In light of recent controversy surrounding the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Department and their press release citing Pedobear as an actual tool for pedophiles to search for one another, I thought that it would be best to come out as an academic. Last semester I was in a criminal justice class at my University where I wrote a paper on Pedobear in the Media, and to say the least, was very proud of it. I thought, “No one is going to write about this, it’s so original!” And turns out it was – everyone did something about rape or video game violence, but I chose to be relevant to current events and culture (pats self on back).
Now, one month after having written this, I find that people are mistaking Pedobear for something it isn’t. As a disclaimer, this is not me trying to bash the Sheriff’s Department. As a Criminal Justice student, I understand how important law enforcement is to this country, have a respect for it that transcends the internet’s opinion. I am simply posting my research paper because I do not want two things; a) for anyone to be wrongfully arrested and interrogated, and b) that the Sheriff’s Department loses no precious resources chasing a ghost. Pedophilia is not to be made light of – but the meaning of Pedobear doesn’t make the act in itself light, but to mock the same media that sensationalizes online predators (who are atypical) but will turn around and sexualize children. I can see how it can be misinterpreted, but knowledge is power so here is me increasing your power to over 9000.
WARNING: this shit is long, and I don’t have time to make it look pretty, andddd some parts aren’t written as well as I’d like it to be. If you want the actual paper in Word, then don’t hesitate to ask. The husband is trying to rush me out of the house for dinner…Enjoy!
A Look at Contradiction in the Media: The Role it Plays in Views about Sex Offenders and the Memes it Creates
name redacted, and University.
Abstract
The definition of satire is the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics or other topic issues. In regards to internet culture, they have created a satirical cartoon pedophile bear that is frequently photoshopped into innocuous pictures of children. The joke, from what has been analyzed, is not just taken as face value, but instead acts as the satire in regards to the media’s influenced moral panic in the relation between sex offenders and the internet. In this paper I explore this relationship between media, the website 4chan, children, and the cartoon character known as “Pedobear”.
Introduction
Wiktionary defines moral panic as, “A semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society”. When we see an article about a sex offender who preys on children, our first thought is usually how much of a monster that individual is, and how terrifying it is that this could happen to you or your children/nieces/nephews/siblings. Recent issues of such cases and the medias propensity to stir an uproar about lax legislation or negligent behavior that could have caught this early has blinded our ability to see the root cause of the matter, rather than the consequences of it.
The internet is comparatively new in regards to communications, and it has grown to such a great size in such little time that most people are very naïve to it’s capabilities, good or bad. While social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook have enabled long lost friends to stay in contact across the country, the means used to contact just about any individual has become effortless. One in five teenagers in the US are sexually solicited online, according to Crimes Against Children Research Center. With the advent of such deviance, it is no wonder why our nation has increased sex offender laws and passed a law requiring offenders to register private information to be made public online for anyone in the community worried about the presence of potential harm for their children.
But has our panic shielded us from seeing the source of this problem? Why are we so worried about sexual predators victimizing our children when we watch (and unwittingly support) television shows about mothers who dress their toddlers up in bikinis and a face full of makeup, to prance around stage in a beauty pageant17? Or when we attend the concert of a 16 year old Disney star, whose act includes dancing on a stripper pole? When these shows are available online, the information becomes more prevalent and widespread, allowing access to just about anyone with an internet connection. It’s no wonder we worry about online predators, looking for their own Toddler and Tiaras or Miley Cyrus to exploit.
In the interest of this paper, I am expanding the term “media” to include anything internet related, as this is primarily of online predators and the internet culture demographic’s reaction to them. My thesis is asking the question of whether or not Pedobear, an internet meme about a pedophile cartoon bear, is simply a casual joke, or if it is this generation’s mockery of the contradiction between the media’s highly exaggerated stories about online child predators, and that same media’s nonchalance to use children in sexually suggestive commercial view.
