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So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).
It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.
I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
It feels to me like 1985 all over again.
Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.
A while back, when I lived closer to the coast, I typed my address into the national sex offender registry to see how prevalent sex offenders were in my area. I was shocked by how long the list was.
I assumed the high number had to be related to something like this, so I started looking up news articles and court cases. It's something I regret doing to this day.
The depths of human depravity are far deeper than most people could imagine. Even someone like myself, who was the victim of childhood abuse, failed to realize how profoundly fucked up things can get.
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The "vigilante" that Roblox recently banned is Schlep, and I take issue with him being described as a vigilante. It implies that he is imposing justice on the pedophiles himself, when he is not. All he is doing is collecting evidence and reporting them to law enforcement, as he should. He also reports them to Roblox, but Roblox has consistently refused to ban the predators from their platform, even after they've been arrested, until he makes widely publicized videos about them.
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You have to wonder just what % of such strangers are not pederasts or pedos.
I mean, presumably most of them are. But what does that amount to? The article I linked suggests that more than 95% of "missing children" cases are runaways, but it is not clear what percent of those run away with someone else. If a 15-year-old runs away with her 16-year-old boyfriend, that often seems to get dropped into the same statistical bucket as a 6-year-old getting snatched off the street, or a 12-year-old who gets removed from an abusive home by her own mother or father violating a custody order. The numbers get turned into a narrative of rampant child endangerment, but the reality is more complicated than that.
Does the 16-year-old boyfriend count as a "stranger" in this context? Either way, whenever teenage girls or boys run away from home, I'm assuming it's usually done on the initiative and with the support of an older man who's usually interested in her sexually, who may or may not be a pimp in reality. In a small minority of cases they run away completely alone, and in another small minority of cases they do so with another teenage love interest. On the other hand, I'm not an expert.
This is definitely not true. Most runaways are going solo, or with the assistance of peers (including romantically involved peers). Pimps and predators are real, but far from common.
If that includes people over the age of 18 then we're largely talking about the same thing. I imagine most of these people aren't pimps and they definitely don't think of themselves as sexual predators either way. If any stats are available about this general subject I'd be interested in them.
Sure, you might start here. Some tidbits:
In other words, there is some information available, but for the most part researchers aren't drawing the lines we're drawing here, which is what I mean when I suggest that the statistics on these things conflate a great many complicated and distinguishable events.
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It's sad that there's this misapprehension that girls are being kidnapped by abusers, when a huge number of runaway girls (something like 20%-40% in most studies) are fleeing sexual abuse in the home.
Right--I've seen other studies suggesting that a majority (perhaps more than 70%) of runaway girls experience some kind of sexual abuse, but I don't have access to the study to see whether they distinguish based on when and where that abuse occurred (i.e. prior to running away, or as a result of it).
Also, no small number of teens run away from home because they are addicted to drugs and their parents are trying to stop them from using. It really is an extremely multifaceted problem.
Which is then further complicated by statistics intentionally erasing the distinction between "getting laid was the participant's explicit intention" (and she made the mistake of disclosing it after the fact, or was pressured into such a confession), "had to put out for lodging/food", and "got far more than they bargained for".
The demand for abducted young women far exceeds its supply.
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There was a local case recently where a 15 year old runaway became a Qanon cause celebre, with the parents and the local whackadoodles accusing random local families of being child traffickers and having kidnapped her.
She turned up a few weeks later in the deep south with a 20 year old boyfriend.
Obsession with some kind of Pennsylvania Pizzagate distracted from any actual effort of finding her, to say nothing of the harm done to those accused in public of child trafficking.
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No responsible adult would violate a custody order.
EDIT to flush out:
Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.
This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.
There are plenty of people who are no particular danger to children in their care despite making rather poor life decisions overall. Very few custody agreement violations present much danger to the child, even if at some level they need to be enforced.
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Irresponsible adults also have children.
The courts are not always known for speed.
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There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).
In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.
Sure. Some people get away with getting into a shootout with the police. But very few do, and the kind of people that think they will win in a shootout with the cops are the last people that you should encourage to do so.
The stories of people that successfully jump the border with their kids are like man bites dog.
I’ve seen it come up with enough regularity on personal drama subs that I think it is not actually that uncommon. Why are you so confident that it is?
Getting into a gunfight with police and traveling across a border with your own child are two wildly different things. The state has a very strong interest in dropping the hammer over the first because not doing so would be giving up it’s monopoly on force.
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It's pretty trivial in some cases, depending on the citizenship of the parent. Japan is notorious for example, there have been hundreds of cases where a parent takes their child to Japan in violation of a custody agreement, and then just refuse to go back. Japanese courts do not take into consideration foreign custody agreements, and strongly favor Japanese parents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101122071433/http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-20100122-85.html
Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?
Granted they exist, they are the exception that proves the rule applies to the rest of cases.
How many Japanese nationals are there who get involved in a custody dispute in a foreign country? A surprising number of people avail themselves of the option when it is available to them. Japan is just the most notorious example, plenty of countries will drag out an international custody dispute for years until the issue is effectively moot. Once a child is 12 or so years old, it becomes very hard to force them to live with an estranged parent they have not seen in years, who lives in a foreign country.
I get your overall point though, most people who disobey custody orders are not exactly masterminds, and likely don't have a foreign abscondment planned.
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It's "flesh out"--like filling out a figure that began only as bones (i.e. in outline).
Sure, if you get caught in the wrong jurisdiction. But violating a custody order doesn't even have to be willful; often it is the result of a misunderstanding, or an emergency, or just panic. Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.
Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse." In that case, it's not irrational or irresponsible to decide that "bad" beats "worse." That's the unfortunate nature of reality. The police are not invincible, the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable. I wouldn't, as an attorney, encourage a client to ever violate a custody order! But I can imagine, as a parent, circumstances that might demand it of me.
It doesn't mean that in the sense of being sufficient, but surely it's at least a few bits of information in that direction.
Well, if it often won't work out then, on the balance we ought to advise people against it.
Sure, but I still wouldn't advise anyone about to be caught with a few grams of drugs to escalate it into a shootout with the police. Sure, some fraction of people that do so get away with it (that is, agreeing the police are not invincible) but on the median
Of course not. But the fallible courts have fairly-reliable armed men that, if you decide to contest their possible-mistakes via physical force, will enforce them against you.
This isn't a normative statement.
Sure. What you said was:
This was false. You now seem to admit that it was strictly false, and that what you really meant was something much more reasonable, like "it's an extremely bad idea to violate a custody order." I don't know why you made such an obviously false statement to begin with, unless maybe you were trying to pick a fight. The comment improved substantially when you fleshed it out, but did so by retreating from your original claim.
If you want people to write plainly, you ought to read plainly too.
Moreover, it's not false (let alone obviously false), any more than any statement that has an exception, no matter how non central & inconsequential, is false. Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January. Or if you want an SSC example, to object to "criminals harm society" by pointing out that MLK was a criminal.
If you want to consider this a "retraction" rather than "a clarification that in most polite conversation it would be considered peevish of a listener to insist upon" that's fine. But it's probably among the least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet when readers do that.
No--it would reject as false the statements "smoking always causes cancer" and "at no point during summer is it ever cooler than at any point in winter." Remember, you did not say "Violating a custody order is itself a sign of irresponsibility," but "no responsible adult would violate a custody order." Pedantic precision is a virtue, here.
The larger problem, though, as was already explained, was your lack of effort to explain and engage. If you want to talk about the "least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet" then "people who drop a low effort, single-sentence sneer instead of engaging the substance of your comment with a thoughtful and amicable reply" is not only high on the list, it's high enough that we have rules against it. This was explained to you, and you largely rectified the situation, which really would have been the end of it had you not also continued to defend your overstatement to multiple commenters, in persistently dismissive tone.
This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.
This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.
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I mean in most circumstances sure, but I think the thing gets a bit complicated when you know your kid will be horrifically abused raped etc. every day he remains with the custodial parent, you don’t have the months to years a court process can take. A kid getting pimped out nightly to men so mom can afford drugs doesn’t have years. The environment is much too dangerous, and leaving them there while they languish is unsafe for the child.
First rule is the health and welfare of the child. The second rule is follow the law if possible.
The health and welfare of the child is not served by having the only responsible parent thrown in jail and discredited in the eyes of the court.
So I agree with the standard that it's the health and welfare of the child. But unless you have a strong predictive reason to think you can beat the law, it's extremely unlikely that disregarding the court order meets your first rule rule.
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That's a very absolute statement for which it's very easy to come up with counterexamples.
This is pretty low effort but just below the threshold at which I feel a need to drop a mod warning (people are allowed to make bad arguments and absolute statements that don't stand up to any kind of scrutiny). However, given your track record, I would suggest putting more effort into your arguments if you wish to actually make an argument.
Sure, added. Seemed obvious enough.
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Even you don't think this is true.
When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
Let's imagine a plausible scenario: you live in Germany during the Kentler Project. One of the placed homeless children draws your attention to the fact his foster parents are pedophiles and that he's afraid of them. You decide to allow the child to stay at your place. This escalates into a legal battle where a German judge orders you to return the child to his legal guardians.
Do you, a responsible person, comply?
Now of course this is a non central example, but if you think it's impossible for judges to be morally wrong in a way that's terrible enough as to require risking everything by running afoul of the law, you clearly have unreasonable faith in the institution.
Of course they can be morally wrong! Or factually wrong! Or legally wrong! Or any combination of the 3.
The issue isn't that they are right, it's that violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.
It could also draw media attention to your case, cause a shitstorm, and force somebody to actually look into it and fix the problem. The martyr strat sometimes works.
It could. But I predict it is extremely unlikely in any given chance.
So much so that I think any parent gambling on "I'm gonna defy the court and get a media shitstorm that causes it to reevaluate in my favor" is making an extremely irresponsible bet.
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I disagree. If the court got it wrong somehow, no responsible parent would let their kid stay in an unsafe situation just because the law said they had to.
Of course plenty of irresponsible parents think they're responsible, so it's almost impossible to tell from the outside without an investigation and trial.
A responsible parent with a reasonable predictor of the external world would realize that violating the order will lead to their child shortly being returned to that unsafe situation with less chance of ultimately getting a better solution.
You have statistics on overturning custody agreements to back that up?
I have an extremely strong prior that courts very reverse custody agreements in favor of a parent that violated their previous order. In fact, there is standing caselaw that violating of a family court order is unfit.
See, e.g. here and here.
I'm also kind of shocked. The statement "if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit" is so much the default presumption that I think the burden really ought to be on the contrary of "the court will not construe violating an existing custody order against the violating party".
In any event, there is sufficient citation to it in existing caselaw.
I think you may have misunderstood my argument.
I agree with this. P(judged unfit | violate order) is significantly higher. Hence my comment about requiring a trial.
But we're talking about a theoretically individual case. Statistics don't matter to the individual.
Let's take someone who was given no custody and has a child in an unsafe situation. A few days out of that situation might be better than none. I'm not sure that parent is automatically irresponsible.
Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.
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