To Catch a Predator: The Lived Experience of Extreme Practices

Abstract

Across several countries, ever-growing societal alarm about the threat of online child sexual exploitation has provoked a controversial civic response: volunteer pedophile hunting teams that expose predators in livestreamed confrontations. Their practices have generated strong criticisms from a police force unsure how to engage them because they lack an empathic understanding of hunters’ lived experience. Through a three-year phenomenological ethnography of a U.K. hunting team, we advance efforts across organization research to theorize the role of lived experience in social action. Specifically, we deploy the phenomenological concept “way-of-being” to explain hunters’ use of extreme practices. Our interpretive account shows how the multiple ways-of-being that characterize the team’s lifeworld suffuse their practices with a complex layered affectivity that is constitutive of the commitment necessary for their persistence. This offers a phenomenological alternative to social psychological models of motivations for vigilantism while also advancing emotions research in organizational institutionalism and practice theory. Practically, our study contributes to the policing challenge of mitigating hunting’s harmful effects by facilitating more constructive mutual engagement. This offers a possible pathway for addressing the broader challenge posed by epistemically closed, social media–enabled communities that act out their concerns in ways that disregard our common humanity.