A Brief History of Moral Panic in “B.I.” – Before Internet
Moral panic is not new in this country; we learn about the Salem Witch trials in grade school, and Japanese internment camps in high school. It has become common knowledge, as we work to move away from such awful, mob-esque behavior. However when it comes to sexuality, the topic is eschewed in schools other than higher education. Homosexuality has been, since as far back as the Middle Ages, viewed as a deplorable lifestyle that targets children. A report in 1999 by Robert Knight and Frank York sought to establish this, by mentioning gay rights platforms in the 70’s abolishing the age of consent for sexual relations – and leading the reader to believe that it is a scientific link between homosexuality and pedophilia (p.3). The entire report is riddled with bias – the American Psychiatric Association rejected it when they tried to have it published (p.28)11.
The rise of tolerance of homosexuality over the years has led to these types of reports, but what people seem to be gathering from it is not the link between homosexuality and pedophilia, but the child abuse itself. And when it stuck, the media created a storm about it. Professor Philip Jenkins writes that child molestation deviance moral panic spiked in the 1940s, and became almost innocuous in psychology-related fields in the 1960s and 70s – only to spike again recently (Moral Panic, p.2). His theory is that while earlier panics “arose from ignorance, hysteria, and self-interest, contemporary formulations of child abuse are sober depictions of objective truth” (p.6)10. This leads us to recent attacks in the media of child predators online – a type of communication that is wholly new and, to the masses, generally unknown.
“A.I.” – After Internet
When just about everyone (it seems) has an internet connection, the chance of a child wandering onto an unlocked browser can be akin to sending them off on a subway at night in New York City. Porn, misogyny, racist jokes – they are prolific and are even seen on comments of news articles on CNN and Fox News. For the average parent, allowing your child to access the internet unsupervised is inviting the chance they will be sexually solicited by an adult. Popular television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Criminal Minds include plot lines where a child or teenager was abducted after meeting an adult in person, whom they originally “met” online. It is not surprising that hysteria of online predators has increased now that the internet is in full-swing. But this inspires the question: if parents are so worried about their child going on the internet, why is it that they haven’t taken the measures to block sites other than for educational purposes? Instead of being proactive about safety, they generate a fear caused initially by the media and support imposing harsher sentences for child abusers who do end up finding that easy access to children. In the next topic I will compare media reports to actual crime statistics of sex offenders and online predators, and then take a look at what might be the cause of such a dichotomy.
Hiding Behind Entertainment Television
There have been multiple reports in the media as a result of paranoia about child sexual abuse. A 15 year old girl was required to register as a sex offender for taking nude photos of herself13, and a four year old in Texas was suspended for sexually harassing a teacher’s aide – by hugging her2. In this next topic, I will discuss actual criminal statistics of reported child abuse, and then the contradiction of the media’s inflated view of child abuse and their own sexual exploitation of children.
Criminal Statistics of Child Abuse
Despite moral panic of child sexual predators spiking since the internet was born, research tells another story. Regardless of the fact that the internet has made it easier to solicit minors, actual abuse is mainly by acquaintances (approximately one-half of offenders) and family members (varied from 14%-41%, approximated to one-third). One-third of offenders overall were also minors as well. Strangers only constituted between seven and 25% of offenders, depending on the study, and young adults under 30 are overrepresented. The numbers reported by the Crimes Against Children Research Center were researched back in 2005, claiming that approximately 1.2 per one thousand children were sexually abused, however recent research has shown that there has been a 26% decline in abuse over the last 10 years, and a 38% drop in just sexual abuse alone.
Crimes Against Children Research Center did a specific study about online predators spread out over two 12 month periods from 2000 and 2006. The more important findings that relate to this analysis are: the percentage of youth internet users went up 73%-93%, and arrests of online predators in 2006 constituted for 1% of total arrests. They also mention that, “facts do not suggest that the internet is facilitating an epidemic of sex crimes against youth. Rather, increasing arrests…probably reflect increasing rates of youth internet use” (p. 2). Arrests went up by 381% of online predators – but the majority (+70%) were soliciting undercover investigators, not actual youth. Finally, there was a significant increase of arrests for young adults age 18-25, and only four percent of online predators arrested were registered sex offenders (Finkelhor, Mitchell, & Wolak, 2006)7.
