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I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
The solution here which seems best suited to curtail dangerous behavior and not end up applied to ordinary good-faith actors seems to be some sort of child-protecting infidelity law. Or maybe just some sort of disclosure thing: don't tell multiple people that they can parent your kids without them knowing about each other. That way more benign cases like getting a new boyfriend while a divorce is being finalized, or consensual polyamory are not affected, while secretly cheating with a dozen people who become emotionally attached to a kid and then want to fight each other and/or kidnap the kid becomes illegal.
I agree that the story buries the lede here, but I don't think that the "criminals" aspect is the red herring, it's obviously the part that makes it interesting; unfaithful spouses are sadly rather commonplace in this day and age. The buried lede is the pictures of children related to her, which strongly suggests, IMO, that something more sinister is going on than "mere" rampant infidelity, and casts light on the depths of the hybristophilia: she's actually trying to create as terrible of a problem as possible.
Assuming, of course, that the story's real, which is a pretty bad assumption. It could also be the storyteller trying to create as terrible of an imaginary problem as possible. But taken at face value it is the character's doing.
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Yeah, no. How do you think the situation would play out if a dozen dudes straight out of prison ran into each as they were serenading her in front of her house, vs. a dozen normal dudes? I'll go out on a limb and say the latter have a significantly higher chance of figuring out what happened, calling her a bitch, and laughing it off at the bar, and the former have a significantly higher chance of turning the neighborhood into a minor war zone.
If each and every one of the twelve "normal" dudes is actually normal, middle of the bell curve in terms of criminality, then yeah it's going to be much safer, although it's still a non-negligible risk factor. Ordinary people can get violent if they're acting to protect their children from what they perceive as a threat (and rightly so in many cases). If instead they're chosen randomly from the distribution, then out of a dozen men you're going to get several on the low end of the bell curve. Given that 9% of men end up going to prison, you're likely to get one being an actual criminal who just hasn't been caught yet. Who might then act violent towards the others and get them pulled into trying to fight back in an attempt to protect themselves, the woman, and/or the child. Modify this again by noting that the subset of men who are likely to fall for a stunt like this are going to be below average in intelligence and general quality, so you're very likely to be pulling from the lower end of the bell curve repeatedly, even if not quite at the depths that prison would be.
It's still qualitatively the same risk scenario, the prison part does make it worse but it's merely an amplifier to the pre-existing risk.
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