I’m gonna post verbatim my contributions to a big thread on RPGnet. Its on a registered-folk only section of the board so I won’t link to it. Its fairly long, but I would really appreciate feedback.
\n——————————–
\n(post #1)
\nOn Saturday afternoons I run a roleplaying club that is focused on recruitment (lately we’ve been creating 2 new gamers every week, which is pretty damn snazzy).
\nWe meet in a cafe seating area that is located in an internet barn – so there’s an island of cafe-style tables, where we hang out mixed in with random cafe people, and surrounding the tables are rows and rows of computers offering internet access. (It’s an easyInternet, for those what know the brand.)
\nSo Saturday I was co-GMing with a guy who was running his first game (which he was doing only a month after trying RPGs for the first time) – a fun Mutants and Masterminds thing he’d come up with. As he was doing okay, my mind wandered a little and I glanced over the back of the section wall at a row of computers.
\nThere was this guy there, who looked to be in his early 30s, and he was gazing at and writing messages in a chatroom that was bannered ‘juniorteenschatsite’ or something.
\nIt was obvious the site was Not For Him.
\nI didn’t know what to do. I didn’t, in the end, do anything. To be quite honest, I forgot about him when the 14-year-old-newbie-filled game needed my guidance – he was gone by the time I thought of him again, which was at least an hour later.
\nI’m thinking back on it now, and wondering if I should have done something, and if so, what?
\nErg. *shudder*<\/p>\n
\n(post #2)
\nI was definitely aware of that possibility, that he was there legitimately. Something in his body language just screamed ‘yuk’ to me, though.
\nThe easyInternet chain have no onsite staff to bring in.
\nI’m not naive about this – I know in my head there’s a lot of this goes on. But I’d never seen a genuine in-his-habitat pretend-juniorteen before. It was unnerving.
\nI’ve just realised, this isn’t just idle thought – if he comes back another Saturday, and I see him, I’ll be wondering what (if anything) to do.
\nPretending to be a teen in a chatsite, that’s hardly criminal in and of itself, of course.
\nErg. I dunno.
\n(post #3)
\n> Innocent until proven guilty, chums.
\nAbsolutely. I’ve always been harshly critical of this country’s tabloid-driven paedophile hysteria.
\nBut I just got bad vibes from this guy. Which ain’t worth anything to anyone who doesn’t trust the calibration of my vibometer.
\n(post #4)
\nThere’re a lot of voices coming in saying ‘its not illegal’. We know this already.
\n*No-one* is jumping to conclusions here. The actions that have been suggested are of the ‘get someone to check things out and make sure they’re on the up and up’ variety.
\nThe easyInternet site requires registration to contact them. Dumb. So I’m not emailing them for advice as to whether or not its possible to monitor chat logs. And there’s no-one on site at the cafe to talk to (only coffee staff and cleaners who know nothing of the internet stuff).
\nIf I see this again, and I’m uncomfortable, I don’t see that I can do anything about it. At most, I could go and talk to the person and say ‘I noticed you’re on a junior teens site and it’s making me uncomfortable’. If I don’t choose to do that, I sit back and don’t think about it.
\n——
\nArgh. I don’t know. I’m really troubled by the notion of an adult hanging on a teensite in ‘disguise’. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t make it right or ‘acceptable’. (Any more than stupid trolls are right or acceptable.) Social interaction is the way to deal with these sorts of concerns.
\nI’m twisting in the wind here. I think I need to think carefully about what my obligations are in this situation, in order to be a responsible and reasonable member of society\/community.
\n(post #5)
\n> The presumption of innocence only applies to the legal system.
\n> It does not apply to the opinions of private citizens.
\nFWIW, I’d prefer a world where it did.
\n(post #6)
\nOh man. Can of worms well and truly opened here. Just watch your analogies, guys.
\nWhat I saw was a man in his thirties sitting on a computer participating in a chatsite that was specifically, clearly and exclusively targeted at 12 year olds.
\nWhat I know is that there are a surprising number of men who visit such chatsites and pretend to be children.
\nSo analogies with anything other than a website that is explicitly for young teens don’t hold. And analogies with schoolteachers or school volunteers don’t hold either – there’s no possibility of deception there.
\n————
\nNow, I know full well that there are legit reasons why he might be on that site. But, as I understand it, the odds of this guy being in that chatroom pretending to be a kid are vastly higher than the odds of him being in there legitimately. I also got the proverbial ‘bad feeling’ about it.
\nWhere does this leave me? I don’t know. While Radical and Cessna are seriously misunderstanding\/misrepresenting my position (and quite unpleasantly I might add), I am leaning towards their point of view – that ultimately, it isn’t my place to do anything.
\nAll the measures I can think of to intervene are too intrusive. They all get too close to ‘guilty until proven innocent’ for my taste. I’ve mentioned before in this thread that the culture in Britain of hysteria about paedophiles disturbs me. This is the microcosmic form of that.
\nIf I believe that we should give people the benefit of the doubt in order to prevent unreasonable suffering by the innocent, then I have to give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
\nThat doesn’t mean I need to feel entirely comfortable about doing so, of course.
\n——-
\nI’m not entirely convinced of this, mind. I also feel that I am part of a community and as such I have a responsibility to look out for trouble and act when I see reason to.
\nMostly that’s simple stuff – if there’s a broken bottle in a children’s play area, I’ll go pick it up.
\nThis is not simple. If I get an idea that something bad is afoot here, I have no way to check it out without overstepping what I feel are appropriate boundaries. So I either discount my feeling or overstep those boundaries.
\nI’m sticking within the boundaries for now. But I’m not entirely convinced its the right choice. Maybe neither of them are the right choice.
\nI’d love to see people keep talking about this, because I’m not finding it a simple situation. But please, no snarkiness, and no more dumb analogies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m gonna post verbatim my contributions to a big thread on RPGnet. Its on a registered-folk only section of the board so I won’t link to it. Its fairly long, but I would really appreciate feedback. ——————————– (post #1) On Saturday afternoons I run a roleplaying club that is focused on recruitment (lately we’ve been … Continue reading My Ethical Dilemma – Advice Needed!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-2d","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}