There are three pieces of research that are notable; one, that 18-25 year old males increased significantly as solicitors. These are not 30/40/50 year old men trolling for young girls – in fact, these boys, especially the 18-21, might very well see themselves still as youth and close in age to the girls/boys they solicit. Secondly, that only four percent of the arrested were actual sex offenders, as this gives way to the idea that maybe not everyone (~96%) arrested were specifically looking for young girls/boys, and instead found a seemingly willing partner and continued on. Last but not least, undercover investigators have lead to an almost 400% increase of arrests. We do not know how they retrieved the information; did they go into a chat room and identify themselves as a willing minor? How many actual youth would have done that? The number of actual youth solicited from arrests is reported to be around 13% – if there had been no undercover agents, would this number have increased? These are things to remember while reading the rest of the analysis and the media content that reports it.
Sensational Media Coverage of Sex Offenders
Chris Hansen is a reporter for Dateline, a news show for NBC. He also hosts a television show titled, “To Catch a Predator”, where a house is staged and a group of private citizens go undercover trying to find online predators. When they are able to convince the predator to come by the house, they are met with Chris Hansen in a wired and video-taped kitchen, asking why he came to the house. His catch-phrase is, “Why don’t you take a seat over there?”. While perusing Oprah’s website, I came across a story titled, “Child Predators on the Internet”, with a picture of a forlorn mother who visited the show to talk about how a man developed an online relationship with her daughter, who in the end, emotionally abused her so badly after she cut off the relationship after having sex, that she committed suicide. The last sentence of the story was, “I want to see him behind bars for life. I believe he killed my child” (Oprah, 2009)16.
These type of atypical cases, as you can see by the statistics above, paint a different picture about online predators for those who do not do research or question the sources. Oprah has a specific demographic; women between the ages of 35 and 60. Chris Hansen, as a well-known reporter for a respectable news company, gives his demographic comfort in his media reports. In fact, fear of online predators has transitioned into even more fear in real life – for example, a 14 year old boy in Florida tried to help a thee year old girl find her mother by holding her hand and walking her around and out of the store because they couldn’t find her, thinking she had been with a group of women who had just left. The boy, Edwin, was even with his mother – and minutes after reuniting the girl with her mother, the police showed up. Despite surveillance cameras and Edwin’s mother’s testimony, the clerk at the store still gave a false report saying that she had seen him try to lead the child away4.
Sensationalist media perpetuates this line of thought. This is prevalent in not just child predator cases, but about all sorts of issues; vigilantism (“the offender was worse than the vigilante, justified”), rape myths (“she was walking alone so she deserved it”), and even simple stories that can be blown out of proportion (i.e., someone saying one thing in certain context, and it gets repeated in a different context, making the original speaker look good/bad). These myths instill fear, which is blatant by the kinds of comments you see written in online news articles about sex offenders, such as “kill him”, or “give him the death penalty”, or “I hope he gets raped in prison!” (Sources not cited for their abundance). Even children, in a study conducted about fears of minors (ages 7-10, 11-14, and 15-18), being raped/kidnapped was the number two overall fear in youth, ahead of terrorism, natural disasters, and diseases1. Because the number of minors who access the internet and the amount of stories they have direct access to, they are starting to fear misconceptions earlier in their lives. Yet, in spite of this moral panic, no one seems to recognize the juxtaposition between the atypical media coverage of unusual, horrific events, and the abundance of sexualization of minors, both young (8-13) and older (14-18).
