Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

Trump Picks Wall Street Lawyer to Head SEC

0
0

On Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that he would be selecting Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton to become the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, CNBC reports.

According to the Washington Post, Clayton is a partner at the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell and has assisted large banks like Barclays and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis. With a background in aiding major companies in mergers and acquisitions, Clayton is expected to help Trump roll back regulations on banks, like parts of 2010's Dodd-Frank Act, if his appointment is confirmed by Congress as expected.

"Jay Clayton is a highly talented expert on many aspects of financial and regulatory law, and he will ensure our financial institutions can thrive and create jobs while playing by the rules at the same time," Trump said in a statement Wednesday. "We need to undo many regulations which have stifled investment in American businesses, and restore oversight of the financial industry in a way that does not harm American workers."

Like many of Trump's prospective appointees to top positions, Clayton has never worked in government before. He would be taking the job currently occupied by Mary Jo White, a former prosecutor who also worked for major banks before being appointed by Barack Obama in 2013.


How Scared Should I Be of the Internet of Things?

0
0

When I think of the term internet of things (IOT), I think of Kevin Spacey as the Jeeves-like computer system GERTY from the 2009 movie Moon: an all-in-one computer that controls my whole house, meaning it can be both an omniscient butler and a best friend. Unfortunately for the time being, the IOT is really just a bunch of Wi-Fi enabled household appliances, and recent headlines have made them a nightmare for paranoid people like me.

Connecting appliances like, say, my aquarium to the internet, so I can theoretically rescue my fish from under-salted water in Los Angeles while I stand on the Great Wall of China, all sounds like a cool idea, but the proliferation of smart appliances may have drawbacks. It seems that voice-activated home assistants like Amazon's Echo are able to violate users' privacy in new and exciting ways. And meanwhile, according to one of my colleagues at Motherboard, highjacking internet-enabled devices is the latest fad for un-creative, dilettante hackers who want to build their very own robot armies, and attack their enemies by overwhelming their servers with too much traffic.

According to Justin Cappos, computer scientist at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, potentially hackable IOT devices are an untamed frontier. Manufacturers typically don't tell consumers what security measures, if any, their devices have been equipped with, so experts have to perform "teardowns," in which they dissect these devices to find out answers. "We basically have to spend months actually going in and figuring out what they did in their device, in a very painstaking, manual way," he told me, adding "the teardowns people have done have not been very promising."

Among common vulnerabilities Cappos cited were developer passwords, usable by anyone who knows them, that allow a backdoor into the device. Often these are as stupidly easy to guess as "password" or "12345." Then, on the off chance a smart appliance encrypts your private data, Cappos said product designers "use very poor encryption that's trivial to break, or they just have a really bad security design that they didn't really think about."

Cappos thinks a certification process not unlike the one the FDA has for food would go a long way toward improving his confidence in IOT devices, and certifications are plausible, given that Tom Wheeler, the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman has actually signaled his interest in exploring such a certification process. But the FCC is about to have a new boss—a dude named Trump—who says he's really, really not into regulating businesses.

And if IOT device owners are vulnerable to hacks, what's the worst that can happen, apart from your smart-stuff being drafted into a "zombie army" by an internet evildoer, and DDoSing an unsuspecting blogger? Cappos told me to imagine anything I worry might go wrong with one of my existing appliances when I'm not home, and then imagine that someone can make that happen on purpose. Personally, I worry about leaving my oven on, or having my electronic dog feeder freak out and starve my dog. If those were all IOT devices, they'd be vulnerable not just to my own forgetfulness, but to the malice of my many enemies.

Then there's Amazon's Echo—an intelligent plastic cylinder that sits in your house and misunderstands things in hilarious ways, (and also is supposed to answer your questions and stuff). Echo is an example of a new brand of full time, internet-enabled presences in our lives who know what we're up to when we're at home. "Privacy in the internet of things is more complicated than current on-line privacy in the sense that you are usually aware—or at least [complicit] in—the collection of data," according to Peter Asaro, a science and technology philosopher at The New School who studies the implications of smart buildings.

So the Echo is shaping up to be one of those new devices that comes with a lot of dystopian worst-case scenarios that we inevitably dismiss and just buy the thing anyway. In particular, it has this questionable habit of analyzing every single word you say in the hopes you'll use the word "Alexa,"and sending your voice queries to Amazon, where they use them for their own purposes. "They have a great economic incentive by the way, to try to use that information, at the minimum, for marketing purposes," said Cappos.

"You will have very little knowledge of who can access that information, and for what purposes," Asaro told me. "Voice recognition personal assistants, for instance, already upload audio recordings to be interpreted by the manufacturer or third parties. It is very unclear how long such data is retained, or how else it may be used."

But some of those unanticipated uses have already become clear. As part of a murder investigation, certain Amazon Echo voice data is already being mined for evidence in a criminal court case. The idea of a household appliance snitching on you is slightly troubling if you're a stickler for privacy, or just don't like being prosecuted for stuff.

But future uses and abuses of this kind of data could be more subtly insidious. Cappos told me that someday, if I buy a smart device that knows what I eat, like a refrigerator, and I don't keep a close eye on who can access my data, it might get sold to someone with an interest in knowing my midnight snacking habits. "You can easily imagine that this information might also be used to influence your health insurance premiums, and even your employer who goes and does a background check on you," he said.

So should I ever let the internet into any of my things? Maybe, Cappos said. Cappos, who avoids all technological intrusions into his personal space if he possibly can, told me he owns a camera-equipped smart device: Kinect for his XBox One. His enjoyment in using it outweighs the risk, and he takes extra precautions by keeping his Kinect unplugged when he's not using it. This is the approach he recommends: if a smart device is going to make a difference in your life, then "it makes a lot of sense to make that leap," he told me.

But he added, "if you just think it's cool to [say to] people who come over, 'look! I can change how cold my freezer is from my phone!' then is it really worth the potential for someone to go and break in and thaw all the stuff in your freezer?"

Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of the Internet of Things?

2/5: Taking Normal Precautions

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

How the CIA Infiltrated the World's Literature

0
0

When the CIA's connections to the Paris Review and two dozen other magazines were revealed in 1966, the backlash was swift but uneven. Some publications crumbled, taking their editors down with them, while other publishers and writers emerged relatively unscathed, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion or else defending the CIA as a "nonviolent and honorable" force for good. But in an illuminating new book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, writer Joel Whitney debunks the myth of a once-moral intelligence agency, revealing an extensive list of writers involved in transforming America's image in countries we destabilized with coups, assassinations, and other all-American interventions.

The CIA developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America. The same agency that occasionally undermined democracies for the sake of fighting Communism also launched the Congress for Cultural Freedoms (CCF). The CCF built editorial strategies for each of these literary outposts, allowing them to control the conversation in countries where readers might otherwise resist the American perspective. The Paris Review, whose co-founder Peter Matthiessen was a CIA agent, would sell its commissioned interviews to the magazine's counterparts in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Mundo Nuevo was created to offer a moderate-left perspective to earn trust among Latin American readers, effectively muting more radical perspectives during the Cuban Revolution. Sometimes the agency would provide editors with funding and content; other times it would work directly with writers to shape the discourse. Through these acts, the CCF weaponized the era's most progressive intellectuals as the American answer to the Soviet spin machine.

While the CIA's involvement in anti-Communist propaganda has been long known, the extent of its influence—particularly in the early careers of the left's most beloved writers—is shocking. Whitney, the co-founder and editor at large of the literary magazine Guernica, spent four years digging through archives, yielding an exhaustive list—James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway all served varying levels of utility to Uncle Sam. (Not that the CIA's interest were only in letters: Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were also championed by arms of the agency.)

But don't let that ruin Love in the Time of Cholera. Whitney explains with methodical clarity how each writer became a tool for the CIA. This nuance not only salvages many of the classics from being junked as solely propaganda, but it serves as a cautionary tale for those trying to navigate today's "post-truth" media landscape. In an era where Facebook algorithms dictate the national discourse, even the most well-meaning journalist is prone to stories that distract on behalf of the US government.

"It was often a way to change the subject from the civil rights fight at home," Whitney said of the CIA's content strategy during the Cold War. We can easily draw parallels to today, where the nation's most dire issues are rarely our viral subjects. With Donald Trump's presidency just weeks away, Finks arrives at a crucial time, exposing the political machinery that can affect which stories are shared and which are silenced.

Photo courtesy of OR Books

VICE: So why did you have to ruin all my favorite authors?
Joel Whitney: You want to know the truth about the writers and publications you love and what their aims might have been, but that shouldn't mean they're ruined. For somebody like Richard Wright or James Baldwin or even Peter Matthiessen, I feel like there were a lot of people who joined through professors. They were in their early 20s, and when you're young and your professors have national reputations, you take their attention seriously. I was a little bit more interested in where people ended up once the truth was known.

And the excuses varied. You mentioned Gabriel Garcia Márquez's advice that "when you write, it's you who informs the publication." If that's true, why did the CIA work with so many left-leaning Latin American authors, whose writing would give voice and credibility to the idea of autonomy in the region? Can we measure how successful the CIA really was in working with these artists?
That's the thing about secrecy: Without any public discussion about what the actual goals were, there was no accountability, and you could keep moving the target. They found that with the early magazines of Latin America—the first one was Cuadernos [del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura]—they had their politics too much on their sleeve, and they weren't getting the readers they wanted. Cuadernos could speak to the hardliners who were already convinced that the US did some good stuff in Latin America. It helped prop up the rich, and it helped knock down purportedly Communist-influenced leftists who often turned out not to have much communism in their leftism. But during the Cuban Revolution, we see a shifting target. Rather than enabling hardliners, "soft-liners" could reach more people.

Basically, they enacted something that I had stumbled into as an idea behind Guernica's political coverage, which is somebody needs to referee, at all times it seems, a debate between the anti-war progressive left and the interventionist left. I was always curious why the interventionist left always was heard and the anti-war progressive left always seemed like it was marginalized.

"The CIA's influence in publishing was on the covert ops side, and it was done as propaganda. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US."

So the CCF published writers who were just left enough to win an audience's trust?
The way that they went about it was to use a cultural leftist like Garcia Márquez with their creative work and put their names on the cover in a sort of Trojan Horse style, so that they had a hand in the conversation during the Cuban Revolution. There was something democratic behind that, but there was also something unaccountable and not so democratic about it.

For example, the scholar Patrick Ira pointed out a moment where Emir Rodríguez Monegal admitted that he published an anti-Vietnam war op-ed just to reestablish the idea that it wasn't a CIA instrument. It gets super complicated, but that's where I got interested. Because once I got to that level of complexity I kind of had to throw out my maybe sweet naïve tendency to sort of morally judge all that stuff. After a while, I was just sort of more interested when people changed their mind or when people had a breakdown or when somebody was so instrumentalized and weaponized that they realized it and it crushed them for a moment.

When the CIA's connections to the Paris Review and other publications were revealed, the backlash was starkly uneven. The Beirut-based Hiwar—as well as the life and career of its editor Tawfiq Sayigh— were destroyed. Why was the Paris Review left unscathed?
Your question just points to a central aim of the book. I think a lot of the writing that deals with this issue never looks at it next to all the coups and assassinations and interventions that made Americans so unpopular. Once Hiwar and other magazines were exposed, they were folded into all the interventions that people hate in the postcolonial world.

The CIA's influence in publishing was on the covert ops side and it was done as propaganda. It might have been conceived by some of the participants as an altruistic funding of culture, but it was actually a control of journalism, a control of the fourth estate. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US. But once it was exposed, it was completely useless.

