Last week, “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson, a psychological A24 thriller giving a new perspective on the hit NBC show “To Catch a Predator” and its host Chris Hansen, was released in theaters.
“To Catch a Predator” was an early 2000s Dateline NBC reality TV show. The show used hidden cameras to lure child predators, typically older men, to sting houses after they chatted online with who they thought was a child or preteen under the pretense of sexual acts. After this, they were confronted by Hansen, publicly shamed and humiliated on television and then often tackled and arrested by police lying in wait outside the home.
After watching “Primetime” and researching the film, Hansen and “To Catch a Predator,” the word I kept seeing was “humiliation.”
Hansen’s methods were unconventional and raised a lot of questions about his role as a journalist and entertainer and where this line should be drawn. However, in America, something happens every day reminding us the comfort, livelihood and reputation of men is more important than the lives, safety and well-being of women and children. This public humiliation and entrapment aspect is not what should make us uncomfortable. The fact grown men are so eager to have sex with a preteen is what should make us uncomfortable.
Of course, these ethical concerns didn’t come from nowhere. TCaP was eventually cancelled because a sexual predator they were investigating, a district attorney in Texas, committed suicide before Hansen’s team could confront him.
Hansen absolutely did humiliate the sexual predators on TCaP, acting as a vigilante. Hansen collaborated with the group Perverted Justice, who acted as preteens online and “responded enthusiastically if adults oriented the conversation toward sex,” creating the decoy situation for Hansen and law enforcement to blow up.
Some also call this entrapment, especially when the decoys messaging potential sexual predators are eager and persistent about sexual acts over the computer.
Some hate this method, which is odd considering we live in a society perpetuating rape culture, where “common social beliefs, attitudes and morals normalize sexual violence, encourage people to associate sex with violence, and minimize the seriousness of sexual violence.”
To be clear, I understand there is a lot of nuance, and what CNN said in a recent headline, we can’t definitively give the title of “pedophile-hunting hero or a great American villain.” However, questioning Hansen’s methods does not mean losing sight of the behavior he was exposing.
There have been no arrests made from the Epstein files. President Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assaulting a teenager, as well as numerous other sexual misconduct allegations. In the NBA, every single franchise has dealt with some sort of domestic or sexual violence allegations from their players. No player has ever been banned from the NBA because of these types of allegations.
We are shown you can harass, groom, rape, assault and most of the time, you get to live a normal life. NBC said, “Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults, and child sex abuse allegations in certain cities across the United States ever result in a sex crime conviction.”
FOX Carolina recently uncovered 417 South Carolina offenders, “convicted of having child pornography, or child sexual abuse material, did not spend any time in a state prison.”
This is part of why TCaP was so appealing to America – it offered a different form of punishment in a system which often failed to give thorough consequences.
An article from The Conversation, “How ‘To Catch a Predator’ indulged America’s appetite for humiliation and punishment,” connects America’s obsession with humiliation entertainment to other humiliation content to help people feel “righteous outrage.” The examples given are gym shaming videos, “Karen” freakouts and homeowners confronting porch pirates.
Hansen and his show may have fed America’s disturbing appetite for humiliation and punishment, but the men being put on blast were not jaywalkers or petty thieves. They were entering and continuing conversations with whom they believed were children and pursuing sexual acts with them.
Hansen’s methods were not immune from criticism, but we need to be careful about making humiliation and entrapment the most troubling part of the story.
Abby Shriver is a sophomore studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note the opinions expressed in this column do not represent those of The Post. Want to talk to Abby about their column? Email/message them at as064024@ohio.edu / @abbyshriver_