Media’s Sexualization of Children
Sex in the media is a common theme, and there is a lot of it. While young children might view sex in the media and try to emulate it, the problem is not in the media itself but the fact that parents are allowing it to happen. For example, a YouTube video has garnered almost a million views of five seven year olds dancing provocatively to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” song. Dressed in what looks like a skimpy, frilly bikini with knee-high stockings, they gyrate for approximately three minutes while the crowd goes absolutely wild (an audience of parents). Seeing the comments made on the video are mostly other parents cheering on the girls for being adorable, and wishing them luck and to not listen to anyone who says they’re sexually exploiting themselves. In all actually, this video would probably fall under the genre of child erotica – scantily-clad minors in sexually suggestive positions.
Teen celebrities have also contributed to this exploitation, and have done so for a number of years. One that comes to mind immediately is Miley Cyrus, a Disney network-raised 16 year old. Miley’s character on her self-titled show is called Hannah Montana, which is about a girl who lives two lives; one of Hannah, a big time star, and Miley, her normal average teenager. Being that it is a Disney show she is dressed conservatively, but when she goes on tour off the show it is a whole different story. In one act she sings as she’s dancing around a stripper pole, and in every act she is wearing very skimpy clothing. While this may be okay for her older audience, pre-teens who watch her show will also attend her concerts. The issue here is that even though some may be disgusted at the sexual exploitation, too many people are still watching, still attending, and still buying merchandise connected to the show. By taking out your wallet, you are inadvertently supporting the show and the exploitation, and to speak out against it at the same time is a massive contradiction. The internet promotes these shows and concerts – on Google Images alone, there are 94,000 pictures, which include approximately ten thousand of just her in concert, most on a stripper pole8.
The movie Donnie Darko references the contradiction between those who support this exploitation, yet are panicked when someone is arrested for pedophilia. In a short summary, the main character’s sister is apart of a dance group of young girls in elementary school, choreographed by the school’s ultra-conservative health education teacher. The dance moves, as they show, are tantalizing. The teacher’s mentor is a local celebrity, a motivational speaker who is incredibly popular around the town. During the talent competition (which the celebrity attends), people snap photos of the girls as they dance, harmless intentions of course. Donnie, during one of his hallucinations, burns down the celebrity’s house. When the firefighters are able to put out the fire, they find a secret basement full of child pornography5. The movie makes an incredible contrast to the media’s own contradiction – the news teaches it’s viewers that pedophiles and child erotica are monsters and are everywhere, to hide behind that same entertainment television to help the audience forget about the ads they display of the same thing they condemn. Fortunately, the internet is starting to pick up on the subtly, and one group in particular has managed to make headlines in ridiculing the contradiction.
An Internet Meme is Born
The internet has created a culture within it’s most prolific demographic built on finding the truth in news, watching free pornography, and creating jokes. These do not always have to be separate, for sometimes you can find each to be causal of the other – jokes about porn come from porn itself, and porn can come from the news (i.e., a Sarah Palin porn titled, “Nailin’ Palin”). Most of the time, jokes, also called “memes”, are created out of mockery from news articles that mispronounce, misinterpret, or blatantly show a lack of understanding for anything said in forums such as Reddit, 4chan, Something Awful, Fark, and Digg. This topic helps the reader to understand the culture from which the Pedobear meme comes from – because to understand the context you must be able to see past the crass and crude sense of humor the websites thrive upon, and into it’s deeper, sardonic meaning.
The Counter-Allculture of 4chan
Everyday, thousands of visitors view www.icanhascheezburger.com, a website with thousands of humorously captioned photos of animals in a gibberish english called, “lolspeak”. People of all ages know of the lolcats phenomenon, and even the older generations, not prolific internet users, like to forward emails of such funny pictures. No doubt if you have access to the internet, you have probably seen this meme. What most people do not know, however, is where these memes came from. What might come as a shock is that only one website, an image-based forum Business Insider calls the dark, disgusting underbelly of the internet, started them (Carlson, 2010)3.
