perpetuating fear of pedophilia and the victimization of children as a moral panic. Before the 1990s, the word sexual predator rarely appeared in major newspapers or media outlets. This term appeared in major newspapers between 1987-1989 on average 140 times per year
(Jenkins 1998). By 1993 it appeared 321 times in major newspapers and by 1995 it appeared more than 900 times (Jenkins 1998). Increased news coverage of crimes of sexual deviance and victimization of children throughout the 1990s directly reflects the increasingly strong bonds between media institutions, legal definitions of sexual deviance, and public anxiety towards sexual victimization. The increased reporting of sexual predators ins the decades before To Catch a Predator provide a historical framework for explicating the growing public awareness of sexual deviance within
American society.
To Catch a Predator communicates legislative and other ideas of justice and punishment through both private and public institutions. Laws protecting against sexual victimization of children, including the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
(1974) reflected the link between sexual deviance and children’s victimization.
9 Furthermore, publications of sexual offenders in local and national registries, as seen through Meghan’s Law (1994), exemplified an increased atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety, and desire to protect communities from suspected predators. Recent lobbying of laws supporting chemical castration and support for capital punishment of convicted child rapists echoed the growing public concern towards sexual victimization of children within the United States. To Catch a Predator builds on these laws by brining the public into the exposure and punishment of sexual abusers of children, especially when they are strangers.
Historical analysis of the distinct cultural, social, and political institutions involved in influencing public debate around capital punishment within the United States helps illuminate the ways in which public punishment has reemerged in modern-day American society (Garland 2007: 440). Garland’s specific analysis of the victim’s role in capital punishment reflects similarities seen in the evolution towards protecting childhood victimization from sexual deviants within the latter half of the 20th century. As seen in
Garland’s findings, To Catch a Predator’s “re-insertion of the victim’s supporters into the process, [suggesting] a movement toward a form of justice that is popular rather than professional” (Garland 2007: 445). To Catch a Predator’s emphasis on the victimization of children reflects the modern-day focus on enforcing sexual morality and defense against the victimization of children.
To Catch a Predator’s protection against child victimization further reveals how partnerships between media institutions, the state, and private citizens continue to “mark” deviants through the reemergence of public punishment while promoting “truths” of deviant and non-deviant behavior. These truths that are subject to influence and change
10 over time, help define and influence laws controlling deviance. Legislative definitions of sex carve “out a space for ‘normal’ sexual behavior through punishing extreme forms of behavior” (Fisher 1995: 94). In To Catch a Predator, each episode’s use of “marking” deviant behavior functions to solidify the boundaries of the constructed space for non- deviant and deviant behavior.
11 Methodology
Nineteen episodes of Dateline NBC’s series, To Catch a Predator, billed as an on- going special investigation, were screened. Of these, four individual episodes, including the fourth, eight, twelfth, and nineteenth (final) episode, were selected for analysis. The four episodes selected allowed comparison between and among episodes over multiple years and different locations. Because all nineteen episodes shared very similar structures and messages, four episodes provided an ample saturation of data. The first episode selected was part one of a two-part episode located in Greenville, Ohio. The second selected episode was filmed in Harris County, Georgia, while the third selected episode was filmed in Long Beach, California. The fourth and final episode was filmed in
Bowling Green, Kentucky. The videos of the selected episodes were retrieved using online public searches of To Catch a Predator and the transcripts of each airing were retrieved through the Dateline NBC website.
The four To Catch a Predator episodes were systematically analyzed using content analysis methodology. “Content analysis is a careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings” (Berg 2009: 338). By using content analysis one is able to find both manifest and latent content within news and media formats. Qualitative methodologists describe the “manifest content [as] comparable to the surface structure present in the message, and latent content [as] the deep structural meaning conveyed by the message” (Berg 2009: 344). Analysis of both latent and manifest elements of To
12 Catch a Predator will shed light on what is being communicated, who is communicating, and how it is being communicated.
The systematic methods of data collection in each episode were influenced by Echo
Fields’ content analysis of both ABC World News and NBC Nightly News. Field’s work revealed the importance of unitizing each news episode into smaller “stories within stories,” connecting combinations of “speech and/or dialogue, vocalizations, and visual images” into each segment (Fields 1998: 184). Like Field’s research, each episode is divided into smaller segments, or individual stories, that collectively define narratives and information presented in each episode.
Each selected episode was first viewed without the researcher taking notes, seeking to emulate the method of consumption for the average audience member. The episodes were then viewed again, at which point detailed notes were made on different facets including dialogue, setting, and visual substance. The dialogue examined included interactions between suspects and Chris Hanson, the child decoys, as well as law enforcement. As outline in the introduction to this research, the setting for each episode was in the living room and kitchen of the decoy homes, as well as within the neighborhood of the decoy home. Analysis of scene composition and visuals, including images chosen in the filming and editing process and the methods used to film different subjects, allows for broader understanding of how selected segments influence the presentation of news to audiences.
Analysis of the verbal content enhances the researcher’s ability to “observe,” not merely “watch” or “hear,” television news (Fields 1998: 184-185). Transcriptions of each
To Catch a Predator segment were compared to the selected broadcast. Examining what people say and how they say it, allows the researcher to find who controls what is said,
13 who says it, and what that implication is, and the development of “buzz words” and stock phrases over the life cycle of a story (Fields 1998: 187-188).
14 Findings
Creation of Predator
The various traits To Catch a Predator utilizes to define the “typical” citizens who pose a threat to children, and the forms of social control exercised against them, reflects a complex and oftentimes contradictory image to television audiences. As each suspect entered the private residence, owned by Dateline NBC, Hanson narrated the sexually explicit correspondence that the perpetrator-suspect had engaged in with the putative child (actually a member of Perverted Justice). He reminded audiences of the suspect’s intention to sexually victimize an underage child. The online and undercover images throughout the show depicts suspects as “amorphous and insidious in how they spread their polluting qualities…they intrude, disrespect boundaries, creep and invade the social spheres of purity,” and therefore threaten sacred codes of sexuality (Lynch 2002: 554-
545).
The recorded confrontations and interrogation of alleged sexual predators revealed that To Catch a Predator functions to “construct ‘the paedophile,’ both categorizing and universalizing, typifying and individualizing, demonizing and retaining a human dimension” (Meyer 2007: 69). The use of undercover cameras provided a realistic image of how each suspect approached the decoy seeking to meet an underage individual; exposing the unguarded suspect in ways Hanson’s confrontation could not. As multiple hidden cameras presented the suspect as a child victimizer in violation of constructed sexual and legal codes, Hanson described each one’s identity outside of the online chat rooms. Through these generalized and contradictory depictions of suspects as potentially
15 normal but actually predators who usually lurk unnoticed within a community, To Catch a Predator helps audiences construct personal views of sexual predators and the social threat posed by them.
