Guillotine: Stop Watching People Suffer

The reality-television show To Catch a Predator (TCAP) averaged over seven million viewers per episode at its peak on NBC. Its format is simple. Adult volunteers pose as underage boys and girls in chatrooms and lure pedophiles, termed ‘predators,’ to a sting house, where they are then confronted by a camera crew and self-proclaimed investigative journalist and host, Chris Hansen. After they are told that they are being filmed for a television documentary, the predators are arrested by waiting police officers. Four months later, their identities and stories are broadcast on national television.

It is inexcusable to watch To Catch a Predator. When I say, ‘inexcusable,’ I do not mean the term literally. There are many things ‘excusable’ about watching the show, just as there are many ‘good’ things about what the show has done.

In front of the cameras, Chris Hansen is always calm, always cold. He acts as justice personified, a handsome, paternally stern American figure fitted into a clean-cut suit and the guise of near-omniscience. He has all the answers. He knows the predators’ names, their marital statuses, the age that Nervous Nelly said she was when she received photos of their penises. Chris Hansen also knows to say, and not without good reason, that his show holds predators accountable and raises parents’ awareness about their children’s online safety. TCAP, in its run from November 2004 to December 2007, resulted in an estimated 200 indictments and 120 convictions across nine American states.

These ‘good’ things about TCAP are what I mean when I talk about ‘excuses’. It is easy to say that we want to see predators brought to justice, that we believe in the virtues of online safety and protection for our children. That is because these things are true. But what is also true, and what is not so easy to say, is that TCAP shows just how okay we are with watching people suffer. The predators cry, deny, plead, and threaten. They bring up their families at home, the jobs at which they have worked for twenty years. Here is a scene from a 2006 episode set in Fortson, Georgia: a twenty-eight-year-old Staff Sergeant on his knees, begging, ‘Please don’t put this on TV…I swear that I’ll never do this again,’ as a camera pushes in close to get a good angle of his pallid, wide-eyed shock. 

I would be very surprised if anyone watching a scene like this thinks about criminal justice or child internet safety, those justifiable ‘good’ things about TCAP. Here, the victims are so abstracted from the crime, and the crime from the scene, that there is really nothing left to see but the immediately accessible: the man on his knees, his panic, his cries for mercy, the dramatic music, the voice-over, the incoming commercial break. And if there is nothing ‘inexcusable’ about watching these things, nothing ‘inexcusable’ about liking them, then the term means nothing at all.

 

Words by Darren Quek.

Art by Rhiannon Bullivant.