4chan(.org) is an offshoot of 2channel, the world’s largest forum for Japanese culture. Created by Christopher Poole (also known as “moot”), it generates 8.2 million unique visitors per month (Carlson, 2010)3. The site itself is somewhat difficult to navigate if you are unfamiliar with the type of forum, and is wholly offensive. The particular sub-forum memes are usually “born” in is called /b/, a Random board for 18 and older as it displays a very heavy amount of genitalia and racist jokes in the images. Once in a while, though, one thread of posts will become so popular that it disseminates outside of /b/ and into mainstream forums such as Reddit, Digg, and BuzzFeed. The general demographic of users on 4chan’s press page report that it is popular among males 18-34.
When mainstream media, such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, report on 4chan, most of the time it is about the proclivity of posts regarding repulsive porn and/or the frequency of child pornography/child erotica. Their “culture” is infamous for an incredibly desensitized view of depravity, a theme most common when reported by the media (FoxNews, 2009)15. But while such deviancy is common for over 18 pornography on the site, child erotica/child pornography is generally regarded with malaise. Posts are replied to with an image of “Pedobear”, a cartoon bear that looks harmless but his intentions as a pedophile are not, and the context means, “You’re being creepy about a kid”. Although that is Pedobear’s primary purpose of existing, it has been circulated under a different context, one that acknowledges the frequency of sexualization of children in the media 4chan torments, and their (and others of different forums) sarcastic reaction to it.
Pedobear versus the Media
2channel, the site previously mentioned as the ancestor of 4chan, had their own type of Rickrolling – the bait, instead, was a picture of Kuma (“bear” in Japanese). He looks exactly like Pedobear, except his purpose was simply to bait someone into replying to their thread, and only to attract attention9. When Kuma reached 4chan, they changed his name and entered him into different threads. For example, while looking through /b/, a thread was started with a picture of a child going to school, and the comment said, “Goodbye summerfags!” (term for individuals who only visit during the summer). The next comment? A photo of Pedobear holding a lollipop.
Pedobear has reached a mainstream level of celebrity in that he has been displayed in real life around the world. Most are graffiti, but once in a while an unsuspecting graphic designer will do a general search for animals to put on an ad, and one of them will be Pedobear. This was the case in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics this year, where someone accidentally added a picture of Pedobear along with other animals as the Olympics mascots. The picture went viral overnight, and the internet collectively laughed out loud at the mistake. Another display was on a billboard in Malta, where someone had tagged a picture next to the sign of the Pope’s upcoming visit. The Vatican, wholly unaware of the cartoon meme, wondered why there were pictures of pandas, and were only removed when informed. Church signs and playgrounds also serve as a canvas for Pedobear tags.
Discerning the context of Pedobear is like looking at two words which are spelled the same, but mean different things. If someone posts a photo of a child in a questionable sexually suggestive position, then someone responds with Pedobear as if to say, “this is what you look like”. However, if the child is in an innocuous photo, for example just walking to school, then a picture of Pedobear holds a much deeper meaning. He is used as a means of satire for media that sensationalizes and exaggerates the existence of online pedophiles and acts as a way to mock the same media (as well as the individuals and companies who promote them) who glorify sexualization of children in advertisements and shows. Because 4chan’s existence is solely based on the internet, their only concern is how the internet is portrayed, being a relatively new (and complex) technology.
Conclusion and Recommendations
From the reports mentioned, it seems that there is quite a contradiction in media that internet culture can clearly identify when it comes to child abuse. Before the internet, we really only had the news and newspaper articles to summarize for us reports – which can be gravely misinterpreted. The arrival of the internet has enabled all of us to have immediate access to such reports so that we can interpret it ourselves, or with the help of how-to’s (also easily Googled). The clash in media’s behavior has given internet culture the ability to openly mock this conduct. This may lead to future legislation reducing the draconian laws against non-violent sex offenders – especially in cases where it was a minor who was convicted for a consensual sexual encounter with another minor. My recommendation is to keep in mind that despite the most immediate context Pedobear is placed in, should you happen to see one, to think about the last time you saw the media depicting seemingly innocuous behavior, and whether or not you would photoshop (or even graffiti) Pedobear onto Disney [or other brand of child] merchandise as a message to their hypocrisy.