Each episode displayed the deviant intentions of the suspected sexual predators while simultaneously broadcasting his oftentimes socially accepted occupation, family, and social identity. Suspects often held jobs as trusted religious clergy, teachers, and skilled professionals within their local community. Although these sexual predators could conform as a non-deviant member of society in everyday life, the show presented a more complex, contradictory, and deviant character to television audiences. The undercover images of adults actively entering communities and homes to victimize children provides first-hand proof of threats sexual deviants pose. The deceptive tactics used by To Catch a
Predator and Perverted Justice helped create the binary composition of the suspect, a portrayal of someone “evil yet human, cunning and pathological, violent and perverted”
(Meyery 2007: 22).
The outward and inward identities alleged sexual predators must navigate throughout their confrontation with Dateline NBC, local law enforcement, and audience members can be further illuminated through historical sociological frameworks for understanding deviance. Kitsuse’s three-stage model for deviance identifies the interactions between audience and actors in perceiving, labeling, and treating individuals as deviant. To Catch a Predator communicates the deviant labels associated with the sexual predators to audience members through language, symbols, and strategic editing.
Kitsuse’s theoretical framework works to identity the ways in which a deviant’s conception of self is conceived to be constrained by the morality of those who define and
16 stigmatize him or her (Kitsuse 1964: 56). First, an audience must interpret the actions of a specific actor as deviant. The title of the show reveals that a predator is being caught, while television viewers, Dateline crews, members of Perverted Justice, and law enforcement agencies are collectively participating in the capture. Each episode identities the suspect as the source of deviance and distrust within society while the rest of society, including police, media institutions, and private citizens are working together to fight criminal and moral threats. To Catch a Predator’s portrayal of triumph against deviance functions to simplify, as well as glamorize, the boundaries of sexuality within the United
States.
The second component of Kitsuse’s model reflects the process of categorizing, or labeling, individual actors as deviant in relationship to other actors within society. To
Catch a Predator emphasizes categorizing actors as irredeemable deviants, and functions to justify the ostracism of deviants in society while highlighting new forms of social control against deviants. Some additional variables that influence the ways in which actors are seen as deviant in selected episodes include intensity, visibility, and audience power to magnify the image creation of the sexual predator. Each confrontation is a dramatic exchange between accuser – Chris Hanson on behalf of us, the public – and the accused, takes places in a highly visible setting, and likely creates long-lasting stigma against the accused. To Catch a Predator aggressively attacks each suspect’s identity and public image in both highly visible and emotionally dramatic ways, facilitating the long- term, possibly permanent stigmatization sexual predators who are portrayed on each episode will face.
17 Becker’s Outsiders argued that an actor develops his or her identity as deviant based upon social reactions, categorizations, and methods of social sanctions. Becker notes that “treating a person as though he were generally rather than specifically deviant produces a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Becker 1963: 54). Becker defines this generalized deviant category, or one dominant trait that is attributed as the defining character of an individual, as one’s master status. The transaction between an individual actor and audience in each episode reveals deviance is “not a quality that lies in behavior itself but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it”
(Becker 1963: 92). To Catch a Predator functions to create and channel public reactions to the deviant behavior highlighted throughout each episode.
The possession “of one deviant trait may have a generalized symbolic value, so that people automatically assume that its bearer possess other undesirable traits allegedly associated with it” (Becker 1963: 94). The suspects captured through hidden cameras, confrontation, and arrests all exhibit the master statuses of sexual deviants. The act of catching a predator reinforces the idea that specific individuals are not seen as having one of an array of identities, such as age, occupation, or social status, but rather as a social menace the needs to be caught and controlled. To Catch a Predator connects other forms of deviance and criminality to the suspects by linking their criminal past, including drunk driving charges, illegal possessions of firearms, previous sexual assault charges, and propensity for providing drugs and alcohol to minors. The danger and menace of the accused sexual deviants on To Catch a Predator is a stark contrast to each episodes mentioning the depicting the suspect’s stable personal and professional lives.
18 One confronted suspect claimed his family, friends, work, and girlfriend would not react well to his exposed identity as a sexual deviant. “I’ll be lucky if I have any sort of resemblances to my job…to my friends…how my family perceives me…to the girlfriend
I have…the dog we have together” (Long Beach, California). Hanson’s confrontation with another suspect, a former minister at a Baptist Church, further exemplified ways in which suspect’s other identities contradicted their deviant master statuses. Hanson challenged this suspect by questioning the role the suspect’s faith assumed in his decision to travel meet an underage child after a sexually charged conversation over the internet
(Greenville, Ohio).
Even when suspects may have sympathetic characteristics or redeeming qualities, To
Catch a Predator underscores the need for viewers to see the hidden danger posed by the suspects. Although one image of a suspected predator with cerebral palsy was shown to viewers, Hanson’s voice-over to television viewers suggested they not to “let the disability fool you, this is a man with a deviant plan” (Bowling Green). Even though the suspects on the show might draw sympathy from viewers, audiences are encouraged to judge the perpetrators using their prescribed master status as sexual deviants and threats to the community, the family, and specifically children.
The master status created in each episode depicts threats of sexual deviance as something that can infiltrate one’s home, living room, and family computer. To Catch a
Predator exclusively depicts sexual abuse of minors through emphasis on “stranger danger,” a threat from outside the safety of a child’s home and family network. The visual images of strangers approaching quiet suburban neighborhoods, along with
19 discussions of the victimization of children in their own home, are integral components of
To Catch a Predator’s methods for constructing a “typical” sexual predator.
Contrary to the images of the “typical” predator presented in each episode, “data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that more than
90 percent of sexually abused minors are assaulted by relatives or acquaintances – people they trust” (Sullman 2011: 3). Disproportionately portraying the sexual abusers as strangers with no ties to the child victim can create misconceptions of social threats and create dangerous consequences for children most affected by sexual abuse. The recent conviction of Jerry Sandusky underscores the limits of messages of danger communicated on To Catch a Predator because of the close-knit relationships that exist between Sandusky and his victims. The distorted realities portrayed on To Catch a
Predator serve to reinforce notions of ‘stranger danger,’ thus limiting the audience’s perceptions of where sexual deviance exists within society. The images broadcast on To
Catch a Predator do not include “family members, neighbors, or friends of potential victims. Historically, the public controversy regarding sexual victimization of children experienced a conceptual shift by the 1990s and reframed child sexual abuse as a problem of the family to a problem outside the family (Meyer 2007: 9). In keeping with this trend,
To Catch a Predator communicates that sexual victimization against children is most likely committed by a stranger outside of the victim’s immediate family network.
