Eyup, I remember this one guy this dude found who was insanely guilty. Was not only in a “relationship” with a child, but was trying to get him to do cocaine.
The pedo-hunter who was onto him decided the best thing to do wasn’t to call the cops, but to harass him in a target and make a scene. So much so that the Target staff thought the hunter, not the pedo, was the criminal.
Police were called and they wound up arresting the pedo upon realizing the situation, but due to the harassment, the way the evidence was collected, and all that…
The only thing they could get him on was a traffic violation when the pedo was driving away from the Target.
My advice for people is this - Don’t be a pedo-hunter, while it is noble that you wanna fight back against the cruelty of the world… The truth is you’re going to wind up doing more harm than good unless you know EXACTLY what you’re doing. If you let your anger control how you do investigations, you’re not that much different from the killer cops that butcher the innocent.
Especially since sex crimes are ones where the mere accusation is enough to ruin people’s lives. I should know, I was nearly expelled at my Community College because a guidance consular blanket accused me of attacking a woman at her car. It was luck, a phone call to her boss, playing the autism card, and calling the bluff… asking her to prove the attack, provide witnesses, show me the police report, and she basically dropped everything and apologized when she couldn’t. And I knew she couldn’t, because I do not attack people, Hell, I have the muscle mass of Melvin Junko BEFORE he became the Toxic Avenger, even if I wanted to I’d just get my ass beat.
Later she tried it again over me using a female restroom as a transwoman, thankfully this was after Obama amended Title IX to cover transpeole so I once again had an Uno Reverse card. So I just got a call from her boss telling me to use whatever restroom I wanted and to ignore her.
I don’t know what’s wrong with that person or why she was so hellbent on getting me kicked out of school, but… I think of her a lot, not only because she traumatized me with her false accusations, but because thanks to her, I do know that false accusations do indeed happen, and sometimes they come from powerful people.
As a writer myself, I can only imagine how many the “All characters are 18 or older unless specifically said otherwise” blurb has saved. I feel like that blurb has become standard in fanworks and web original stories, even when they don’t involve sex. If there’s even the slightest chance anything that happens could be interpreted as someone’s kink, you better believe it’s there now.
I actually have one character from a series I wrote ages ago, I kind of abandoned it because I’m not edgy anymore, but I still use the lead character from time to time for art projects; commissions mostly, as she did have a fun character design being an undead gerbil and all.
I’ve retroactively upped her age from 17 to 19, just to be safe.
Though as I said, I was REALLY edgy when I wrote the book series (I was around 19 myself, I’m 33 now), so this is a change I’m actually happy to have made.
It wasn’t pornographic, it was based on the movie “I Spit On Your Grave”, only if the lead character was killed and got revenge from beyond the grave, so there was a sex scene with her, but it was intended to be immorally wrong and disturbing… and mostly talked about how this otherwise fearless street tough was suffering… It was also over quick and not elaborated on too much beyond giving the sense that “This is horrible and she’s very much not a fan” as the point of the book was that she died horribly, but was given a chance at revenge in the afterlife. (There wasn’t even a content warning, because this was so long ago that “CWs” weren’t a thing)
I’ve actually considered doing a reboot of her story and making it lighter and softer, maybe removing the rape from her death entirely.
Not because of fears of being targeted mind you, but because I like the character I created and would love to tell more stories with her, but I’m not the edgelord I was when I first wrote her and if I wrote about her today would never have handled her story the way I did.