Family and Friends Forum

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My person is a communication offence. Vigilante decoy. Only happened in the last few weeks so on pre-charge bail currently.

I did a FOI request on this but it was declined. Antidotally from this forum and from newspaper reports it seems that the majority are decoys. I do understand the logic in theory as to why they are used, but I've seen very few cases where investigations have found other chats with genuine children, or images.

I'm sorry for everyone on here. My person went on an adult website and was contacted through that. So like what's been said previously are offenders being made not caught.

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Mine is vigilante decoy, now past sentencing (pretty hefty one at that), be warned that vigilantes are lying scum and will do and say anything to make your person look like he's done worse, for example my person did not arrange to meet nor sent or received videos/images etc nor asked for them, but somehow they got his address etc - according to them he gave them his address which I know 100% he did not, they tracked his ip address which is illegal. They made out he asked for images which he didn't (I've seen the original messages) they used screenshots in court that can and were doctored. They even admitted to using dubious tactics and were proud of doing so.

My person is in prison (the surreality of this smacks me in the face every time). When he was taken in and the officers at 'reception' read the reason he was being taken in, one of them literally rolled his eyes and asked 'so, what it a police decoy or vigilantes?' as if these were the only possible two options. Meanwhile, our real, actual children are suffering terribly through all ~this~...

I'm too tired to go into all the intricacies and rights and wrongs but OF COURSE our people shouldn't correspond in this way, but I don't understand why the police aren't considered guilty of the same crimes when they are are actively engaging in exactly the same correspondence. We will never know whether, if the situation had been real and not artificially engineered, one party or the other would have pulled back/ended the correspondence. Of course, vigilantes and police decoys are never going to reach a point where they say 'hey, I don't like the direction this is heading, I'm not on board with this any more...'.

I thought I might offer a different perspective on this. Why do so few cases involving real children seem to go to court? I think the answer is that these things are massively under reported.

If you look at the 'Everyones invited' website, or read the NSPCC report on young people and social media, it's clear that young women and girls are being bombarded with sexualised messages and d*ckpics, all the time. Many of these come from people their own age, but a lot of it is being sent by older men.

But almost none of it gets reported to the police. That's because the victims think that (a) its just normal, and (b) even if they did report it, the police wouldn't do anything.

I also read some research a while ago, about communication offences and the men who commit them. The men talked about the tactics they used to find children and most of them used a scattergun approach. That means they will send messages to lots of different girls at the same time, knowing that 90% of them will either ignore the message, or tell them to get lost.

But they also knew, that if they approached enough girls, eventually they would find one who replied. And how many of the ones who didn't reply would go the police? I'm guessing almost none of them, because they don't think its worth reporting.

So we dont really know how widespread this problem is. We don't how many real children these men may have sent messages to, before they encountered a decoy, or a vigilante.

Even in the cases where a real child is contacted, often it is not reported, because the child is afraid of what their parents will say and in the most extreme cases, the men will blackmail them or threaten to harm them, if they say anything to anyone.

Take d*kpics for example. This is now a criminal offence, although I gather it is very common, but it hardly ever gets reported, so there are hardly any cases in the media. But, if every time a man sent one of these it was reported and the police took it to court, I think we then would see just how big the problem is and just how many men are doing it.

Vigilantes just drag innocent family members into a situation they just don't deserve. Naming people and who they work for in a live streaming video is shameful. Bringing people's lives crashing down around them. Go through the proper channels and let the innocents at least continue to have some anonymity whilst they're trying to deal with what has happened

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The reality is that dick pics and nudes have become normal. If I recieved an unsolicited dick pic I personally wouldn't contact the police, I am an adult though.

I'm almost positive that there will be members of authorities thay have seen more images than my person ever saw, he has been convicted though.

I completely agree that offenders are being created rather than purposely setting out to commit crimes in many cases.