Using a broad selection of sexual predators, across a wide range of ages and occupations, To Catch a Predator promotes the idea that fear of sexual threats are around our daily lives, waiting to strike the nearest vulnerable child. As Meyer’s research notes, the pedophiles are constructed “as simultaneously knowable and unknowable, a type and
20 an individual (anyone), devil and human is precisely what makes them so dangerous”
(Meyer 2007: 102). To Catch a Predator’s construction of each suspected deviant encourages an atmosphere of uncertainty that requires unrelenting vigilance and commitment to social control, because sexual predators can strike anytime, anywhere, and victimize anyone’s child.
Confrontation
The confrontation between Chris Hanson and the suspected predator serve as the climax of each segment, providing audiences with revealing truths about the suspect and his suspected deviant intentions. After the sexual predators have been labeled as deviants to the audience, Hanson, functioning as the defender in chief of sexual normalcy or morality, confronts the suspects. Many predators thought Hanson to be the father of the decoy, a police officer, or even a therapist. Hanson’s portrayal as a strong male character and spokesperson for media institutions, partner of private vigilante organizations and law enforcement agencies, enabled both sexual predators and audiences to view him with authority and authenticity.
Becker defines a moral entrepreneur as a defender of social values; one who justifies the actions as a means for achieving a desired result (Becker 1963: 150). Hanson’s presence as a moral entrepreneur is seen through his universal role as the father, state, and defender of social values. Hanson protects the rules of society by concerning himself with the ultimate goals of the show, exposing adults trying to meet children for sex. As a moral entrepreneur, Hanson’s role must demonstrate that attempts to police against sexual deviance are effective and worthwhile, while in the same breath saying the problem is perhaps worse than ever, requiring renewed and increased efforts of control
21 (Becker 1963: 157). During the confrontation, when suspects ask Hanson if they will be punished, he claims he has no such authority and they are free to leave the decoy house.
As seen in all selected episodes, Hanson’s role as moral entrepreneur ensures his main point has been won, while leaving the implementation of reaching his goal to others, including private and public methods of enforcement (Becker 1963: 152).
The sexual and social threat seen in each episode is exclusively framed as an issue created, confronted, and solved by an authoritative man. There are no females except young victims who are largely invisible. To Catch a Predator communicates messages of vulnerability within the family home by using a living room or kitchen as the setting for the confrontation with the sexual predator. Hanson’s presence communicates that outside entities (Perverted Justice and Dateline NBC) in cooperation with the state (law enforcement) are necessary to defend social values within the patriarchal home; Hanson’s presence within this patriarchal framework is necessary for the conditions of enforcement
(Becker 1963: 156).
While inside the home, Hanson’s oftentimes aggressive and unrelenting confrontation creates a forum for suspects to navigate the social confines of their imputed deviant status. The suspect’s attempt to navigate their deviant identity and defend their actions was most visible throughout their dialogue with both Hanson and the decoy. As television audiences watch, the man attempts to justify his reasons for contacting the child.
Following Hanson’s verbal challenges, the predator is met outside by waiting police officers. The always emotional, and oftentimes forceful takedown of suspects is recorded from a variety of camera angles. The arrest is carried out in public view within the neighborhood; several segments include Chris Hanson attempting to continue
22 interviewing the suspect after he is placed in police custody, all while the incident is recorded.
Throughout the confrontation with Hanson and law enforcement the caught predators use a variety of techniques to deny their deviance and avoid further condemnation. By denying responsibility, suspects view themselves as “more acted upon than acting…It may also be asserted that delinquent acts are due to forces outside of the individual and beyond his control” (Sykes and Matza 1957: 667). One sexual predator argued he is not the type of deviant Hanson depicts him to be. The suspect argued, “a predator is somebody that constantly does that [underage sex]. I don’t do that. I would prefer to have someone my age that would prefer to have me” (Greenville, Ohio). While this suspect described himself as a lonely father of two, desperately using the Internet to meet companions, others justified their actions by claiming their good-natured intentions were influenced by boredom and loneliness. “I’m a man with a good heart, the kid was lonely and bored and that’s all it was” (Greenville, Ohio).
Analysis of other confrontations revealed that many sexual predators claimed no victimization of children had occurred. Multiple predators questioned Hanson about punishments they faced, claiming their actions should not be vilified and treated with severe sanctions. By denying injury to victim, alleged sexual predators sought to neutralize their deviant behavior and vilified status by claiming that such behavior “does not really cause any great harm despite the fact that it runs counter to the law” (Sykes and
Matza 1957: 668).
Although members of Perverted Justice explicitly stated that suspects always initiated the first online contact with the decoy, most suspects repeatedly argued that the decoys
23 aggressively initiated further contact online. By denying wrong, the accused deviant is arguing that the “injury is not wrong in light of the circumstances” (Sykes and Matza
1957: 668). For example, suspects claimed that it was the child decoy that advanced online conversations into a sexual nature, perpetuating an innocent conversation into sexually explicit topics. One specific suspect in Long Beach, California claimed to have made efforts to avoid the decoy in Internet chat rooms but was constantly solicited for private chats by the decoy. By claiming that the meeting was mutually agreed upon between the adult and underage decoy, the accused predators avoided responsibility for the decision of the decoy to agree to meet.
Previous research of online pedophile forums reveals that “denial of injury as a technique of neutralization…is a strategy used by the pedophile organizations to redefine adult sexual behavior with children in positive terms” (De Young 1988: 586). By redefining their deviant behavior as something that poses no injury, the “adults who engage in this behavior can effectively disavow or neutralize any imputation of a deviant identity by the larger society” (De Young 1988: 586). The claim of mutual companionship between adult and child, however, was challenged and ultimately dismissed by Hanson as a false claim. Throughout the confrontation Hanson argued that he has heard similar excuses from other predators, all of which were equally suspect.
To Catch a Predator’s partners, including Perverted Justice and law enforcement, all share similar doubt on the predator’s explanations for coming to the decoy’s home.
Hanson often asked what would happen if he had not been in the home to prevent the meeting between the suspect and the supposed minors. Hanson follows up by claiming they had deviant intentions because their predisposition for sexual deviant behavior.