References
1American Psychological Association (2008, February 19). Most Internet Sex Offenders Aim At Teens, Not Young Children, Study Shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 10, 2010, from http:// www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/02/080218185101.htm
2Associated Press (2006, December 11). 4-year-old Suspended After Hugging Teacher’s Aide. Retrieved August 10, 2010, from http://www.pantagraph.com/news/weird-news/article_b72f2ac5- b91b-5af6- ae79-7ac99699ae4f.html
3Carlson, Nicholas (2010, March 19). Even with 8.2 Million Uniques, 4chan is Only Worth $45,000. Retrieved August 6, 2010, from http://www.businessinsider.com/even-with-82-million- uniques-4chan-is-only-worth-45000-2010-3#ixzz0wGvu9dDo
4Cohen, Brian, Koffman, Jeffrey, and Ferran, Lee (2010, June 17). Exclusive: Teen “Just Trying to Help” Lost Tot Arrested for Kidnapping. ABC News. Retrieved August 5, 2010, from http:// abcnews.go.com/ GMA/Broadcast/exclusive-teen-arrested-kidnapping-tot/story? id=10938679&page=1
5Donnie Darko. Release date 2001 by Pandora Cinema. Retrieved August 9, 2010, from http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/
6Douglas, Emily M. and Finkelhor, David (2005, May). Childhood Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet. Crimes Against Children Research Center. Retrieved August 8, 2010, from www.unh.edu/cccrc
7Finkelhor, David, Mitchell, Kimberly, and Wolack, Janis (2008). Trends in Arrests of “Online Predators”. Crimes Against Children Research Center. Retrieved August 9, 2010, from http:// www.unh.edu/ ccrc/pdf/CV194.pdf
8Google Image Search for “Miley Cyrus, Stripper Pole”. Retrieved August 9, 2010, from http:// images.google.com/images?hl=en&biw=1269&bih=657&gbv=2&tbs=isch %3A1&sa=1&q=miley +cyrus+stripper+pole&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
9History of Pedobear. Retrieved August 4, 2010, from http://www.metafilter.com/92777/Pedobear- Plush#3133023
10Jenkins, Professor Philip (1998). Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. pp. 2-6. Published by Yale University. Retrieved August 5, 2010, from http:// tinyurl.com/2dzree2
11Knight, Robert and York, Frank V. (1999). Homosexual Behavior & Pedophilia. Unpublished. Retrieved August 10, 2010, from http://www.us2000.org/cfmc/Pedophilia.pdf
12Landau, Elizabeth (2009, April 16). Terrorism, Kidnapping Among Top Fears for Today’s Youth. CNN. Retrieved August 8, 2010, from http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/16/children.fears/index.html
13Michels, Scott (2008, October 10). Teen Charged with Sending Nude Pictures of Herself. ABC News. Retrieved August 10, 2010, from http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=5995084
14Silverberg, Cory (2010, June 17). Media and the Sexualization of Children. Huffington Post. Retrieved August 9, 2010, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cory-silverberg/media-and-the- sexualizati_b_612691.html
15Sauthoff, Taryn (2009, April 08). 4Chan: The Rude, Raunchy Underbelly of the Internet. Fox News. Retrieved August 7, 2010, from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512957,00.html
16The Oprah Winfrey Show (2009, June 13). Child Predators on the Internet. Retrieved August 6, 2010, from http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Protect-Your-Children-from-Internet-Predators/6#comments
17Toddlers & Tiaras (2010). TLC Network. Retrieved August 9, 2010, from http://tlc.discovery.com/ tv/ toddlers-tiaras/about-toddlers-and-tiaras.html
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