But not only did the Paris Review solicit this kind of propaganda literature, a lot of their editors were also monitoring writers and expats and the going-ons in France. How did they casually just replace their editors and move on?
This "joint employ" is important because it shows a sort of soft collusion. Peter Matthiessen admitted that we were spying but he resigned when he saw how ugly it was. I think there are some conspiracies out there that he didn't but I've tried to stick with what I could find. Were Nelson Aldrich and Frances Fitzgerald spying on their friends while they were working for the Congress for Cultural Freedom? I don't think so. They were basically doing magazine work and PR work, disguising it as innocent cultural work while doing sort of PR for the American Way. It's not totally inconceivable that you could imagine yourself in the way that García Márquez did, taking that money and sort of affecting its outcome more than the paymasters would. That's the conundrum, I think, and the problem with patronage in secret: It lets you tell yourself, "I don't think I was tainted" and justifying your own behavior. But as soon as you say that, you're talking against the basic journalistic principle of transparency.

The CIA turned writers into cultural weapons even when they weren't saying anything explicitly pro-America, by simply advertising for the "American alternative." How is that different today? American writers still have a monopoly in the literature scene—are they not conveying the same narrative?
That's a huge question, and a good question. It reminds me of the mission for Guernica during the Bush Administration. The US was committing an ugly war, and I was horrified, ashamed, but I was a lit guy who did an MFA, so what could I do to help? I feel like a lot of writers feel that way now—what can we do? I needed to be instrumentalized. There is a shame in being represented by Bush or Donald Trump and the assholes only who often cheat their way into government. I will say, I don't think positive propaganda is quite as nasty as disinformation and negative propaganda, which are almost always the same thing.

Once you start doing negative propaganda, I think it quickly turns into disinformation. You're willing to entertain any argument that makes your enemy look bad. In one of Boris Pasternak's interviews, he says something like, "We need the American writers to be known overseas." I can almost agree with that as long as we're willing to say, "We need Americans to know about work in translation." The Paris Review tried to do that when they introduced readers to new writers but they tended to be European and tended to be white. They weren't introducing writers from the developing world to the Americans.

And Pasternak is in many ways a native informant, in that he was a foreign writer who gave testimony to a narrative that the US wanted, and so became a CIA darling.
That's what the Pasternak story is. He wrote Doctor Zhivago as an independent dissident, but the CIA wanted to control that, and so Pasternak became a symbol of why Western democracies "were better than that" culturally.

You have to hear his criticism not as a one-way thing that only criticizes his system. You have to listen to these dissidents and think about your own dissidence. Who is your Pasternak, and how are you treating him while you're propping up Pasternak? That was one impetuous behind the book: the question of whether we have a Pasternak now. What is Snowden compared to Pasternak? I don't know that you can make huge comparisons to one creative writer making critique versus a leaker and whistleblower. But I wanted people to see in Pasternak not just the symbol that we try to make him into as Cold Warriors. These people are now symbols, but before that, they were independent thinkers. In some cases, they were just trying to tell their stories.

Where can we draw the line today? If writers want to avoid the blurred lines between honest expression and propaganda, should we simply swear off any sort of government funding or is it possible to be more nuanced?
No. It's way more nuanced. We should have a wall of separation, and we have the principle in government in the separation of powers. It's not that we don't want government funding, it just can't be secret. Some principles that point back to some of our finest big principles need to be re-articulated and restated. We're in a messy, impure world, and as journalists, we'll take whatever funding we can get. [But] we have be smart about it, like what García Márquez was trying to do.

Social media has dethroned editors as the gatekeepers of information. Do you think that makes it easier for the CIA to control the conversation?
I feel like some of these platforms withstood the government pressure better than others. I know that Facebook constantly is changing its algorithm for ad-related purposes, but they withstood some of the pressure a little differently than Twitter, who faced pressure to reveal identities in the wake of Arab Spring and other movements.

But there are other ways to leverage these cultural markets. If you look at the film industry— Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.—we're paying billions of dollars to lie to ourselves. I feel like at some point in the early war on terror, the Bush administration met with filmmakers, and they said, "We need to enlist you in this mission." That's not a new thing, but it felt new at the time, if you didn't know how often that kind of thing happened during the cultural Cold War.

Follow Mary von Aue on Twitter.

Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers by Joel Whitney is available in bookstores and online from OR Books.

Bernie Sanders Brought a Very Large Poster of Trump's Tweet to Senate on Wednesday

0
0

Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders came to work Wednesday to debate the repealing of Obamacare—one of Donald Trump's top priorities—armed with a giant printout of one of the president-elect's tweets, Gizmodo reports.

Back in May, Donald Trump tweeted about being one of the only Republican presidential candidates to promise not to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Now, to fulfill the president-elect's vow to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, some members of the GOP have proposed getting rid of those programs.

Sanders apparently saw the irony in that and decided to take it to the Senate floor, illustrating the healthcare flip-flop by printing out Trump's former campaign promise onto a big-ass poster board.

Sanders explained that Republicans "want to cut Social Security. They want to cut Medicare. They want to cut Medicaid. Mr. Trump was right, and millions of people voted for him on the believe that he would keep his word." He added, "If all that he was talking about was campaign rhetoric, then what he was obliged to do is to tell the American people, 'I was lying.'"

Sanders's extra-credit project even reportedly got a laugh from Ted Cruz, according to the Vermont senator's deputy communications director, Mike Casca.

The Developers Behind 'Ratchet & Clank' Are Surprisingly Good at Scaring You

0
0

There's a moment in Edge of Nowhere, an hour or so in, when you've escaped a series of caves filled with Lovecraftian horrors, and fumble into the open air. These are usually moments for you to stop and catch your breath, ease the nerves, and prepare for what's next. Soon, though, you hear a dull stompstompstomp—and then a roar. Overhead, a building-sized behemoth lurches towards some unknown destination. You, a human-sized insect, are of no consequence to this creature from the beyond, and you can only watch it pass through in awe.

Set in the frigid arctic, Edge of Nowhere was released last June. But as an Oculus exclusive, I didn't have a way to play the game until recently. It's my understanding that Edge of Nowhere wouldn't exist without Oculus directly funding it, but it's unfortunate more people won't have a chance to experience Insomniac Games' dip into psychological horror; it's surprisingly effective.

Read more on Waypoint

McDonald’s Opens Its Most Controversial Location Yet in Vatican City

0
0

Around six million tourists visit Vatican City each year, but now, before they can pass through the awe-inspiring arched passageways of St Peter's Basilica, they will need to pass by another set of arches—golden ones.

Just last week, McDonald's set up shop within a stone's throw of the home of the Catholic Church in Vatican-owned property, and not everyone is lovin' it.

The McDonald's is located at the corner of Borgo Pio and Via del Mascherino, a mere block and a half—about 100 yards—from the famous St Peter's Square. While neighbors already displeased by vendors hawking knickknacks in the area have complained that the McDonald's would be a "decisive blow on an already wounded animal," at least one Cardinal is also saying leasing Vatican real estate to Ronald McDonald isn't in keeping with the Church's mission. Blessed are not the McFlurries, apparently.

Read more on MUNCHIES

Age of Consent Social 1

0
0
Justin Payne is a self proclaimed vigilante who spends his nights pretending to be a thirteen year old boy online and is intent on confronting every pedophile he finds. With help from his cameraman Gerry, the duo have publicly shamed hundreds of sexual predators and have been a thorn in the side of local law enforcement. Filmed in the suburbs of Toronto, this Vice film intimately documents the life of Justin Payne and his sometimes very creepy late night encounters.

The Real Story Behind the Rise of Creep Catchers, Canada’s Vigilante Pedophile Hunters

0
0

Even in a fairly crowded shopping mall, it doesn't take long to spot the Surrey Creep Catchers.

Despite the covert nature of their work, which involves publicly shaming and filming people they have deemed to be pedophiles, members of the organization frequently wear clothing emblazoned with the Surrey Creep Catchers name and logo.

On this crisp October evening, a handful of them gather in the food court at Lougheed Town Centre in Burnaby, BC. The president, Ryan Laforge, is tall, broad, and bearded. He sports a light grey Surrey Creep Catchers hoodie, camo shorts, and a black baseball cap; his chihuahua Pinto is slung over his shoulder in a green leather bag, softening his otherwise imposing presence.

LaForge, 33, is debriefing a couple of young-ish guys and a woman on the sting that's about to take place.

"Do we know what he's wearing?" he asks.

"Did you see his big head? He won't be hard to spot," replies a man in a red-and-black Surrey Creep Catchers t-shirt who has a skull shaved into the back of his head.

"I don't give a fuck," Laforge snaps. "It's not about for us. If this goes to court, we want him saying what he's wearing and then showing up in what he's wearing."

The man with the skull on his head apologizes. Like the others, he hangs off Laforge's every command.

This is a part of a VICE Canada project investigating the impact of vigilante pedophile hunting in Canada.

On Facebook, they've started a group chat called "Tuesday goof" ("goof" is prison slang for child molester) to stay in constant communication with each other as they go through the night's catches.

First up is a 52-year-old man who, based on his chats with a member of Laforge's team, allegedly thinks he's meeting a 15-year-old girl. At the meeting spot, a McDonald's inside the mall's Walmart, a petite brunette woman in her 20s—a decoy—sits at a booth and awaits his arrival, while the others, including Laforge, disperse and position themselves nearby.

The man arrives. He's overweight and balding; what little hair he still has is white. He's wearing an ill-fitting grey polo shirt, with black track pants and a black windbreaker. He sits at a booth alone and looks around a little. Laforge slides into the seat across from him and holds his phone up to his face. Others in the crew follow suit, whipping out their cameras.

"Surrey Creep Catcher, you're here to meet a 15-year-old girl," Laforge states, along with the man's name. He explains he's filming to protect both of them and lays down the man's options—run or explain why he set up a date with a minor. The man doesn't move.

Surrey Creep Catchers president Ryan Laforge. Photo by Rafal Gerszak

"OK, so first things first," Laforge says, speaking calmly. "Do you want to admit that you made a mistake?"

"I guess I did make a mistake," the man responds, sounding somewhat bewildered. "But initially the ad that I responded to said she was 18 years old."

Laforge concedes that that's true, but claims that during their chats, the decoy informed the man that she was actually 15. He threatens to pull out the chat logs.

Flustered, the man replies, "What I didn't know is what the actual age of consent was," and says his intention was to "get together, talk, whatever. See where it goes." Eventually he admits, "I guess I was sort of... excited at the fact of meeting a young girl."

People at the surrounding tables are starting to stare.

Laforge gives the man a spiel about Creep Catchers ("You know that we're out there, you know what we're doing, so why is it that you're still here meeting an underage child?") and lectures him about how meeting a minor is morally wrong. "This is going to be on Facebook and YouTube and everything," he says. "I can promise you someone you know is going to see it."  

It ends with the man vowing he'll never do this again and Laforge repeating the Creep Catchers catchphrase, "Yer done bud."

The man skulks away quietly, through Walmart, past the greeters, and into the parking lot.  

Laforge and his team will complete a half-dozen of these ambushes tonight, performed in rapid succession at fast food joints and coffee shops around the Lower Mainland. And in cities across Canada, other groups are doing the exact same thing.

"We don't sleep," says Laforge.

***

Up until about three years ago, Canada didn't have any so-called "pedophile hunters." These days, they're a fixture of local news cycles, particularly out west.  

VICE has spent months tracking the movement, shadowing stings in multiple cities and conducting dozens of interviews with vigilantes, members of law enforcement, experts in child exploitation and pedophilia, lawyers, and people who claim to have been victimized by the videos. We have learned of at least one instance in which Creep Catchers interfered with a police operation, resulting in the suspect fleeing town and molesting children before he could be arrested. And just last month, a Red Deer Creep Catcher was charged with harassment and mischief relating to one of his stings. Successes, on the other hand, appear to be limited—only a handful of arrests and one conviction yielded from hundreds of videos posted.

In this three-part series and an upcoming VICE Canada documentary, we'll reveal an organization that is in the midst of an identity crisis, with new branches seemingly opening every week, in the face of intense infighting and allegations of bullying and harassment coming from the outside.  

