Writing in Vanity Fair, journalist and author Mark Bowden looks into the world of online sex predators and those who pose as children to attempt to catch them. He writes he found a “gray area of thoughts, intentions and predispositions and “the equally murky realm of enticement and entrapment” where “the pursuer and the pursued grow entangled in a transaction that takes on a gruesome life of its own.”
Bowden writes, “Entrapment has long been a factor in the enforcement of vice laws, which seek to punish behavior that is furtive and widespread…American courts have long recognized the right of police to invent ruses. Sting operations flourish in a climate of fear. Courts and lawmakers become less and less scrupulous about basic fairness. The more frightening and reprehensible the threat, the more license and latitude are given to the police. For a variety of reasons, few of them valid, the child-molester has become the pre-eminent domestic villain of our time.”