A man slashed his own throat live on a Facebook stream after being confronted by paedophile hunters in the English city of Liverpool.
The Facebook Live video, now deleted, showed the man going into his car, taking out a knife, and slitting his own throat, according to a MailOnline report.
The emergency services attended the scene and took the man to hospital, where he is said to be in a stable condition. Merseyside Police have not addressed the man’s fate outright, but they have confirmed that they arrested a 55-year-old man from the town of Kirkby has been placed under arrest for allegedly grooming a child under 14 and the possession of a bladed article.
Citizen “paedophile hunters” who pose as children online in order to smoke out predators who try to groom youngsters on the Internet have become increasingly successful in recent years, with BBC research revealing that an astonishing 60 per cent of grooming prosecutions in 2018 drew upon evidence gathered by them.
However, despite — or perhaps because of — this fact, the police and swathes of the establishment media are extremely hostile towards them.
Assistant Chief Constable Dan Vajzovic, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s so-called lead for online child abuse groups, has gone so far as to allege that “[w]hen [paedophile hunters] say they are acting in the interests of children, largely they are acting in their own interests, their self-aggrandisement and their desire to exercise force against so-called perpetrators of child abuse” — although why this should matter, even if it was true, is unclear, so long as they do manage to bring groomers before the courts.
Vajzovic has also suggested that some of the prosecutions brought as a result of paedophile hunter activity “may have diverted police resources from more significant offenders,” and that, therefore, “the activity of these groups is not positive” overall.
However, the evidence does not suggest that the authorities would be pursuing an equal number of more targeted prosecutions in the absence of paedophile hunters, with The Telegraph noting that just 68 people were convicted of grooming offences in 2013, before the rise of the hunter groups, compared to 359 in 2018.
Indeed, some might argue that British police resentment of paedophile hunters might be rooted in their own sordid history of failure on child grooming, which the hunters’ success as unpaid amateurs might tend to underline.
Most notoriously, forces were far from eager to pursue mostly Muslim, Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs which operated across the country with impunity for decades, with officers told to “try and get other ethnicities” and victims’ parents told their children were “child prostitutes” making a lifestyle choice.
While failure in this area is now acknowledged, few if any officers have actually been held to account personally, with forces still seemingly plagued by political correctness and claims that grooming abuse continues largely unabated.
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