***

Pedophile hunting blew up in the US when a California-based volunteer organization called Perverted Justice teamed up with Dateline to produce To Catch A Predator. The series debuted in 2004, and featured host Chris Hansen and his team posing as teenagers online and confronting adults who solicited them for sex.

It's Hansen who inspired Brampton, Ontario's Justin Payne, arguably Canada's original pedophile hunter. VICE first wrote about Payne in October 2015. His profile has since grown exponentially, and he's inspired many copycats, including Dawson Raymond who founded the Creep Catchers Canada organization in Calgary in September 2015. That in turn has spurred more than 30 branches and spin-offs across the country in cities such as Vancouver, Surrey, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John, and Halifax.

Vigilante pedophile shaming groups have set up shop across the country. 

Payne, 29, a bricklayer who recently went on a cross-country pedophile-hunting trip, operates mostly as a lone wolf. His chats are usually sexually explicit. "Father Attempts To Meet 12 Year Old, For Blowjobs & Ejaculation In His Mouth," reads the description for a recent Facebook video he posted to his thousands of followers.

On a September evening, he can be found sitting in the parking lot of a Brampton shopping centre in his beat-up Kia Spectra, the word 'VIGILANTE' affixed to its bumper. He's using the dating app Skout to chat with a man in his 20s who thinks Payne is a 12-year-old girl.  

Justin Payne (also pictured at top) was Canada's first vigilante pedophile hunter. Photo by Norman Wong

The man is on his way to the parking lot—he's picking some condoms en route, according to the chat logs.

"I always try to get them to say they'll bring condoms 'cause it shows intent," Payne explains.

After entering the dark and deserted parking lot, the man appears to grow skittish and begins walking away quickly. He's short and slight, wearing a bucket hat, his earphones in. Payne chases him. Once he catches up, he pulls out his phone and starts filming while laying into the man for wanting to have sex with a little girl.

"I never believed she was 12 years old," the man protests, claiming that the woman he spoke with on the phone (Payne's decoy) sounded much older. (She was.) After the confrontation, the man, who recently moved to Canada from India, tells VICE he grabbed condoms with the hopes that the person he'd been chatting with was actually of legal age.

Chats between Justin Payne and a suspected sexual predator. 

Despite having just been humiliated, he says he supports Payne's work.

"You need somebody to show the fucking truth of what's going on," he says. But he's equally emphatic about what he'll do if he ends up being exposed online.

"I'll kill myself. My family will fucking not accept me so what the hell am I going to do living by myself?"

***

Payne is not a part of Creep Catchers and says he will never join it—"it's too much drama."

He's not wrong about that.

While Raymond initially founded Creep Catchers in Calgary and set up outlets around Alberta and in BC, including Surrey, he and Laforge have since have a very public falling out. It's difficult to discern exactly what the beef is tied to—a clash of male egos certainly seems to be a factor—but Laforge says in part he felt his Albertan counterparts weren't pulling their weight in terms of posting enough videos. That they were more interested in a "rockstar" lifestyle. Turf wars and smear campaigns accusing various chapter leaders of abusing and selling drugs or doctoring chat logs are cropping up weekly on Facebook. And negative media attention relating to the busts of Katelynn McKnight, a trans woman from Edmonton who killed herself after a Creep Catcher showed up at her house and filmed her, and more recently, a controversial sting Laforge conducted on a man in a scooter with cerebral palsy, has exacerbated the tension.

Read Part Two:  Predators or Prey? Creep Catchers Accused of Targeting People with Physical and Mental Disabilities

"It's a joke," Raymond tells VICE, adding he's washing his hands clean of how other vigilantes conduct themselves. "Basically I started a movement, and now any fucking asshole dickhead is coming out there doing it."

Calgary's Dawson Raymond founded Creep Catchers Canada in September 2015. Photo via Facebook

Laforge, meanwhile, refers to at least one member of Raymond's crew as a "punk bitch" and has declared Surrey Creep Catchers its own entity, along with branches in the Tri-Cities and Fraser Valley. Ironically, the latter has since divorced Laforge, describing his tactics as bullying and borderline entrapment.   

Laforge's team primarily uses Craigslist ads to ensnare alleged predators. When making the ad, they always pretend to be at least 18 and later say they lied and are actually younger—a bait and switch. Laforge says it doesn't matter to him whether or not the accused predator mentions anything explicitly sexual or not.

"To me, it's the same thing—if you meet a child, you're a creep, you're a pedophile."

He says the ratio of people who express sexual intent versus those who claim they just want to hang out for ice cream or a bike ride is about 60:40. He has no issue with publicizing any of their addresses because he thinks parents should know who to avoid.

After the Walmart sting, the Surrey crew reconvenes in the parking lot of another McDonald's. There's an air of excitement as they stand around in a circle, smoking and discussing their next catch.

"It's like you're on crack," says a dark-haired man in his early 20s who is wearing a black Surrey Creep Catchers t-shirt, grinning as he chats with a suspected predator on Grindr. 

Laforge claims he and his team members try to tell their potential suitors that they are underage as soon as possible—within four or five messages. But VICE witnessed one sting in which a man was shamed after a chat on Grindr that commenced less than an hour before the bust went down.

A member of Surrey Creep Catchers gets ready for his next sting. Photo by Rafal Gerszak

Not surprisingly, law enforcement and members of the criminal justice system have come out strongly against these vigilantes.

"There's nothing good coming from this, nothing good at all, except for an emotional response that's very acute and very short lived," Staff Sergeant Stephen Camp of the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team's Integrated Child Exploitation Unit tells VICE over the phone from Edmonton.

ICE was established 15 years ago to protect children from sexual exploitation. It deals with about 400 files annually, primarily pertaining to the possession, creation, and distribution of child pornography.

Nationally, the number of child porn-related offences has ticked upwards, from 1,958 incidents reported to police in 2011 to 4,310 in 2015, according to Statistics Canada. Meanwhile, the total number of sexual violations against children in Canada, including sexual interference, luring, and sexual exploitation, has gone from from 3,804 reported incidents in 2011 to 4,532 in 2015. Police say the spikes are due to better reporting of crimes, specialized units like ICE, and the prevalence of smartphones and social media.

Offences of luring a child via computer—one of Creep Catchers' main focuses—have doubled in the last five years from 568 in 2011 to 1,060 in 2015. Under the criminal code, it is illegal to lure a child off the internet to commit another crime, such as sexual assault or kidnapping. But, contrary to what vigilantes often state in their videos, talking to a minor online platonically isn't in and of itself a crime. An adult can still be convicted of luring a child after having non-sexual conversations online, but there would have to be evidence to suggest they had criminal intentions.

Camp, who leads a team of 16 people, says he found out about the Creep Catchers when he joined ICE in May.

"What Creep Catchers does is catch and release the individual back into society to continue to offend."

He notes one occasion in which his undercover officers had already engaged with a suspect online but their operation was blown when Creep Catchers shamed the man.

"This person left Alberta, went to Saskatchewan, and there was nothing we could do at that point. What that person went on to do is sexually offend two toddlers a few months later," he says.

Had police been able to complete their arrest, Camp says the man would have either been remanded or placed under a court order preventing him from leaving the province or being near children.

"What Creep Catchers does is catch and release the individual back into society to continue to offend."

Laforge tells VICE he thinks there are officers who respect Creep Catchers work off the books. He says he's heard of one case in which Creep Catchers in BC interfered in an RCMP ICE case by having a decoy meet with a man being investigated. But he's not sorry, reasoning authorities should've acted faster.

"To me if this guy is bad enough to have an investigation on him… Why is he out?"

Camp says there have been about 20 instances in which his team has investigated a tip about luring, only to find out it was a Creep Catcher sting, wasting time and resources.

He also points out vigilantes are essentially making money off their stings by growing support through each video—something police could never do, ethically.

Surrey Creep Catchers film one of their suspects. Photo via Rafal Gerszak

To that end, Laforge quit his job as a construction safety officer six months ago to dedicate himself to Surrey Creep Catchers. Several other hunters tell VICE they aren't working. To fund their activities, they sell branded hoodies and sweats for $35-$55, and take donations for electronics and cash. Laforge wouldn't disclose how much they make off these sales but "It's not much," he says. "I ran through $20,000 in savings." He says he'll be forced to return to work soon.

Camp's criticisms about Creep Catchers' tactics have been echoed many times over: They have no oversight. They overrule due process. They don't know how to collect evidence properly. They're putting themselves and the public at risk, especially if a sting turns violent. On at least two occasions, Surrey Creep Catchers or their followers identified the wrong people as pedophiles.

BC-based lawyer Craig Jones is so concerned about the movement that he's compiled a list of the ways in which vigilante predator hunters may be breaking the law, including violating privacy and entrapment legislation, and potentially being in possession of written child porn if chats become explicit.

"In some cases, the intimidation of the 'target,' if it places him in fear for his safety, may constitute criminal harassment or even assault," he says—a theory that was bolstered by the recent Red Deer arrest.

Both men believe the movement is an affront to democracy.

"We're very strong in that we would not work with Creep Catchers, and we want nothing to do with them," says Camp.

***

Despite the backlash, the appetite for shaming perverts is enormous and growing. A video posted by Payne in October of him confronting a man inside a trailer in BC garnered 225,000 views. Many of the local Creep Catcher presidents, including Laforge, have multiple Facebook accounts, with thousands of friends on each. And in the past year, three stings have given them more credibility. The first two resulted in child luring charges for Surrey, BC RCMP Constable Dario Devic, and Mission, BC school principal Jason Obert. The third involved Chilliwack, BC man Doug Putt, whose child luring conviction is believed to be the first time a vigilante bust in Canada has yielded jail time.

Chats between Justin Payne and a suspected sexual predator. 

But Laforge tells VICE he doesn't necessarily consider those the movement's biggest successes. Rather, it's about raising awareness and lobbying for tougher laws against child predators.

"When you do a video, it puts it out there, and people start talking," he explains, eating a yellow lollipop at the Surrey library. "It's basically bringing the community together."

Laforge hasn't always been considered an upstanding citizen. By his own admission, he spent half his life dealing drugs, and court records show he was convicted of trafficking, possession of a controlled substance, mischief, and breach of probation.

He says he quit selling drugs five years ago to work in construction. While picking up his nephew and niece from school earlier this year, he heard a radio report about a sex offender who'd been released after one month in prison. The story angered him.

"We googled how to deal with pedophiles, and Creep Catchers came up," he says. He connected with the group and launched his own chapter in Surrey.

Laforge admits he has no personal connection to child abuse, no close relative who was victimized. So it's easy to wonder what keeps him motivated. While he says it's not about fame, the group's desire to have its own reality TV show— " To Catch A Predator meets Dog the Bounty Hunter"—suggests otherwise.

"It's entertaining," he says, of the videos.

To hang out with Laforge is to witness him receive a steady stream of props from people who recognize him, either by face or his branded clothing.

If a bystander observing a bust asks what Laforge and his team members are up to, they respond "Creep Catchers: We hunt pedophiles" with the same sense of self-importance as FBI agents identifying themselves in movies. They even have their own theme songs that play at the beginning of every video.

"This is one way to fancy oneself as a warrior of justice," says Christopher Schneider, a Brandon University sociology professor who has written a book on policing and social media.

Schneider says it's probably no coincidence that many pedophile hunters are white men who come from blue collar backgrounds—the same overlooked demographic losing work in the oilfields in Western Canada and partially responsible for electing Donald Trump down south.

On occasion, Laforge will offer to live-stream a bust on Facebook in exchange for 500 or 1,000 comments; he'll receive excited responses, like "popcorn is ready."

"People are paying attention, and they're applauding their efforts," says Schneider. "This is one way of feeling good."

A clip from VICE Canada's upcoming documentary 'Age of Consent'

Schneider says the vigilantes have tapped into a "moral panic" about online pedophiles—one that's not necessarily based in fact. Coupled with society's desire for immediate results and a justice system that can be both painfully slow and light on sex offenders, the group's popularity is a no-brainer.