24 Although predators routinely challenge their deviant labels and master status, the show rejects claims of innocence, promoting a guilty verdict before a suspect has been charged.
In a practical sense, Hanson and To Catch a Predator play police, prosecutor, judge, and jury.
The physical confrontations reaffirm to viewers the threat sexual predators pose, and the requirement of armed resistance from law enforcement. Although most arrests take place without resistance, officers in Long Beach argued that when confronted with the realities of their crimes, many suspects might try violence to get away. In Long
Beach, California police officers used a taser gun to subdue the sexual predator while he frantically retreated into the decoy’s house when confronted. As Hanson noted, “there was nowhere to run” for these sexual deviants. Oftentimes, predators would become emotional, cry in pain or humiliation, and express regret once caught. The broadcast images of a defeated predator crying and moaning are “the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force” (Foucault 1978: 34).
While undercover cameras capture every moment, the confrontation with the suspect allows for Hanson to exert his symbolic presence as moral entrepreneur and appointed advocate for social control. The confrontations further allow suspects to attempt to navigate their deviant-labeled identity with Hanson, law enforcement, as well as audience members. The broadcast confrontation both created a forum for sexual predators to explain their presence in the decoy house and enabled new forms of public punishment as a spectacle to reemerge in modern-day television.
25 Public Punishment
Although To Catch a Predator does not punish people in the criminal justice and correctional system, the exposure, humiliation, and condemnation the suspects receive are a series non-official punishments in their own right. To Catch a Predator made it clear that public punishment is a modern-day reality, deeply imbedded in popular culture and entertainment. Circulating images and videos of suspected sexual predators being confronted, humiliated, and publically punished continually fueled by public’s voyeuristic tendencies. The show communicates public punishment as a spectacle; such punishment has historically, and will continue to, function as a societal ritual and method of social control.
Dateline NBC hosts and Perverted Justice argued that To Catch a Predator’s methods of public punishment serve “as a deterrent for other people to not get in this situation” (Bowling Green). Perverted Justice volunteers argued that some potential sexual predators did not act on their desires out of fear of capture and humiliation, following the exposure of others on earlier episodes. The act of catching and “outing” suspected predators is meant to discourage deviance, as well as regulate conformity amongst suspects seeking to violate the law and socially sanctioned concepts of sexuality the law enforces. This method of deterrence creates a form self-regulating form of adherence to the law in order to avoid the humiliation through vigilante justice.
One can interpret Perverted Justice and To Catch a Predator as a modern version of vigilante justice. The historical brand of popular justice, seen through vigilante justice and images of humiliation throughout each episode, suggests strong evidence for the public’s desire to see visuals of justice carried out. Similar to lynch mobs within the
26 United States, examples of vigilante justice communicates “impassioned sentiments that could no longer be expressed in the official idiom of the criminal law, and [serve] to inflict a level of suffering that had long since been officially disavowed” (Garland 2007:
453). Therefore, although state-sanctioned forms of punishment have moved behind prison walls, public punishment as a spectacle continues to express itself through unofficial forms of justice, as seen on To Catch a Predator. The show’s depiction of punishment as a public spectacle also facilitates societal desire to inflict revenge upon a suspected predator. The images of sexual predators getting exposed, confronted, and arrested reflects the “public’s appetite for ever more public, ever more humiliating, and ever more stigmatizing forms of retribution” (Lancaster 2012: 3026-3029).
As Garland notes about capital punishment, revenge “is repeatedly said to have no place in the operations of law or the motivations of legal actors and yet it is clearly one of the psychic and cultural forces that provides the death penalty with energy and appeal”
(Garland 2007: 448). The collective condemnation of labeled deviants in each episode remains one of the ways in which groups of people express their autonomy, invoke traditional values, assert their local identity, and sometimes invoke revenge (Garland
2007: 459). To Catch a Predator reiterates this practice, not through capital punishment, but symbolically through public shame, humiliation, and defamation of character.
Public punishment allows the public to view the condemned directly, with a front row seat to the confrontation, exposure, and shaming being carried out in the name of justice.
The expected encounter, the confrontation with camera crews and law enforcement, and the accusation of being a sexual predator present both a confusing and ultimately humiliating experience for the predator. This televised experience promotes social
27 cohesion and moral order, reinforcing Durkheim’s functionalist viewpoints regarding punishment within society. From a functionalist perspective, public identification and punishments serves a macro-level purpose in drawing public attention to moral boundaries, marking distinctions between good and evil, further enhancing social cohesion and solidarity against deviants. Such castigation of deviants functions to identify “common external enemies, or scapegoats, usually [causing] conflicting groups to set aside, at least temporarily, their hostilities towards each other” (Heiner 2008: 48).
This social function, created through social cohesion against a common threat, reaffirms the role mass media routinely plays in modern society, taking the place of public executions or the shaming stocks of past centuries.
Shaming Historically, shaming as a form of public punishment indicates visible signs “that the sentiments of the collectivity are still unchanged, that the communion of minds sharing the same beliefs remains absolute, and in this way the injury that the crime has inflicted upon society is made good” (Durkheim 1983). By creating a forum for collective condemnation, the show justifies the mechanism of shame by private citizens and law enforcement agencies in confronting threats of moral panic.
To Catch a Predator’s methods of public humiliation reflects long-standing methods of shaming by religious authorities and state institutions. For example, in 17th century England, it was proposed that ministers in each parish “should appoint secret inspectors to spy on those persons ‘most known or suspected; of debauchery [sexual deviance]…..[and] each Sunday he would then, in the presence of the congregation, cause
[their] names and crime to be distinctly read” (Dabhoiwala 2007: 300). Following a confession, the sexual deviants were forbidden from communion until they repented for
28 their sexual deviance. Modern-day public shaming of sexual deviants exists in other forms, as seen through making “convicts wear signs, post notices in their front yards, or perform other public rituals as part of their punishment” (Lancaster 2012: 3026-3029). To
Catch a Predator offers a similar venue for public shaming and humiliation while failing to provide avenues for reintegration of the sexual predator, instead promoting a permanent stigma against the deviant.
The forms of public humiliation and shaming on To Catch a Predator reflect the blurring boundaries between mass-media institutions and law and order institutions, and the ways in which ideas of punishment and social control are defined. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the rise in the criminal justice entertainment industry, as seen in popular television programming, has expanded the increasingly complex role entertainment assumes in creating knowledge of criminal threats within society. These expansions led to heightened forms of shaming and humiliation shaped through the lens of privatized policing efforts.
