Internet Stings Directed at Pedophiles: A Study in Philosophy and Law

Abstract:     
This paper considers a jurisprudential issue that has heretofore not received much attention: Do Internet Stings Directed at Pedophiles Create Offenders or Capture Offenders? to paraphrase my 2002 article in Sexuality and Culture which opened this subject. Section II presents the jurisprudential argument, while Section I gives a framework for classifying work in jurisprudence as (1) an application of ethics and allied fields to legal matters - the traditional definition, (2) a philosophical examination of a legal question, the argument does not depend on ethical premises but rather given data only appeals to (already) shared ethical premises, and (3) a kind of examination that takes existing legal frameworks as a given and then makes an ethical argument within those frameworks, with the aim of achieving logical coherence of the whole.

We situate our work as (2) above and the only other jurisprudential treatment of this issue as (3) above. Thus, we answer an objection of R. H. S. Tur (1978) to traditional jurisprudential inquiry ((1) above) as mere opinion - ideology - and as syncretist.

In section III, we try the empirical basis of the argument in section II (our 2002 article) by three other empirical/experimental studies (one by the DOJ on the recidivism of sex offenders, one published in the British Journal of Criminology on an experimental Internet sting with free games as the bait and pornography (among other categories) as the trap, and one unpublished study relied on heavily in law-enforcement circles on the prevalence of contact offenses in the histories of offenders undergoing sex-offender treatment but incarcerated for non-contact offenses).

In section IV, we discuss the other jurisprudential treatment of this general topic, a piece by Sinnott-Armstrong in Ethics and Information Technology.

Keywords: jurisprudence, ideological arguments, evidence-based arguments, shared premises, internet, sting operations, victimless crimes, pedophiles, pedophilia, statutory rape

Working Paper Series