"It's really easy to get on board with demonizing pedophiles," says Schneider. "They're probably the most demonized and stigmatized of all criminals."

***

Though they put up a defiant front, there's no question that pressure from detractors is getting under the skin of the Creep Catchers.

"It's just gotten to the point where it's out of control, and I'm not going to be taking nobody's liability when I don't even know who the fuck they are and they don't do things to our standards," Raymond tells VICE while pacing around his new apartment in Calgary. He points to the bright green and pale blue walls of his bedroom.

"It looks like a fucking kid's room," he says, but it's better than the garage he was sleeping in until very recently—a result of being dead broke from Creep Catching. 

"Mostly [I was] getting fired from jobs 'cause of them seeing me on the news and being afraid it would reflect bad on their company."

"I'll do this until my fucking grave." 

Raymond has deleted his Facebook profile, citing stress from the incessant online bickering amongst the various vigilante groups. Despite his exasperation, he is adamant that he will never stop doing "catches."

"I'll be in a wheelchair 90-something years old fucking chasing after these guys in an electric fucking wheelchair, you know what I mean?" he says. "I'll do this until my fucking grave, or until it puts me in my grave."

A couple days later, from his home in the neighbouring province, Laforge hosts a Facebook live. He's angry about the arrest of the Red Deer Creep Catcher, and even moreso about the backlash the group has been receiving.

"There's more haters than ever lately," he says, referring to the media as snakes. "If you're gonna tell us we're doing it wrong, you're not a supporter, and I'll block you."

Toward the end, he chills out, discusses starting a warm clothing drive for the homeless, and takes questions from his followers. Then it's back to business:

"I gotta get out in the snow and go catch some goofs."  

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


Predators or Prey? Creep Catchers Accused of Targeting People with Physical and Mental Disabilities

0
0

Katelynn McKnight died a few steps from where she slept.

McKnight, 27, a trans woman, had spent most of last year living in southeast Edmonton with Matthias Eichner, a man who considered himself her "street dad." But after she was confronted and shamed online by Edmonton Creep Catchers in April, Eichner said his home became her prison. He found her lying on the basement floor dead on September 7.

Both Eichner and McKnight's adoptive parents told VICE they believe her death was an intentional drug overdose, although authorities have not yet confirmed that. VICE has viewed Facebook conversations in which McKnight said killing herself was the only way to make a statement to Creep Catchers and the public.

"I think she was so psychologically damaged and physically damaged, and Creep Catchers pushed her over the edge," Eichner, 60, told VICE from the living room of his three-storey house. Downstairs, he pointed to a spot on the carpeted floor, just outside the bathroom, where he found her lying down with a towel placed underneath her pelvis.

"When I walked up to look at her I noticed her fingernails were black, and I knew what that meant," he said. "I touched her arm, and it was like ice."

This is a part of a VICE Canada project investigating the impact of vigilante pedophile hunting in Canada.

Self-described pedophile-hunting groups like Creep Catchers operate by posing as minors on Craigslist and dating apps and shaming adults who express sexual interest in them or even just an interest in hanging out platonically.

But McKnight's death has raised serious questions about how these vigilantes treat people with mental illness and physical and intellectual disabilities. VICE has spoken with family members, close friends, and support workers of several people with such challenges who have been shamed by Creep Catchers and similar organizations. They say Creep Catchers' tendency to bait and switch, by first posting an advertisement as an adult and later revealing themselves to be a teenager, makes those with cognitive impairments easy targets. In addition, they say the interactions featured on video stings may be motivated by loneliness, isolation, and an inability to understand the consequences of talking to a teen online—factors that don't seem to be on the average vigilante's radar.

McKnight's suspected suicide, previously reported by VICE, came just a couple weeks after Creep Catchers posted a "top 10 compilation video" on August 17 featuring her bust, which originally took place in April. The footage shows Edmonton chapter president John Doep, who also goes by O Nigel Woolcox on Facebook, knocking on McKnight's door. (This is unheard of—stings usually take place at a public meeting spot.) When she answers, he confronts her about wanting to meet up with a 14-year-old girl. McKnight denies it. "My phone was stolen," she protests.

Afterward "she just didn't know what to do," McKnight's mother, Cathy Dunn, told VICE. "She was totally distraught."

Cathy and her husband Phil adopted McKnight, an orphan from Romania, when she was 22 months old. Back then she was called Joe Dunn. As a child, McKnight was happy, they said, until she hit the school system.

Phil and Cathy Dunn's daughter Katelynn died on September 7. Photo by Jason Franson

"She did struggle with [attention deficit disorder], more specifically the hyperactive part of that," Cathy said during a phone interview. Later, she was diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder and reactive attachment disorder, which Cathy said caused her to lash out at them at times.

"They draw you in closer and want that relationship and then, because of that trust issue, they will do something to drive you away."

From the age of 13, McKnight was placed in a group home because it became too difficult for her parents to care for her. She had three or four stints in hospital and threatened suicide.

"It started to become more of a theme: 'I hate myself,'" Cathy said.

In October 2015, Cathy said McKnight drank antifreeze in a Canadian Tire in an attempt to end her life. The Dunns said McKnight was using drugs to "self-medicate," though they aren't sure which ones specifically. Eichner told VICE he believes she was using heroin. All three have said McKnight was also doing sex work and spent time living on the street.

"She lost all her friends. Everyone thought she was a pedo."

Cathy said McKnight began transitioning in 2012, a process that took an emotional toll on her. The Creep Catchers video, which was posted with descriptions like "Creepy Child Predator Confronted!" prompted many hateful online comments about her gender. One, in which Jackass star Bam Margera referred to McKnight as "it," was shared by her catcher Doep on his Facebook page.

John Doep (above), president of Edmonton Creep Catchers, shamed Katelynn McKnight at her home in April. Below: Doep shares a post mocking McKnight's gender. Screenshots via YouTube/Facebook

After being outed, Eichner said McKnight would not leave her room in his dimly lit basement, spending hours at a time watching TV in bed and playing with his kittens.

"She lost all her friends. Everyone thought she was a pedo." In a Facebook chat between McKnight and RL Dakin, an Edmonton woman who has started an anti-vigilante campaign, McKnight spoke about how her reputation was permanently shattered.

"My whole life will always be hiding, having people accuse me of horrible things, and the possibilities of assaults and possibly even murder," she wrote to Dakin on August 17. A few days later she said, "I do quite honestly believe I would be murdered in public. I think I'll probably get murdered very close to home or in my home."

Throughout the conversations, which spanned the latter half of August, she repeatedly said killing herself was the only way to stop Creep Catchers, and even discussed streaming her suicide online.

"Me dying is the best chance anyone has… I'm very proud to be able to save anyone. Even if this doesn't stop them directly, maybe just maybe some of the Creep Catchers will start to question whether or not they are doing the right thing."

When VICE originally reported on McKnight's death, Doep refused to comment other than to say "lol" via Facebook messenger. When VICE reached out again more recently, Doep responded with, "Please know that you have became a blemish on my life. I can't believe you actually think I would ever speak with you."

His Facebook posts about McKnight have been somewhat contradictory. He's removed McKnight's video, and a screenshot appeared to show him apologizing for being "reckless and misdirected." However, in response to media reports about McKnight, he has also said "We DO NOT target anyone other than those who prey on children."

Cathy and Phil Dunn hold a picture of their late daughter, Katelynn. Photo by Codie McLachlan

Other troubling shaming incidents have surfaced in the aftermath of McKnight's death.

A video titled "Skinner Scooter" (skinner is prison slang for child molester), posted by Surrey Creep Catchers on November 16, shows a Facebook live bust of a man on a scooter who has cerebral palsy. The man responded to an ad for an escort, stating the escort was 20, but, as is often the case with Creep Catchers, they claimed a decoy later informed the man she was actually a 14-year-old girl.

In the video, Surrey Creep Catchers president Ryan Laforge and a member of Tri-Cities Creep Catchers accuse the man of wanting to have sex with the teen in a school bathroom.

"She said she was an escort," the man in the scooter replies, repeatedly asking the Creep Catchers what they're going to do with the footage.

"You're a creep. We're gonna show this to everybody so they know to keep their kids away from you," replies the Tri-Cities Creep Catcher, while Laforge informs the disabled man that people are watching him live.

The man appears to have difficulty grasping the fact that he was never talking to an escort.

At one point, Laforge asks him if he has cerebral palsy, which the target confirms.

"Do you think having a disability is like a cover up for this behaviour?" Laforge says, noting that his brother has cerebral palsy and "He's no goof." (Goof is also prison slang for a child molester.) 

"When the phone calls and the emails and the text messages and the Facebook fucking blame starts hitting you up, you will be fucking sorry," Laforge adds. Near the end, he quips: "If you give me your scooter I won't put this up on Facebook and YouTube."

Eventually the man speeds off on his scooter, as Laforge and the other Creep Catcher chase behind. In the distance, the man on the scooter then appears to get hit by a car. He did not sustain injuries.  

The video has been viewed more than 35,000 times, and while some Creep Catchers supporters have raised red flags about it, many are supportive of shaming the man. "Omg did he get hit by a car," one Facebook user wrote. "Hahahhah karma at its finest."  

Ryan Laforge

Surrey Creep Catcher Ryan Laforge shames an alleged predator in his car. Photo by Rafal Gerszak

Faith Bodnar, executive director of Inclusion BC, an advocacy group for British Columbians with disabilities, told VICE she has been in touch with the man's family. She said in addition to having cerebral palsy, he has an IQ lower than 70. The man, who is 30, is well-known in his local community, but Bodnar said he hasn't been to work since being shamed.

"It's just been absolutely devastating for he and his family," she said, adding he has no history of predatory behaviour.

She said preying on someone with significant physical and cognitive impairments is a "very low form of behaviour" displayed by Creep Catchers.

"They groomed and lured him to that spot intentionally knowing what they were doing. He didn't understand, nor was he able to process what was happening to him."

Laforge told VICE he stands by the video. He said the initial conversation with the man in the scooter was started by female followers of Surrey Creep Catchers who were pretending to be an escort because "they mess with creepy guys." The women, he said, then told the man they had a 14-year-old friend and passed along the chats to Laforge, who acted as the teenager.

Laforge has not produced the chat logs for VICE.

"I never said he operates with all cylinders, but he's still willing and able to hurt children," he said, noting, "Mental disability or not, it needs to be exposed."

Calgary's Dawson Raymond founded Creep Catchers in fall 2015. He has told VICE that the organization has since spiralled out of his control and that he does not want to be held accountable for how other chapters conduct themselves. However, regarding shaming people with cognitive disabilities, he said this:

"If that person seems coherent enough to set up a meeting with a child and meet them, I don't give a fuck what their IQ level is. Who fucking knows? What's Paul Bernardo's fucking IQ? Does anybody even know?"

Vigilante pedophile hunting in Canada has exploded in recent years.  

In another case, Leisa Howell, a Kelowna, BC community support worker, told VICE her client, a 27-year-old man with schizophrenia, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, ADHD, and reactive attachment disorder, was shamed online after agreeing to meet a decoy from Zero Children Hurt (a Creep Catchers offshoot) posing as a teenage girl online. Howell said John (not his real name), operates at the level of a 12-year-old and has an IQ of less than 70. She said John takes shots twice a month for psychosis and is "extremely medicated."

It's impossible for him to engage in sexual intercourse, she added. "He can't even get an erection."

Kelowna, BC community support worker Leisa Howell says vigilantes have repeatedly targeted her client. Photo via Facebook

She said she received a call from the RCMP one night during the summer; they were with John who was crying and heaving, "freaking out beyond belief." As it turned out, she said he'd been speaking with a Zero Children Hurt decoy on Plenty of Fish—a woman posing as a 14-year-old girl. The next day his video was on Facebook.

The decoy, who goes by the alias Shoni McBee, told VICE John "referenced wanting to make a family with the teen girl as well as wanting her to sleep over in his bed." She would not provide VICE with chat logs.