Public perceptions about shaming as a method for social control is therefore linked between the criminal justice system, and private media institutions such as Dateline NBC, and Perverted Justice’s influence over undercover operations. Members of the online watchdog group openly embraced shaming as way to expose and punish sexual predators.
Before Perverted Justice teamed up with Dateline NBC and local law enforcement agencies across the country, members were inspired to expose online sexual predators through any means possible. After finding personal contact information of individuals soliciting sex with minors, members of Perverted Justice “outed” the online sexual predators. By informing friends, family, employers, and co-workers about such private
29 exploits, Perverted Justice shamed and humiliated suspected predators, destroying the social ties previously shared within their community.
One Perverted Justice member argued that “there’s nothing finer than the feeling when some bastard who thought he was about to ‘score big’ with a ten-year-old gets the surprise of his life: my face on his monitor, my voice on his phone and, in a figurative sense at least, my shit in his mouth” (Grigoriadis 2007: 4). By creating a public spectacle of shame and humiliation against a suspected predator, “the performance of shame by online vigilante groups like Perverted Justice connects the celebration of hurt and humiliation in popular culture with broader cultural and political shifts toward expressive and shaming forms of criminal justice in the late 20th century” (Kohm 2009: 192). The expanded role Perverted Justice enjoys as a private consultant connected with Dateline
NBC allows for unfettered contact with law enforcement agencies and thus direct influence over the ways in which practices of public shaming are carried out.
While some predators who were confronted offered excuses or justifications for their actions, others showed remorse, embarrassment, or shame for their deviant behavior. As
Hanson read highlights of the sexually explicit transcripts, several suspects recoiled in embarrassment and pleaded with him to stop reading. By reacting to their label as a sexual predator from Hanson, these men were responding with shame to the amplified visibility of their deviant acts and intensity of public exposure and condemnation of such behavior.
Others expressed their regret by professing their stupidity, admitting poor judgment, and regretting the shame, harm, and humiliation caused to their friends, coworkers, and families. In being publically condemned as predators, these men were instantly aware of
30 how their identities will be forever scarred with the social stigmas attached to pedophiles and sexual predators within the United States. The stigmatized individual’s struggle to maintain a positive identity despite negative assumptions society makes about them can be further understood using Goffman’s analysis of identity management (Goffman 1963).
Stigmatized individuals, such as the sexual deviants depicted on the show “must learn to reconcile the discrepancy between their virtual identity and their actual identity, which violates society’s definition of normal and/or acceptable” (Koken, Bimbi, Parsons,
Halkitis 2004: 16). It is through identity management that disgraced individuals must attempt to maintain a positive identity despite being labeled perverse and deviant.
Selected episodes revealed impacts of disintegrative shaming, before suspects are found guilty of their charges of sexual misconduct.
Shaming and stigmatization against an individual can influence one’s inability to manage his deviant identity may cause his ties to community, workplace, and family to disintegrate. As opposed to reintegrative shaming, disintegrative shaming works to disintegrate or “impede [one’s] successful reintegration into the community, [one’s] ability to get a job or accommodation and, therefore, [one’s] ultimate rehabilitation”
(McAliden 2005: 379). By referring to suspects on the episodes as “flies that keep coming back,” Hanson reaffirms the ways in which society should judge the offender, influencing his long-lasting identity within society.
Although episodes do not focus on legal proceedings experienced by sexual predators after the television encounter, it offers several images and attitudes towards those accused, but yet not convicted, of sexual crimes against children. The public shaming component, as seen through the lens of private media, plays an integral role in what the
31 judicial process is created to do: decide the fate of suspected criminals. In To Catch a
Predator’s last segment several predators were shown in jail jumpsuits, looking dazed and defeated as they faced arraignment upon their entry into the criminal justice system.
In many ways, however, following up on these sexual predators in the formal criminal justice system is superfluous given they have been captured, tried, and convicted within a public forum.
Some scholars have argued that modern forms of shaming through public punishment may be linked to a “public collective outrage at a criminal justice system to be ineffectual” (Kohm 2009: 190). The need to visualize and celebrate public shaming amplifies the public’s desire to place the role of punishment in the hand of private citizens and companies. By bridging the gaps between effective law enforcement and sexual morality within society, To Catch a Predator helps satiate the audience’s hunger for visible proofs of justice. Controversy surrounding the show’s methods of “outing” predators, specifically in an unaired episode in 2006, has functioned to weaken the legitimacy of shame as a method for punishment.
Although “there is a practical imposition of some form of suffering in the threat of stigma and social exclusion,” too much shaming can disrupt the foundation of certainty and punishment it is seeking to promote (McAliden 2005: 378). For example, a 2006 undercover sting of sexual predators, involving To Catch a Predator crews and local
SWAT teams, led to the suicide of Louis Conradt Jr., a Texas District Attorney. The public outcry against the role of the media and law enforcement in Conradt’s suicide led to a distancing between local law enforcement and To Catch a Predator crews. Such an example reveals “the use of mediated humiliation as a tactic of ‘gonzo’ justice by local
32 law enforcement in a variety of ways contains the seeds of its own demise” (Kohm 2009:
202). This ambiguous cultural place shame assumes within society can be seen through the weaknesses and limitations of shaming depicted on To Catch a Predator.
Promotion of Sexuality The boundaries between child and sexuality on the show are both a continuation of historical “sexual purity campaigns” and the “dominant post-1980s figuration of children as one of innocence without sexuality, in a way different from earlier decades of the twentieth century” (Angelides 2004: 91). Commentary on To Catch a Predator has functioned to defined the line between law and mental illness, as well as punishment and sympathy by encouraging a one-size-fits all punishment to an already demonized sub population. As historical analysis of sexual deviance and its relationship to the law reveal
“sex laws have become over-inclusive, embracing a large grey area of sexual activity that is not pedophilia in a psychiatric sense” (West 2000: 524). Analysis of To Catch a
Predator’s focus on deviant sexuality, and justification for punishment, articulates the ways in which present-day law enforcement has worked to define and control the grey areas of sexuality.
Rules and regulations regarding non-deviant and deviant behavior were communicated throughout the confrontation with the suspect. The show’s depictions of rule violations function to bridge the gap between the state and private citizens by enforcing social control against those who are sexually aberrant, regardless of their mental ailments or previous background.
