Abstract
Abstract‘Paedophile hunters’ have attracted global media attention. The limited literature on paedophile hunters, which documents their emergence in contemporary liberal democracies, pays scant attention to how their use of intrusive investigative methods may threaten the procedural rights of suspects and undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system. This article fills this normative ‘gap’ in the literature. It draws upon media coverage, criminal procedure jurisprudence, and criminological scholarship to analyse the regulation of paedophile hunting in English and Welsh law. The article suggests that domestic law does not afford adequate protection to due process and the fundamental human rights of those falling under the paedophile hunter's purview. Unless paedophile hunting is constrained by a narrower and more robustly enforced regulatory regime, it should not be permitted, let alone encouraged, in contemporary liberal democracies.
Highlights
This article analyses the regulation of the activities of so-called ‘paedophile hunters’
The limited literature on paedophile hunters, which documents their emergence in contemporary liberal democracies, pays scant attention to how their use of intrusive investigative methods may threaten the procedural rights of suspects and undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system
According to data obtained by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), evidence provided by paedophile-hunting groups was used to support 150 of the 302 prosecutions for the offence of meeting a child following sexual grooming in 2017.1 The official line of the police is that these groups should not be encouraged and may face prosecution for any offences that they commit.[2]
Summary
This article analyses the regulation of the activities of so-called ‘paedophile hunters’. Follows a famous case where paedophile hunters from a group called Silent Justice were convicted for a series of public order offences after confronting a journalist who was reporting a story on their activities.[63] This seems to suggest that the response by law enforcement agencies to paedophile hunters has been varied, even within individual force areas It appears that police forces are treading a fine line between their duty to act on credible evidence of child sexual abuse (even if this is supplied by paedophile hunters) and their responsibility to discourage vigilantism and other forms of public disorder. Langstaff J observed that it was not a precondition of admissibility of evidence that private citizens acting as paedophile hunters should be expressly subject to CHIS authorization, or behave as if they are when conducting their investigations.[74] In this case, Dark Justice, a selfdescribed paedophile-hunting group, targeted the defendants.
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