Despite being informed of John's disabilities by Howell, McBee said she left the video of him up, but it was reported to YouTube and removed nonetheless. She said Zero Children Hurt recently "caught" John again, this time chatting with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl.  

"Fetal Alcohol Syndrome does not make you ask children to sleepover in your bed," McBee said.

Howell said she has tried to teach John internet safety training but that she doesn't have the time to monitor his activities at all times, due to her responsibilities to other clients. She stressed that his interest in these women is not sexual, but comes from a place of loneliness.

"Nobody pays attention to these people, and when somebody starts talking to them they're lonely and they don't get it," she said. "It's companionship."

McKnight's confidante Dakin has started a Facebook group called CREEP CATCHERS HARASSING MENTALLY ILL AND DISABLED, which details stings that allegedly target vulnerable people.

Dakin said her 29-year-old daughter has bipolar disorder so severe that she's currently "lying in a hospital bed—unable to walk, talk, or feed herself."

She said her daughter was shamed by Edmonton Creep Catchers in July after she agreed to meet up with a decoy posing as a 15-year-old girl.

Dakin said her daughter was going to meet the girl for a walk, with the intention of going "all big sister on her" about talking to strangers online. At some point during the chats, Dakin said someone else—possibly her daughter's boyfriend—picked up her daughter's phone and texted the decoy, "Hey, how would you like to meet my 36-year-old friend? He's awesome and a great kisser."

Aside from that message, which she said was sent when her daughter was sleeping, the conversation was innocent.

Dakin said when her daughter showed up to meet the teenage girl, she was confronted by Edmonton Creep Catchers. In the video, a Creep Catcher who identifies himself as David Matthews asks about the reference to the 36-year-old, to which Dakin's daughter replies that it was a joke. Matthews then scolds Dakin for meeting with a "child" but says, "You never technically said anything sexual to the child at all."

"This is really awkward 'cause this is the first time we've ever had to talk to a female about this," Matthews adds. "I expect it to be pretty viral, so I apologize for all the hate that's gonna come your way."

Because her daughter was manic at the time, Dakin said she didn't understand what was going on and left with the impression that she had helped protect a real teenage girl from harm.

Dakin said her daughter's phone number was posted with the video, resulting in harassment.

"She did tell me people threatened to beat her up, to rape her," she said.

A clip from VICE Canada's upcoming documentary 'Age of Consent'

Stings like these have actually prompted some Creep Catchers to speak out about this aggressive approach.

Mike Shea, president of the newly founded Langley, BC chapter, told VICE the scooter bust was "very unprofessional."

"You shouldn't ever chase someone like that," he said, noting Surrey Creep Catchers, despite divorcing the umbrella organization, is giving his chapter a bad name.

Shea said he has videos on his computer from stings in which the people busted have agreed to seek professional help. He cited one young man who said he was in the closet and wanted to meet up with a decoy he believed to be a teenage boy—not for anything sexual. Shea said he decided not to post the video online because the man, who appeared to be extremely distressed, agreed to go to the hospital.

"We don't want to ruin people's lives," he said. "The people who actually need help, like a mental issue or a psychological issue, they don't need to be blasted on the internet and have their lives ruined for a simple mistake."

Dakin told VICE her anti-Creep Catchers Facebook page is a place for people to share their side of the story, something that McKnight took solace in. 

"I think that's something that meant a great deal to Katelynn," she said. "The relief that there was somewhere on the internet where people were not saying ugly vile things about her."  

Phil and Cathy Dunn said their daughter was neither physically nor psychologically capable of sexually assaulting a child.

"I am sure that with a lot the stuff she went through, she would never have wanted to hurt anyone else," Cathy said. They questioned why Edmonton Creep Catchers would remove the video of McKnight if they truly had evidence of criminal activity.

In the months since her death, they've kept a low profile, seeking comfort from family, friends, and their church group.

They don't believe anyone has the right to act as judge, jury—and executioner.

"They see trapping these people as justice, but it's wrong," said Cathy. "It's vigilante injustice."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

A Pedophile Opens Up About Being Targeted By Vigilantes

0
0

Todd Nickerson is a 43-year-old virgin.

The graphic designer, who has dark blond shoulder-length hair, thinning at the front, and a prosthetic right hand, lives alone in a mobile home near Savannah, Tennessee. For a long time, he stayed in his bedroom, isolated, because he had a secret: He was attracted to children.

Nickerson is a pedophile.

By definition, it means he is sexually aroused by prepubescent children (in his case, girls). However, Nickerson tells VICE it does not mean he is a child molester, and he stresses he has never and will never act on his desires.

"I kind of had to get over a lot of society's BS, this idea that you're doomed to offend," he says in a phone interview. "I had to say, 'No, no. You're not, you have control over that.' We're not slaves to our hormones."

This is a part of a VICE Canada project investigating the impact of vigilante pedophile hunting in Canada.

Due to the stigma surrounding pedophilia, it's difficult to know how many people are affected by it, although experts have estimated its 0.5 to two percent of the general population. But not all people who commit sexual offences against children are pedophiles. In fact, according to studies, between 40 to 75 percent are not. When it comes to child porn, however, closer to 80 percent are pedophiles.

"There are people who are pedophilic, they know they're attracted to children, and never touch a child, never download any kind of child pornography, they never break any kind of law," says James Cantor, a Toronto-based clinical psychologist and sexual behaviour scientist who has been studying pedophilia for 20 years.

"It also works the other way around. There are people who are child molesters, they actually committed crimes and victimized someone even though they sexually prefer adults." These people are sometimes referred to as surrogate sex offenders, Cantor explains, who use children to replace an adult sexual partner.  

Dr. James Cantor is a leading expert in pedophilia. (still via 'Age of Consent')

The distinction is rarely discussed publicly, likely in part because no one really has much sympathy for a pedophile. More recently, self-described "pedophile hunters" like Creep Catchers have made a point of labelling most of the people they shame online a "pedophile."

Ryan Laforge, president of Surrey Creep Catchers, tells VICE in his mind a guy who says he wants to ride bikes with a teenager is as much a pedophile as someone who requests naked photographs.

"I got bigger worries than to lose sleep over that exact minor detail," Laforge says.

Laforge and vigilantes like him operate by posting profiles on Craigslist and dating sites, pretending to be at least 18 years old, and later informing the adults who express interest in them that they are actually a minor, typically around 14-15 years old. During the ensuing conversations, they send photos of people who look young, pulled from volunteers. The people in the images are currently over the age of 18 but were often younger at the time the photos were taken—though there's no set standard as to what age.

Cantor says the ideal age range for a true pedophile would be ten and under, while hebephiles are attracted to children around 11-14 years old.

People who attracted to children in the later teens, aged 15 to 16, are technically ephebophiles and aren't considered to have any kind of mental disorder. Based on the tactics used by vigilantes, the majority of the people vigilantes bust are hebephiles or ephebophiles, says Cantor.

"It sounds like few of them would be considered pedophiles."

Media reports that often conflate pedophiles with child abusers exacerbate the confusion.

But Nickerson says there are many pedophiles who have no interest in hurting children.

His own realization that he was a pedophile came over time.

Nickerson, who was born without his right hand, says he was molested by a family friend at the age of seven. He believes both factors could have contributed to his sexuality (research shows pedophiles are more likely to be left-handed.)

"I think on some level I identified with my abuser more than I did with the males in my family. He was very gentile and clearly interested in me," says Nickerson. 

Todd Nickerson says he was molested as a child. Photo submitted

He recalls being in sixth grade, standing around with three or four boys from his class discussing which girls they had crushes on.

"All the other boys in my group were kind of [into] this one particular girl who was the most well-developed girl in our class. I wasn't attracted to her at all," he says. "The girl I was I was attracted to was the petite, undeveloped girl."

But, being 12, he didn't think much of it. His "eureka moment" came when he was 13, hanging out at his grandparents' house. He remembers sitting in the living room drawing when his grandparents' neighbour visited with his seven-year-old daughter.

"I looked up, and this little girl was standing there watching me draw. It just struck me, 'wow,'" he says. "At that moment I realized, this is a little different than being attracted to the least-developed girl in your class."

What followed, he says, was a period of deep denial, including visits to church where Nickerson prayed that god would "take this away from me."

Pedophile Todd Nickerson, here in fifth grade, says he was attracted to less-developed girls as a pre-teen. Photo submitted

Then, when he was 18, he says he fell in love with a five-year-old girl he was babysitting—the daughter of a family friend.  

"She would take her clothes off and run through the house," he says. "That girl was the only time in my life that I faced real temptation."

Nickerson quit babysitting and left town, realizing he could no longer pretend his desires didn't exist. Instead, he kept his guard up so as not to trick himself into believing a child could reciprocate his feelings.  

"There were days when I was suicidal, where I would wake up and that's all I could think about."

Nickerson has also tried and failed to have adult relationships. When he was 20, he says he briefly dated a woman who was six years older than him, but there was no sexual chemistry. In college, which he started at the age of 25, he says he didn't date at all.

"When two adults are flirting, there's that unspoken exchange and non-verbal cues. I'm not good at reading those because I'm just not really attracted to them." As graduation loomed, Nickerson says he panicked.

"It kinda dawned on me even though I'd accepted my attraction, for a while I'd entertained this idea that I could get married and have a family and have a normal life," he says. "I realized that would never happen."

Nickerson says he experienced stages of grief, including serious depression. To make things worse, a cousin had found some journal entries in which Nickerson admitted to being a pedophile, so he knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of his family found out.

"There were days when I was suicidal, where I would wake up and that's all I could think about," he says.

A clip from VICE Canada's upcoming documentary 'Age of Consent'

Desperate for some sort of comfort, he turned to Girlchat in 2005, an online forum for pedophiles who mostly believe in "pro-contact"—the idea that consent laws should be changed to make sex with minors legal. Though he says that point of view made him uncomfortable, the "cult-like" mentality sucked him in.

"I kinda threw myself at it, it was kinda like: These are my people."

Within a year, he says he outed himself on the forum, giving up his real name.

"I was kind of of the mindset that I was gonna die soon anyway, take my own life. It didn't really matter." He says it was liberating and that he even created an autobiographical page online that stated he was a pedophile; he shared it with his parents.

"They didn't really want to address it," he said. Eventually, though, he said they came around to accept it. "They knew I wasn't going to hurt any kids." These days he says he's not around kids, as most of the children in his family are grown.

In college, Todd Nickerson says he wasn't able to pursue any adult relationships. Photo submitted

But soon after, a vigilante group called Perverted Justice, which partnered with Dateline to film To Catch A Predator, infiltrated Girlchat and found Nickerson's information. They outed him publicly, posting his name and photos on a site called Wikisposure. He says they also called people in his town and spread lies about him, including that he was in possession of child porn, and distributed flyers with his face on it.

Nickerson lost his job at Lowe's. His father also lost his job when his employers found out about Nickerson.

"They literally made my life as miserable as they could," he says, noting the shaming lasted for years.

He feared being physically attacked, but that never happened. He also claims cops never charged him with any crime.

On a positive note, however, he says being outed made him leave Girlchat. He's now a moderator on Virtuous Pedophiles, a closed online support group for pedophiles who say they're committed to not offending. An organizer told VICE the group currently has 1,845 members.

In light of his experiences, Nickerson says he's wary of vigilantism. He echoes the concerns of authorities who say vigilantes don't have standards or ethics to abide by.

"They can say whatever they want to say. If someone's coming there to meet a minor, that's not really a person who is completely innocent or anything," he concedes. "But I know that in some cases they would actually badger people, force people into it. We don't know that they're not doing that."

Todd Nickerson is now open about his status as a non-offending pedophile. Photo submitted

But he also believes continuing to stigmatize pedophiles can actually endanger children.

"Real pedophiles get that idea stuck in their head, they start to believe the myths. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for them," he says. "Society thinks we're the scum of the earth as it is."