Topics exposed throughout To Catch a Predator reaffirmed normative sexual behavior concerning virginity, sexual acts, and most importantly victimization against children. Transcripts of the chats were oftentimes shown to viewers while an adult male
33 actor and young female or male voice reenacted the online dialogue. An integral part of
Hanson’s confrontation relies on reading the transcript aloud to the predator, focusing exclusively on the sexual components of the online chat. As Hanson reads aloud the chats with disgust and disdain, audiences are reminded of the titillating details that make this sexual deviant especially dangerous to society’s most innocent and defenseless population, children. To Catch a Predator’s depiction of unsupervised innocence colliding with deviance communicates a clear picture of what type of threat sexual predators pose.
The interactions between the adult male and the apparent child, as seen on hidden cameras capturing the early moments of the confrontation, provide audiences with examples of pending threat of victimization the suspect pose. The decoy, who is played by a 19 year-old, solidifies an image of an innocent teen through her clothing, actions, and mannerisms. The actor is oftentimes dressed in shorts and a baseball cap and has either cookies or sweet tea for the suspects who arrive at the decoy house. Furthermore, the decoys are oftentimes “cleaning up” or “finishing laundry,” actions that reflect the child’s commitment and obedience to traditional femininity and domestic norms. It is the adult-led depiction of children within the setting of a “family home,” on To Catch a
Predator, which defines the boundaries between innocence and sexuality, child and adult.
Decoys act like willing participants in sexual encounters while the show continually reaffirms the “unnatural” attraction shared by the adult suspects. The episodes reflect a “double assertion that practically all children indulge or are prone to indulge in sexual activity; and that, being unwarranted, at the same time ‘natural’ and ‘contrary to nature,’ this sexual activity posed physical and moral, individual and collective dangers”
34 (Foucault 1978: 104). To Catch a Predator thus communicates the taboo of children’s sexuality and the need for children to be protected against sexual pollutants and outside threats.
A common theme seen within chats between predators and decoys was the desire for virginity and sexual purity. Online chats revealed many suspects desire to introduce the
(presumed) underage boys or girls to particular sexual positions and many encouraged them explore their sexuality by masturbating. One suspect summarized many predator’s desire for young, virgin children by claiming that sex with a minor offers him the
“cleanest, best pleasure” (Bowling Green). By comparing the graphic images of predators’ genitals, previously sent from the predator to the decoy, audience members were provided with tangible images of innocence and evil, while witnessing examples of the need for protectionist measures to guard children from victimization.
Chris Hanson assumes authority as a father figure, substitute for a failed individual parent (because the child was alone online and at home, unsupervised and unprotected) and a weak state (that needs entertainment media and a small grass roots initiative to lead) to catch criminals after a fictional parent failed to protect the child decoy. Historical stereotypes depicting woman as a caregivers, and more gentle, can be linked to the lack of depictions of women victimizing children (Zilney 2009). The absence of a female figure, however, further validates the need to involve the role of the patriarchal figure, and involvement of private and public institutions.
To Catch a Predator brings the threat, faced by children and parents alike, into the public realm, justifying the involvement of private entities and the state in enforcing sexual codes within society. “Today the figure of the child victim stands at the center of
35 governance,” as the state functions as the parent figure, not simply in a figural sense but teaching, enforcing, and punishing (Lancaster 2012: 4748-4750). When suspects ask
Hanson if they are in legal trouble, he claims that that “it is not up to me,” avoiding direct responsibility for formal sanctions against their actions. Although Hanson may not be directly involved in arresting, prosecuting, or convicting sexual predators he serves as a connecting point for law enforcement, Perverted Justice, sexual predators, and audiences viewing each episode.
By suppressing children’s sexuality and punishing sexual deviants, To Catch a
Predator reaffirms sexual codes of the state, legitimizing the state’s inclusion into protecting individuals and families from suspected moral danger, and influences production of knowledge within households across America. As witnessed in the collective condemnation of adult and child sexual relations in each episode, To Catch a
Predator defines deviance as criminal because it offends the commonly held values of sexual morality (Durkheim 1893: 163).
The Role of Police The relationship Dateline NBC enjoys with local law enforcement agencies and citizen volunteers enables a unique method of defining and controlling crime through both private and public partnerships. To Catch a Predator’s interviews with police officers and investigators consistently highlighted that, increased cooperation with
Perverted Justice was integral in exposing and challenging the threat online sexual predators pose to innocent child victims. The cooperating police departments assumed an active role by encouraging Perverted Justice and Dateline NBC to operate within their jurisdictions. Furthermore, local law enforcement agencies took part in each investigation, oftentimes praising the techniques of Perverted Justice and offering
36 gratitude to Dateline NBC for actively facilitating Perverted Justice’s role in the undercover investigation.
The commentary offered by police investigators, district attorneys, and other local officials throughout each segment further reinforces the legitimacy of Dateline NBC’s methods for facilitating the policing of sexual deviants. Kentucky Attorney General, Greg
Stumbo, for example, identified cooperation with private citizens a “positive thing.”
Stumbo argued that “law enforcement is not equipped to conduct these types of operations at this point….so to us it was just a natural fit” (Bowling Green). Undercover sting operations, various methods of surveillance including hidden cameras, and public forms of shaming provide police agencies with free labor, transmit definitions of normative behavior to millions of citizens, and provide tangible demonstrations of social cohesion as a result of collective condemnation. Likewise, Kentucky law enforcement agencies spoke positively of their long-lasting relationship with Dateline NBC, further bolstering the legitimacy of the partnership among police, private citizens, and media institutions.
It is the social institutions between media, private life, and law enforcement that encourage the condemnation of sexual deviancy that acts as a point of unification within society. By framing sexual victimization as the most pressing issue regarding children with society, the institutions involved in the show fail to highlight ways in which other social factors, including poverty and lack of healthcare, influence children’s vulnerability within society. To Catch a Predator exclusive focus on the threats posed sexual deviants helps to legitimize social control of alleged threats against society’s most sacred
37 institutions and communicates ways in which punishments and shaming can be utilized to enforce social unity.
Although under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement agencies, Dateline NBC crews are still actively involved in the police interrogation, bringing the criminal justice system “experience” further into the public domain. It is through this amalgamation of private and public entities that broadcasts the humiliating police interviews, oftentimes revealing titillating details the suspected sexual predator left out with his conversations with Hanson. In round one, the offender is identified as deviant through his confrontation with Hanson and private citizen groups. In round two, To Catch a Predator enables the voices from the criminal justice system to be heard, working to justify the television show’s methods of social control as a means of protecting communities from sexual predators.
Police officers interviewed throughout the show argued that these sexual deviants were not only a chronic threat to children, but were also threats to their own family. Sgt.