The theory is bolstered by Cantor, who says people often offend after a long time of trying to abstain.

"They often know that there's something up, that they're different, and they don't want to be acting on it but they talk themselves into believing that it's not so bad, that a particular circumstance is an exception, that a particular is kid is more developed and knows more about what's going on," he explains.

Once caught, however, it serves as a wake-up call, and treatment can be sought out, sometimes from behind bars.

Cantor says he's supportive of the idea of wanting to prevent sexual abuse against kids, but he thinks the shaming aspect of vigilantism is counterproductive.

"If somebody is surfing the net looking for an inappropriately young partner and is all of a sudden going to get confronted with 'Look at what you're doing,' to me that's an opportunity for this person now confronted to start thinking… 'Do you want to talk to somebody about this? Do you want sex drive-reducing medications? Do you want a therapist to help you deal with these feelings that you can't express in a public way?'" he says.

"Rather than publicly shame, drive somebody further into suicide and depression, which essentially just drives people underground where nobody can support them." Mandatory reporting laws in Canada requiring a therapist to report on a client who is a pedophile if a child is believed to be at risk make it even harder for pedophiles to speak out, he notes.

Laforge admits that Creep Catchers might push a predator underground. But he thinks that's proof that more people like him are needed "until there's nowhere left for them to go."  

He says he can respect someone like Nickerson—a non-offending pedophile who is open about his condition so everyone around him knows. But he believes Creep Catchers are necessary for the people who won't be so forthcoming.

"At least people can say 'OK, you see this guy at the school, you see him at a park, you see him at the pool or something, at least you know you can watch your kids better'."  

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Here’s Why We Spent Months Investigating Canada’s Vigilante Pedophile Hunters

0
0

A particularly jarring scene from our upcoming documentary— Age of Consent—features Justin Payne, the subject of the film, in the midst of a confrontation with one of his targets.

If Payne's name does not already immediately ring a bell from his quick-hit coverage across Canadian newspaper covers and nightly news segments, he's one of those vigilante pedophile hunters you're more than likely aware of.

You know, the type of guy who spends hours upon hours setting online traps for alleged pedophiles to act on their urges. Then films his intense interactions with them and puts the footage online for a rabid audience. It's To Catch a Predator meets Jackass.

This is a part of a VICE Canada project investigating the impact of vigilante pedophile hunting in Canada.

Payne tricks men (they are nearly always men) with a fake kid's voice and a childlike vocabulary, sets up an in-person meeting, and to the life-ruining dismay of the predator, shows up as a fully grown (and very angry) man with a camera in his hand screaming things like: "YOU'RE HERE TO MEET A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL!"

In the scene I'm referencing, from our documentary which you'll see next week, Payne's ambush is witnessed by several bystanders in an Ontario suburb who applaud him, urge him to continue his work, and then violently threaten the alleged predator (who is all the while vehemently denying the heinous luring Payne is so loudly accusing him of).

So, is that the type of justice that we, democratic Canadians, are after?

VICE Canada has been exploring and investigating this question for several months.

Manisha Krishnan, senior staff writer for VICE.com, first profiled Payne in late 2015, which sparked a range of reactions in our newsroom that led to the series of stories we are laying out before you now.

We know it's important work to expose the mindset of these vigilante pedophile hunters who are proliferating across the country and the continent.

We were given unprecedented access to the obviously unregulated stings that these men go on night after night. And what was the most shocking, to me anyhow, was how many predators they're able to catch in a given night in basically any major Canadian city.

In a series of three incredible features, Manisha has investigated how creep catching became so popular, how some vigilantes have confronted the disabled, as well as an interview to discover what a non-offending pedophile thinks about the Creep Catcher phenomenon.

Next week, we'll have a feature-length documentary directed by Shawney Cohen—who made our painfully important fentanyl epidemic documentary last year—that will bring you directly into the world of Payne, the country's most "famous" pedophile hunter who has spawned a legion of copycats.

For now, you can watch this teaser. If you can stomach this, you can stomach the film.

We hope this series of stories, and the forthcoming film, will elevate Canada's dialogue around the efficacy of this breed of vigilante justice, the seething rage from Canadians everywhere that it capitalizes on, and the anti-hero allure that has got so many Canadians cheering the Creep Catchers on.

Let us know what you think.

This Comedian is Bringing Psychedelics to Middle America

0
0

"People aren't going to listen to some person with dreadlocks tell them about psychedelics. They're just not," Shane Mauss tells me. Mauss looks pretty much like somebody's grandson from the Midwest. Probably because he is.

But that benign appearance belies the fact that Mauss, by all accounts, has done a shitload of drugs over the past 20 years. For one, he claims he's experienced over 100 DMT trips—a lot for a drug that famed psychedelic advocate Terence McKenna called "the most powerful hallucinogen known to man or science."

On his currently-running 80-plus city tour, A Good Trip, he's taking audiences inside the mind and experiences of a man who loves drugs and the neuroscience behind them. In the process, he's helping to normalize psychedelics for audiences who, like him, may lack dreadlocks but carry open minds toward what may be a revolutionary tool for bettering lives.

"Most psychedelic users don't really need psychedelics. They've already gotten it," he said. "Let's focus on the veterans, people with PTSD, the children, people with drug addictions."

The poster for Mauss' tour. Illustration by Ramon Nazer

A Good Trip is sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (or MAPS), an organization at the forefront of medicinal psychedelic research. Dedicated to forging relationships with government bodies and conducting clinical studies on medical applications for psychoactives, their partnership with Mauss arrives at a fortuitous time for both parties. The past few years have seen unprecedented headway toward legitimizing psychedelics in medicine and science, and never before have drugs like MDMA and LSD seen as much interest by researchers and legislators as they enjoy today. And Mauss' comedic anecdotes, about everything from smoking weed for the first time to taking enormous doses of mushrooms, are helping audiences discover where their fears about psychedelics may be misplaced.

Mauss' endgame is not to become the Doug Benson of DMT, or a Ken Kesey-type figure, traveling from state-to-state in a Day-Glo bus (Mauss drives a Hyundai Elantra). His show is rooted in the same inquisitive approach to human behavior and the mind that drove his 2013 Netflix special, Mating Season. He doesn't use his platform to rail against legalization or criminalization issues, and there's no MAPS mailing list at the merchandise table. His comedy is also far removed from the goofball, stoner stereotype seen in earlier drug comedy icons like Cheech and Chong. Mauss is intelligent, likable and sharp, and by openly discussing psychedelics in cities like Minot, North Dakota and Norman, Oklahoma, he's helping to shift already-eroding American taboos surrounding drugs in a big way.

"He's discussing the challenging issues [surrounding psychedelics] as a culture," said MAPS executive associate Merete Christiansen, who agrees that because Mauss doesn't resemble what many think of as the typical acid user or "rail against society" on stage, he's helping to challenge stereotypes. "He's not necessarily making light of it." To MAPS, he's their funny guy from a small town in Wisconsin that hasn't fried his brain on the stuff—which, to many Americans, is a notable departure from drug lore.

Mauss' show aims to balance his psychedelic experiences with deeper analysis and a little science. And he's wary of being overly celebratory. "Someone could think maybe I haven't done enough?" he said. "The last thing that I want is to inspire someone to do some crazy shit. I hope I'm emphasizing that I want this to be in clinics. I don't think everyone should just be giving it a shot willy nilly. It's going to make the movement look bad when some rich white person's kid dies. That's why MDMA is illegal in the first place."

In November of last year, the FDA announced that it had approved MDMA for Phase III clinical trials, a drug's final step before being approved for prescription use. That research is set to begin this summer in a trial with over 230 participants; like many of the Phase II clinical trials that preceded it, the study will be funded by MAPS. The announcement was a milestone for the founder of MAPS, Rick Doblin, who began advocating for psychedelics over 30 years ago when he sued the DEA over MDMA's classification as a Schedule 1 drug. Before one of his show's intermissions, Mauss called Doblin to celebrate the good news, holding up his phone for Doblin to hear the cheers of 300 people down for the cause in the audience.

Between sponsoring Mauss' tour and other efforts, like sponsoring psychiatric harm reduction spaces at events like Burning Man, MAPS' efforts to culturally normalize psychedelics are paying dividends. "Even though something is difficult doesn't mean it's a bad thing. That's the struggle MAPS has had for 30 years in having these studies approved," said Christiansen. "We're not trying to tell people that psychedelics are right for you. We are creating the opportunity for them to decide for themselves."

And neither is Mauss, whose show is, more than anything, a social gathering for people who enjoy altered mental states and hearing about them. Mauss is no Timothy Leary; in fact, he's considered the very real threat of demagoguery. "I have people coming up to my afterwards asking to hug me and call me their Jesus," he said. "Please, don't. Be your own Jesus. I'm in town for a night. I can't help you."

I Tried to Find the Sketchiest Marijuana Dispensary in LA

0
0

Buying pot in the United States used to be a crapshoot: You'd call your dealer and take whatever strain he had on hand, without much semblance of quality control or selection. Even most early dispensaries were no-frills operations, with little more than four walls and a few shelves of product.

The times are a-changing, of course, and the slow creep of boring legitimacy has already begun its manifest destiny. As weed becomes more and more mainstream—now legal to varying degrees in 26 of the 50 states—the sketchier side of cannabis retail is being snuffed out to make room for hip, loungey clubs and Marlboro Greens on 7-Eleven shelves. These days, you can pick up your stash with a jaunt to the corner store, as easily as you would a bottle of wine, with police officers cheerily waving goodbye upon exit.

On the one hand, this is a good thing. Nobody should have to worry about getting robbed or going to jail for buying weed. On the other, do we really want to homogenize and sanitize pot the way we have with booze? Have we lost something from this wave of legitimization?

In Los Angeles, where I live, recreational marijuana became legal this week—meaning the gritty, shady dispensaries that are still left in the city will likely soon become shiny, trendy retail spaces. So I set out to see if I could find the last bastions of LA's sketchy weed dispensaries before they disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Photos by Connie Ha

MARY JANE'S COLLECTIVE

I started the day at my local shop, Mary Jane's Collective, in East Hollywood. It's not necessarily a sketchy place, but this being my main re-up location, I figured I could count on the budtenders to recognize me well enough to lead me somewhere sketchier.

Upon arrival, I saw a backhoe digging up the front parking lot. Stepping over debris to get to the front door, I wondered if I had been going to a secretly sketchy shop all this time. But then I remembered that truly sketchy places don't invest money into construction projects.

Inside, I asked one of the budtenders about the sketchiest dispensaries she knew. She leaned in and whispered that the dispensary across the street freaked her out. "There's, like, Día de los Muertos skulls and a death cult place attached to it," she warned. I thanked her for the tip by buying some THC-infused mints and crossed the street.

PAIN FREE SOCIETY OF CA

The neighboring shop was indeed adjacent to a Santa Muerte church, but I wasn't sure that constituted sketchiness. Inside, a bleary-eyed guard in a Kevlar vest with a pistol holstered on his thigh greeted me, took my ID and marijuana card, and waved me into the waiting room. The walls were painted with cartoon characters that seemed a bit daycare for an industry catering to the 21+ crowd, but I guess cartoons and stoners go hand in hand.

Once my paperwork cleared, I was buzzed through another metal door and entered the inventory room. The interior of this showroom was undeniably a bit dingier and dirtier than the previous location, but the inventory was nicely shelved and nothing seemed out of place.

This place didn't seem sketchy either, so I asked the guard where I might want to head next. He seemed genuinely concerned that if he sent me to "the ghetto," he might be putting me at risk of bodily harm, but he finally acquiesced and grimly gave me some cross streets in south LA to look for my next destination.

540 COLLECTIVE

South of the I-10 freeway, where I was headed next, is regarded as "the hood" by many of those who live north of that dividing line. But as we drove south, the only indicators of "hood" I saw were in the slight uptick of payday loan shops and homeless individuals.