Lee De Bradander argued that because of the predator’s decision to solicit sex with a minor “they’re affecting all these other people who they’re supposed to love and care for”
(Long Beach, California). Commentary from other officers similarly argued suspects knew what they were doing was wrong and yet that cannot control their deviant appetites.
Sgt. Adkins argued that, “chances are slim that he’s only done this two times. Obviously, there’s something he can’t control there. I mean, he knew for a fact that I was after him for a year and a half” (Greenville, Ohio). Other officers interviewed argued that sexual predators could not use ‘severe mental illness’ as a defense, given that they were fully aware of the risks involved. At the crossroads of knowledge production, To Catch a
38 Predator reaffirms the role of the criminal justice system without explicitly stating messages of sexuality from the state. The enthusiastic and generalized judgments against alleged deviants by police officers not only reaffirms attitudes from Perverted Justice and
Chris Hanson, but also has contradictory aims to negate as well as reaffirm the functions of our modern criminal justice system.
The brief role of the criminal justice system throughout the show is shown with a judge concluding that the “court will make a finding that you are a sexual predator”
(Greenville, Ohio). This brief, yet powerful reference to the role of the legal system not only downplays its important function in protecting the rights of suspects but also reinforces the societal assumption that all sexual deviants are guilty before proven so.
The absence of trials and opportunities for an accused predator’s reintegration back into society reflects the way in which To Catch a Predator promotes vigilante activism and collective condemnation prior to the completion of legal proceedings and comprehensive criminal investigations.
To Catch a Predator casts society, as collection of suspicious neighbors and strangers. This in part, is reflected in the new and evolving role technology has assumed in surveillance against deviant behavior. These technologically advanced “modes of surveillance [can] multiply in the community, at schools, in the workplace—and increasingly citizens are primed to crave new techniques of supervision, which are silently disseminated across the landscape” (Lancaster 2012: 4926-4927). By providing technologies for surveillance, To Catch a Predator “acts as a bridge between online vigilantes and cash-strapped local police forces,” and therefore enjoys great authority in shaping public awareness of and response to sexual predators (Kohm 2009: 196). The
39 show is simultaneously encouraging distrust amongst neighbors, community members, and online networks, while promoting absolute trust in the messages presented through mass media, the state, and both private and public law enforcement.
Policing the Internet
The anonymous nature of Internet-based social interactions makes the very notion and definition of community borderless, presenting an indefinable target for law enforcement. Dateline NBC commentary suggests it is only ‘through the click of a mouse
[a] child can go visit and talk to people that they have never talked to” (Long Beach,
California). The threat of violence against children, made possible by “cyber stalking,” has expanded the notion that children can become victims of sexual violence at school, outside, or in the comfort of their own home while online. Furthermore, the anonymity within cyberspace provides hitherto-unobtainable opportunities for any social group, including pedophiles, to contact one another and disseminate information to potentially any online user (Goode 2011: 53).
The anonymity provided by the Internet offers no face to this deviant actor with perverse intentions, providing no visual clues about who is deviant and where he or she is located. This idea of stranger danger throughout the Internet, enforced on To Catch a
Predator as each segment of the show depicts the Internet as a breeding ground for innocent children to interact with strangers who attempt to build sexual relationship through the click of a button.
The role the show assumes in incorporating private entities and citizen vigilantes into the judicial process reflects a desire amongst law enforcement agencies to adapt its response to a public need for order (Juliano 2012: 54). The adaptations reflect the private
40 vigilante’s utilization of widespread tools to become an independent crime fighter and taking the law into his or her own hands (Juliano 2012: 65). Like a modern-day posse comitatus, the posse of Perverted Justice volunteer vigilantes, assume an authoritative role in “taming” the lawlessness, in the absence of organized law, within the Internet. The settlement, control, and “taming” of the world wide web shares similar traits in the ways in which Americans depicted and glorified the expansion into the western United States.
Once as a wilderness with very few settled places, regulations, and restrictions, the
Internet has today become more connected, controlled, and ultimately regulated public space. As seen in To Catch a Predator, both the local and federal law enforcement agencies work to reign in the lawlessness of the Internet through controlling inappropriate sexual contact with minors. Unlike the natural environment of land, the Internet has no physical boundaries and the sharing of information transcends “geographical boundaries…typically involving the jurisdiction of more than one law enforcement agency” (Durkin 1997: 16). The maintenance of public security, historically conducted by a posse of private citizens working to preserve law and order within America’s western frontier, is directly reflected in each episode.
Despite the contemporary nature of the Internet, and the implications of new threats it poses, To Catch a Predator also builds on deep and old cultural fears. Ronald
Lee and Shawn Wahl’s research aims to understand how the media’s framing of Internet pedophiles resembles previous cultural narratives depicting the image of a “dangerous community.” The research uses the stories of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Mean
Streets” to further define how modern technologies, specifically the Internet, can create new moral panics that have both historic and contemporary dimensions. Like the
41 vulnerable character in Little Red Riding Hood, for example, the selected episodes highlight the danger children faced by going online. By engaging with strangers online, some of whom may share similar traits to the fictional Big Bad Wolf, sexual predators are able to maneuver themselves into the most sacred structures of the family.
To Catch a Predator’s methods of social control further define the Internet as an electric frontier inhabited by dangerous, yet anonymous, predators roaming cyberspace searching for naïve and innocent children. Laws, news coverage, and primetime television all work to reinforce the dangers within cyberspace by creating an image of a child predator entering one’s living room through cyberspace. “With fear-arousing marketing appeals for filtering technology, advocacy by child-safety groups, and lurid sweep-month televised news accounts of cyber-sting operations, the “Internet Pedophile” has become the iconic figure in a moral panic” (Lee and Wahl 2007: 1). In keeping with this iconic treatment of sexual deviants, the show helps to watch, guard, contain, and punish suspects…[and] warns its audience against the dangers of the other” (Lee and
Wahl 2007: 7). To Catch a Predator’s effort in linking modern technologies with dystopian tales have detrimental effects on how citizens perceive moral threats and engage in punitive measures.
Moral Panic
A moral panic can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill-defined threat to society. Attempts at purging the alleged threat to society can be seen through increased punitive policies such as, zero tolerance, more encompassing laws, and communal vigilance (Lancaster 2012: 537-540).
The “underlying assumption of moral panic theory is that the concern at hand is inflated
42 or unwarranted, that it is disproportionate to the actual threat posed” (Angelides 2004:
82). Major social institutions involved all work together to buttress moral panics by publically identifying deviance and applying punitive measures for all audience members to see. To Catch a Predator’s depiction of Internet sexual predators as threats to moral order increases the need for mobilization of the media, public opinion, and various agents of social control around a perceived social problem” (Angelides 2004: 81).
The depiction of threats being revealed and challenged in To Catch a Predator reflects the shows emphasis on addressing what moral deviations are of most concern.
The shows overt use of law enforcement and public humiliation works to address this deviance with a sense of urgency, driven by perceived threats against moral order and social norms. Connecting police, private investigators, television networks, as well as viewers across America, each episode communicates a constant urgency to confront a specific moral danger. Historical analysis of media institutions reveal that To Catch a
Predators methods of communication are defined by the media’s role in perpetuating pedophilia and sexual victimization as a moral panic.
Quantitative analysis of trends in sexual crimes and convictions revealed that between
1987 and 1997, “the number of persons convicted for indictable sex offenses has not increased, but the changes of immediate imprisonment following conviction have increased twice as much for indictable sex offenses as for the generality of indictable offense” (West 2000: 518). These trends reflect a change between the 1950s and 1970s in the U.S. in associating adolescence with dangerous and reckless behavior, including drug use and sexual promiscuity, and in need of control (Zilney, 64). More recently, the
Internet has provided a source of information on sexuality that was previously dealt with
43 through peer-to-peer interaction, resulting in a large majority of teens (98.9 percent of males and 73.5 percent of females) having viewed pornography by the age of 15 (Zilney
2009: 65). The defensive measures on To Catch a Predator reflect a framework for protecting children from their own immaturity or inexperience, or sheltering them from adult perversity and corruption (Fisher 2005: 134). Such a conclusion reflects the growing societal concern in stiffening formal sanctions against child sex offenders.
Focused crime data, contemporary punitive policies, and the sensationalized portrayal of violent sexual offenders in the media, function to reiterate how institutions of media can amplify deviant behavior and increase moral panics within society.
Media reporting reinforces negative views of pedophiles by promoting the construction of child sex offenders as “members of ‘outgroups’ similar in ways to labeling witches as “outsiders” thus, making it possible for communities to take collective action against them (Gavin 2005: 397). Functioning as a reusable template, the socially constructed master status can easily transmit strong emotions across broad audiences when exposed to television. Television coverage of child sex offenders not only fosters moral panics, it also influences how sexual offenders are thought of as one group, regardless of the differences and severities of their crimes.
Subsequent research on media institutions reveals television coverage often pits “evil against innocence” by increasing focuses on “crime stories” in order to attract viewership
(Burns and Crawford 1999: 158). News coverage of sexual offenders fosters concern about an issue, identifies or underscores the deviance of certain behavior, perpetuates hostility against that conduct, and seeks to solidify a consensus throughout society on how to react to specific forms of deviant behavior. This process of news and information
44 connecting with and influencing public perception and public policy reflects the ways in which threats to societal values can create moral panic (Burns and Crawford 1999: 148).
The news media’s use of “fear-arousing marketing appeals for filtering technology, advocacy by child-safety group, and lurid sweep-month televised news accounts of cyber-sting operations” has helped the Internet sexual predator become the iconic figure the modern day moral panic. (Lee and Wahl 2007: 1). Dateline NBC’s production of To
Catch a Predator is unique in that it functions through a mixture of information, news, and entertainment, or infotainment. Infotainment is the result of blurring boundaries between “fiction, spectacle, entertainment, and punishment” (Kohm 2009: 199). This blurring between reality and fiction in contemporary media formats has long-lasting effects on further reinforcing this taken-for-granted ‘reality’ of crime” (Kohm 2009: 193).
The reality that To Catch a Predator exists in, and perpetually defines, is one that has been taking shape for decades as well as reinventing centuries-old traditions of public punishment. Other shows depicting “reality policing,” function to couple emotive and often humiliating displays of social control with a form of television at the margins of fiction and news, “creating misperceptions of moral threats against the social order”
(Kohn 2009: 194).
By concentrating coverage on minority sexual abuses and creating a “cut-dry approach” for conceptualizing threats of sexual victimization within society, To Catch a
Predator is a functioning mass-mediated spectacle of humiliation-as-entertainment. To
Catch a Predator and other “reality policing programs couple emotive and often humiliating displays of social control with a form of television at the margins of fact and fiction, entertainment and news” (Kohm 2009: 194). By using emotions, entertainment,
45 and humiliation as punishment, To Catch a Predator has helped nurture the moral panics around online sexual predators. This program frames this “growing national epidemic” as something that can affect anyone’s child, thus justifying the show’s conduct as a means of ridding society of predators one sting at a time (Grigoridadis 2007: 69).
The role journalists play in this interaction between fiction, entertainment, and fact influence the ways in which news stories are created as opposed to covered. Reality TV programming “pushes the boundaries of post-modern journalism by actively creating the very stories it claims to cover in the name of public interest” (Kohm 2009: 194). Profit- driven news organizations, however, are not directly driven to improve the social good, but rather have invested interests in the realities of ratings and quarterly earnings.
Mainstream news organizations therefore employ “an element of entertainment-style programming in order to draw in viewers” and maintain dominance within a competitive industry (Cecil and Leitner 2009: 185). The influence of profit-driven, consumer-oriented news has further perpetuated the increased for sensationalist coverage of child sexual victimization within the United States. The growth the major 24-hour news networks has also allowed for increase coverage of crimes against children, including stranger- abducting and sexual violence as a means of maximizing viewership. This increased coverage in recent years has in-turn helped “increase public awareness and condemnation of this type of [sexually deviant] crime” (Quinn 2004: 221).
46 Conclusion
Analysis of To Catch a Predator revealed broader social implications for what messages are being transmitted and how both private and public institutions communicate these messages. By attempting to answer how To Catch a Predator communicates definitions of sexuality, punishment, and social control through partnerships with various social institutions, this research allowed for increased understanding of the role mass media assumes in defining public knowledge and influencing current-day discourses. The show functioned to bridge the historical constructs of sexuality with modern-day infotainment television, encouraging viewers to find collective solace in the condemnation, castigation, and public humiliation of others.
To Catch a Predator’s emphasis on the danger posed by online sexual predators, further highlighted ways in which anxiety around perceived social threats are conceived and perpetuated, articulated how private and public cooperation can strengthen methods of social control, and ultimately reinforce the state’s role in promoting moral codes and social control, and exerting punishment against deviant citizens with society. This current research can be complimented in the future by exploring the implications of infotainment themed shows, such as To
Catch a Predator on the criminal justice system and popular culture within the
United States.
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