Outside the stark black rectangle of a shop on Western Avenue, some guys in black jackets, who appeared to be security guards, were sharing a blunt. I chalked this up to more of a workplace violation than legit sketch activity.

Inside, 540 Collective was dark. Due to regulations requiring blacked out or covered windows, the lighting inside of dispensaries, including this one, is artificial and often dim. A few beams of natural light poked through cracks in the curtains and caught smoke in the air. Even still, the scene was more Renaissance painting than den of thieves.

The whole thing was pretty hum drum. The only real difference to other dispensaries I've visited was the lack of a metal buzz-door.

I explained the task at hand to a woman helming the tiny speakeasy peephole of a sales window. She gave me new pair of cross streets, along with the Cinnamon Toast Crunch bar edible I'd purchased.

CALIFORNIA WELLNESS CENTER

Just a few minutes east, I walked into a similar looking dispensary called the California Wellness Center. The posters on the waiting room walls assured me that "good buds stick together."

More metal doors, more buzzers, more barred windows, more drab interiors, more guards in Eazy-E-style security windbreakers. I was clearly not falling deeper and deeper into some sketch rabbit hole—instead, each new dispensary I visited was virtually indistinguishable from the last. The banal uniformity of each shop was starting to bum me out. Can sketchy shops even exist in a state where recreational pot is legal?

When I reached the counter, I bought some dealer's choice bud to help me ruminate on that question and asked where I should head next. The guy sheepishly offered up yet another set of guesstimate cross streets and wished me luck in my journey.

THE PLUG

The next dispensary had all the trappings of sketchiness on the outside—plywood behind shattered windows and minimal effort signage—but the inside was a disappointing step backward toward legitimate business and a crushing blow to my morale. Cute budtender girls, managers checking flower stocks, even receipts! I was back to the square one vibes of Mary Jane's Collective. Had I already passed peak sketch?

I asked a budtender my usual questions and she called over her manager to get ideas for my next location. As they packed my chocolate pretzel and fruity pebbles edibles, they gave me two locations they said were guaranteed to suit my needs, one in Inglewood, one on the outskirts of Downtown LA.

METRO GREEN MEDS

Half an hour of driving later, I came to the unfortunate realization that the Inglewood location had vanished into the ether without a trace. This was getting frustrating. I had not indulged in any of my cannabis purchases over the day's journey due to all the driving I needed to do. In short, I wasn't nearly high enough for this.

I drove Downtown to hit the alternate shop as a Hail Mary final play.

Something felt off as soon as we arrived. The shop was located in the armpit of a freeway on-ramp and I had to circle around a one-way street to find parking at the back of the warehousey building in which the dispensary resided. Once parked behind a detached semi trailer, I stepped over trash, human feces, and a gnarled guardrail before making my way through a hole in a chain link fence to the shop entrance.

Inside, I began filling out enough paperwork to refinance a mortgage. The squareness of the mountain of paperwork was offset by the docile pitbull laying on the couch next to me, occasionally lapping at my hand.

The door to the back room suddenly opened and out walked the owner, Michael Federici, a tanned, middle-aged Italian man wearing a leather jacket and gold chains. He took off his sunglasses and greeted me like an old friend. Behind him lumbered a guy in a velour tracksuit.

I told Federici that I was here to find the sketchiest dispensary in LA. "Whoa! Sketchy?" he replied, and I wasn't sure if he was feigning insult or was actually offended. He proceeded to give me the grand tour of his operation, telling me the skeletons of his past—opiate addiction and smuggling—along the way.

"I like to think I'm reclaiming a bit of my history by doing this," he told me.

The bright, spacious, high-ceilinged room he sold from was a far cry from the poorly-lit sardine cans from earlier in the day. And though it may not have been a space intended for socializing, Federici made it feel as welcoming as any dive bar. That is, the kind of dive bar with a back room customers should never go into.

As the cashier packed up my discounted top shelf greens, I felt no need to ask for a next stop. The universe had already gifted me an experience so classically, cartoonishly sketchy that I don't even blame those of you reading who don't quite buy it.

It's hard to find the sort of dubious charm offered by Federici and MGM; less a warning klaxon than a patina on a beloved pair of boots. In my heart, of course, I knew it to be a facade. There's no getting around the fact that as the illegality of a product diminishes, so too does the sketchiness surrounding the circumstances of its sale.

But MGM, with its pitbulls, track-suited muscle, and character of an owner with a less-than-kosher background felt as close to earnestly sketchy as one could hope to find in 2016. Like a Westworld general store, the glints of danger lurked around each corner, but it was pretty clear that none of the bullets were meant to hurt me.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Kissing the Cross: Photos of Romanians Having Their Homes Blessed by Priests

0
0

Top image: The photographer's mother-in-law and priest Felix during a blessing ceremony.

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Every year close to the Christmas holidays, my nan would call the priest to her home so he could bless it in time for the celebration of the birth of baby Jesus. She would call him again every time she redecorated for additional blessings. The priest would usually come with an assistant and walk around the house waving incense and splashing drops of holy water all over the place using dried basil twigs. At the end, we would all line up and kiss his cross and then he'd leave –the house smelling like he had just torched the place.

House blessing or house cleansing isn't just something my Romanian grandmother did – it's something people in many different religions and spiritual practices do. But photographer Remus Țiplea decided to focus on the ritual as it's performed in Romania, by following a Catholic and an Orthodox Christian priest around Western Romania, back in 2013.

"In a Romanian village, when you tag along with a priest or the mayor all doors are open to you," Remus explained to me. "But my role was just to document the ritual." Home owners request the blessing for many reasons – from warding off evil spirits to ending family fights in their homes. The priest doesn't ask for a fixed fee, you can pay what you like. The only rule is that you clean your house before his visit.

Scroll down for Remus' series on Romanian house blessings:


More from Romania on VICE:

Photos of Romania's Neglected Orphans Then and Now

Talking to Survivors of Last Year's Devastating Club Fire in Bucharest

Photos of Romania in the 90s, When Sheep Roamed Bucharest's Motorways

This Woman Can Tell You Who's Really Been Abducted By Aliens and Who's Faking It

0
0

Image by Steve Jurvetson via Flickr | CC BY 2.0

This article originally appeared on VICE France

Myriame Belmyr is a retired computer scientist, who claims she was abducted by aliens in 1987. These days, she heads CERO-France, an organisation that offers help to people who say they've experienced an extraterrestrial kidnapping – so-called "experiencers".

A few months ago, I spoke with Belmyr and a few others, who are convinced they have been abducted by aliens, and most seemed to still be traumatised by their memories. While it's easy to dismiss those incredible memories as a cry for attention or even psychotic episodes, there is research indicating that's not always the issue. Former psychiatrist and Harvard professor John Edward Mack studied close to 200 cases of people claiming to have been abducted. In an interview with French writer Stéphane Allix for the latter's book on extraterrestrial life, Mack explained that "when you hear someone with mental health issues recounting something that sounds like a psychotic episode, you get the sense that what they're saying never happened. [...] That's not at all the case here. [Experiencers] are of sound mind, they ask many questions, they doubt themselves. They describe a seemingly real, intense experience, a light, something happening to their bodies." Stéphane Allix went on to found INREES – an organisation researching unusual human experiences like near-death experiences and alien abductions.

To see what's so real about alien abductions and how experiencers deal with them, I called Myriame Belmyr. "In 2008, decades after my experience, I spoke with Stepháne Allix about abductions. Through him, I got in touch with other experiencers. There wasn't an organisation dedicated solely to helping people who'd been abducted at the time, so we founded CERO-France.

People who claim to have found themselves paralysed, floating and surrounded by little green men communicating via telepathy generally face a lot of scepticism in society. But Belmyr takes her role seriously. The organisation has 50 members, who all claim to have been abducted. She talks to them and coaches them.

"I've met people in a very severe state of trauma," she tells me. "Some have sought help from their GPs and have been on the cusp of being admitted to psychiatric hospitals." The first thing Belmyr does when seeing a potential new member, is investigate their claims. "We conduct a very in-depth evaluation with every person who claims to have been abducted. With a team of psychologists and hypnotherapists we verify all the details that have made a person think they have been taken."

One member of that team is Nicolas Dumont. He's the vice-president of CERO-France and a clinical psychologist. "The first thing to do when someone new comes in, is to conduct an interview to find out whether they're describing an abduction or something else," he tells me over the phone. That "something else" could be many things. "They could have been manipulated or abused, they could have become obsessed with the idea of alien abduction through the media – or they could have undergone a failed hypnosis."

After having concluded that someone might actually have been abducted, Dumont tries to detect common traits usually found in experiencers. In the interviews I conducted for my previous article, all experiencers described a feeling of time having stopped and all noise and air disappearing. Other common traits exist, but Dumont prefers not to reveal those. He doesn't want to make it harder for himself to weed out the experiences he considers real from the ones he thinks are fantasy.

Dumont admits that certain cases divide the CERO community. "With one of our patients, I'm certain that he's a compulsive liar, while many of our other experts think he was really abducted." Sometimes, Dumont will use hypnotherapy on his patients to try to remember what happened exactly, but it's not a step he lightly takes, because "it's possible to create false memories that way."

Most scientists stay away from the subject of extraterrestrial life. "It's not a very popular belief that aliens exist," Belmyr says, "so people are unwilling to compromise their careers by looking into the possibility."

In 2003, the COMETA report was published in French popular magazine VSD. The report was a study into unidentified aerial phenomena, put together not by tin foil hat-wearing bloggers but by a group of researchers. Among those researchers were André Lebeau, former president of the French governmental space agency, and Gilles Pinon, a senior figure in the French navy, but the report was quickly mocked by the French press.

Some astrophysicists have spoken up about the subject, like the now-retired Jean-Pierre Petit, who believes that mankind could be helped greatly by being in touch with extraterrestrial life. His views, unsurprisingly, aren't well-received within his former community. More recently, the French governmental body GEIPAN was founded in order to study reports of unidentified aerial activity in France. I assume that's great news for Belmyr, yet when I ask her about it, she's sceptical, to say the least: "GEIPAN knows all about the abductions and are in regular contact with the aliens," she tells me. "It's obvious."

The experiencers community isn't helped much by the conventional scientific community, but it helps itself – with CERO-France and other organisations like it. When I ask Belmyr what the aliens' ultimate goal of all those visits to Earth is, she tells me that it's "definitely for genetic engineering. Both in my own case and in others, I'm sure [that was the point]". She thinks that the aliens that took her have much to learn from us. "There are similarities between us and them, but they have their own way of life. I remember they told me that they were particularly intrigued by our emotions and our art. They don't know about any of that."

More on VICE:

We Asked People Who Claim They Were Abducted by Aliens to Draw Their Experience

We Talked to a Controversial Quebec Professor About His Search for Aliens

We Asked Alien Experts Who They'd Want as President if UFOs Landed


Child Refugees Share Their Hopes and Dreams for 2017

0
0

I'm sitting in a pair of thermal leggings, surrounded by Arabic dictionaries, listening to nine Syrian boys slowly chanting the same sentence over and over again. "The penis in the box." "The penis in the box." They are, I eventually realise, supposed to be learning prepositions: the pen is in the box.

In the next room, children from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, dressed in football shirts and donated raincoats, are designing a business plan for an imaginary cafe. In any other school this would be useful real-life advice, but here it feels like teaching a dream.

This winter I have been volunteering at a school for refugees on the Greek island of Chios. Under the twinkling of fairy lights and to the strains of Wham's "Last Christmas" I've been making jam sandwiches, learning the Farsi for "point" and teaching percentages to 16-year-old girls from Damascus.


The school, which was founded last year, is run by an organisation called Be Aware and Share, set up in response to the changing problems facing refugees after the 2016 EU-Turkey deal. To say that refugees in Chios have been banjaxed by the EU-Turkey deal is like saying haddock are a little put out by deep fat fryers. Since March, anyone found trying to cross from Turkey to Greece can be sent straight back, or even detained. If they manage to stay, they may well be stuck here for years without hope of ever reaching mainland Europe. It's all particularly perverse because, when I go outside for a cigarette, I can see actually see Turkey. The snow on Turkish mountains, the lights in Turkish houses and the smoke from Turkish chimneys.

But freedom of movement is the privilege of the wealthy. So while thousands of refugees have, over the last few months, risked life, lungs and loved ones trying to make it over to Greece from Turkey, for many of them it has been a fruitless journey.

As the Norwegian Refugee Council dispassionately puts it: "Those who arrived after the 20th of March are not allowed to leave the islands unless they get a special permission." They are trapped. Stuck. Held in a cold and wind-blown limbo, sometimes for years at a time, and often (in the case of the Afghan refugees fleeing a country ravaged by war) end up being sent back to where they came from.

The school was set up in an old brick building that, judging by the industrial-sized sinks, used to be a cafe. Its pupils are hundreds of young people who have fallen out of education while trying to walk, run and swim to the safety of Europe. Learning English, we hope, may help with future asylum interviews, and help if they ever find refuge in mainland Europe. But at the very least, it takes them away from the mud and metal of the camps for a few hours.

Some, like the 16-year-old Iraqi man who comes to school every week carrying a rucksack decorated with Disney's Hercules, haven't been faced with an exercise book since they were about eight. The young people here are clever, canny, polite, endearing, dedicated and charming, but many of them haven't had much opportunity to learn English and they sometimes struggle with simple mathematics.

There have been some very successful lessons. Vowel sounds, days of the week, a brief stroll through family relationships via Romeo and Juliet, a geography lesson in which everyone recognised the outline of Syria from a simple line drawing. But my favourite was when I asked the students to come up with a resolution, a dream or a hope for 2017.


Abdullah, a refugee from Syria who sits in a white T-shirt as the rest of us huddle around pod heaters in three jumpers and thermal socks, wrote out in clumsy, felt-tipped script: "In 2017 I want peace for all country, and I want go London."

Abdullah's classmate, a freckle-faced young woman from Afghanistan who I met one day down by the sea, wrote that "my dream for 2017 is to go to England, because I would like to be a policewoman". I wanted to hug her, and not just because she correctly used the clause construction "I would like". This girl gets the coach – which is laid on by the school – from the island's second refugee camp, Vial, about 9km out of Chios city, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to come to our lessons.

Vial is a grim place by all accounts. From the outside it looks like an industrial estate, surrounded by wire fences, with young men wandering aimlessly between bits of dismantled cars and puddles, as guards stand at their kiosk frowning at the entrance. When the primary school children approach Vial by bus they fall silent, looking at the large metal gates. When the EU-Turkey deal was first passed, Vial was used as a detention centre. Refugees detained in Vial said it made prison "look like a five star hotel".

On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we teach students from Souda, the refugee camp now made infamous by the Golden Dawn fascist attacks in November. Souda is basically a collection of hastily-assembled white plastic tents in the moat of an old castle, which bends round to the sea. Some of my students are sleeping under nothing but nylon, on a hard pebble beach, in the snow, just metres from the very ocean they arrived from.

One of these Souda students, Manir, is about the height of my elbow, fair-skinned, with a close-cropped haircut, pale blue down jacket and a drawn-on earring (I think he borrows one of the felt tip pens in the entrance hall to trace it anew every morning). His dream for 2017, according to the small note pegged to the classroom wall, is "to come to England and meet Cristiano Ronaldo". Manir helps me hand out the jam sandwiches and half a banana we give out each morning and afternoon break time, while his friend, Mahmoud, pours water into small plastic cups, on which the smiling face print has been nearly rubbed away by so many young fingers.


There is far more to a school for refugees than what happens in the lessons, of course. Much of what Be Aware and Share is doing is simply giving young, traumatised, disoriented and disappointed people the opportunity to be in a safe environment. For students, it's about wearing your donated Brecon Climbing Club hoodie during the gnawing cold of a maths lesson. It's about inviting new European strangers to drink tea in your white plastic UNHCR tent. It's about shouting out the days of the week as you walk back to your camp arm in arm with a young boy wearing sandals in December. It's about watching a room full of Farsi-speaking teenagers fall silent in front of a David Attenborough documentary about iguanas and snakes.

In an ideal world, English volunteers like me would be able tell our classes that, one day, they will be able to come to London, on a double decker bus, like they hope. We would be preparing them for jobs in shops, on building sites, in hospitals, where they can use the sentence structures and vocabulary we spend all day practicing. Raabia would get her New Year's wish and be able to watch a film on television. But that doesn't seem likely – not at the moment, anyway.

Every month a few families pass their asylum interviews and get a place on the ferry to Athens. But many more are left behind on the marble slabs of the dock, watching the boat pull away, without them. Most of them, for now, are stuck here, on this small wind-blown island, eating out of tin foil trays and dreaming of a future where they can travel to Europe and see their cousins.

@NellFrizzell

More on VICE:

Compassion Fatigue: Inside the Refugee Camp We've Already Forgotten

What's Happened to the Refugees Who Were in the Calais Jungle?

What It's Like to Photograph the Refugee Crisis

I Ghost Everyone I Fuck (If They Don’t Ghost Me First)

0
0

All illustrations by the author

My dating life is tough for me to navigate, because different parts of me are looking for different things. I want to start the New Year by trying to address the root causes of why I'm perpetually single and why I think that's the right thing for me. Maybe there will be some positive and relatable reflection by some of the people who read this. More likely, though, it will just be a bunch of Facebook people commenting on how I'm a typical millennial loser who isn't a real journalist and that I don't deserve love. That's chill too. I agree with you for the most part. I don't think I'm better than anyone, so just let me have my Carrie Bradshaw moment.



Actually, only part of me is attuned to Carrie Bradshaw's eternal quest of finding real love. Somewhere inside of me I'm looking for that, but the moment I start to acknowledge it, I push it out of my mind. The dominant side of me is a shitty fuccboi who thinks he's somehow above love as a concept. I think of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street when he says that love is a fiction created by people to keep them from jumping out windows. I probably shouldn't reference a movie villain's outlook on love, but I watched it last night alone in bed, eating coconut cream pie, after I hooked up with a guy on Tinder, and it really struck a chord.

I use Tinder a lot. It works well for me because I'm an extreme introvert who reads as an extrovert online. Before I meet someone in person, I'll usually bring this up, in fear of being a borderline-catfish. Tinder works because I don't feel very weird ghosting people I meet on it. Usually, I'll go on a date, probably hook up, and 30 percent of the time, never have contact with them again.

But ghosting works both ways, and I don't feel that hurt when people on Tinder do it to me. It happens all the time. Maybe ghosting as a practice is symptomatic of our culture, which glorifies immediate satisfaction and condemns accountability. Or maybe they just didn't like fucking me. Regardless of its cause, my life is haunted by ghosts. Sometimes I can feel their presence, like when they like one of my selfies after we haven't spoken for months, trying to contact me from the other side. I'd bring in a medium to help with a reunion, but I'm not into threesomes. Once you've ghosted me, you're a ghost forever. No take backs.

Sometimes I'm the ghost. When I stop contact with someone, I expect to be treated like I'm invisible. If I see someone I've ghosted at a club, I don't want them to acknowledge me. More than once I've ghosted someone and regretted my choice. I stop talking to people for a lot of reasons. A lot of times, I'm just in a bad mental state and communicate it poorly. When I'm feeling better, I'll jangle my chains at them and hope for a response. Almost always the damage has already been done, and it's too late. I repeat this cycle often.

Relationships scare me. I have a lot of trust issues, and my cynicism can be pretty toxic to be around for extended periods. This is one of the reasons I am such a solitary person. It's hard to find a balance between wanting to be alone and wanting to have a lot of sex with people.  

Another of my (plentiful) major flaws is how obsessive I get when I like someone. I get fixated and jealous. It brings out this awful person in me that I really don't like being. I don't know if that is what other people call "crushes," but I try to avoid those at any cost and keep things as casual as I can with the people I sleep with. When I start turning into that crazy version of myself, I disappear.

I have been running a pretty long con on myself for a while to get away with avoiding emotional commitment, and up until recently it's worked. I've been getting these "crushes" on people who live far away from me. That way, when we meet, the ghosting is implicit because it's geographic. We can have our little fling and leave it at that.  This plan worked really well until I flew across the continent to meet a guy and brought my feelings home with me. Now I'm obsessed with him but can barely stalk him from this distance. And that worries me. If I don't want to ghost someone who lives on the opposite seaboard, I'm totally susceptible to falling for someone in my own city.

I don't think ghosting is necessarily a good thing. It's problematic. But maybe it's just a natural evolution of our current modes of interaction that technology has shifted us towards. The anonymity I'm afforded by being behind a screen makes the impulse to ghost easier to act on. We have to accept that we're all someone's ghost.

This is the part where I twirl a pen bemusedly in my mouth, look at the ceiling in thought, take a deep breath and type, "And I couldn't help but wonder… If we're all someone's ghost, are any of us really living?"


Jaik Puppyteeth is an artist in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

0
0

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Obama Urges Democrats to Fight for Affordable Care Act
President Obama has encouraged Democrats to fight to save his Affordable Care Act in a meeting with party lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Obama reportedly urged Democrats to "stay strong" and refuse to work with Republicans on a replacement bill. Vice President-elect Mike Pence met with House Republicans to talk about ways to repeal the law.—The Washington Post

Four Teens in Custody After Livestreamed Torture Video
Four teenagers are being held in police custody in Chicago after a video streamed on Facebook Live appeared to show the group beating and cutting another teenager who was bound and gagged. Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson called the torture seen in the video "brutal" and "sickening." Charges against the four 18-year-olds, two male and two female, are expected in the next 24 hours.—NBC News

Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico Pushes for US Statehood
Jenniffer González, the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, has launched a bill for a referendum on statehood for the US island territory. It would ask voters in Puerto Rico to choose between independence or becoming the 51st state by 2025. Gonzalez claimed statehood would result in an extra $10 billion a year in federal funds.—AP

US Department of Labor Sues Google
The US Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against Google for the company's refusal to provide information on its equal opportunity program. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) will ask the court for permission to bar Google from government contracts. A Google spokesperson said complying with the OFCCP request would reveal "confidential data."—Reuters

International News

Israeli PM Calls for Pardoning of Convicted Solider
Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said he supports the pardon of Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting a wounded Palestinian dead. Israel's president, Reuven Rivlin, is the only person who has the power to grant pardons. Rivlin said he would wait until the legal process was at an end before making a decision on Azaria, who faces sentencing next week.—Al Jazeera

Turkey Accuses Syrian Regime of Ceasefire Violations
Turkey has accused Bashar al Assad's government of breaking the terms of a ceasefire agreement in Syria. Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, has warned that continued assaults on the rebel-held Wadi Barada area by government forces and Iranian militias threaten the peace talks planned in Kazakhstan later this month.—Deutsche Welle

Former PM of Kosovo Arrested in France
The former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, has been arrested by police in France on a warrant issued by Serbia. Haradinaj is accused by Serbia of war crimes dating back to the Kosovo conflict of the 1990s, but Haradinaj has been acquitted twice of war crimes at the Hague. Kosovo's foreign ministry called the arrest and Serbia's extradition request "unacceptable."—Reuters

Baghdad Car Bombs Kills Nine
A car bomb detonated at a fruit and vegetable market in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad has killed at least nine people and left at least 15 others wounded. No group has claimed immediate responsibility for the attack, but ISIS has carried out a series of bombings in Baghdad in the past week. More than 100 people have been killed.—AP

Everything Else

Chance the Rapper to Play Governors Ball
Chance the Rapper, Childish Gambino, Rae Sremmurd, and Wu-Tang Clan will all play this year's Governors Ball music festival at Randall's Island in New York City. Rock band Tool will play its first New York City gig in 11 years at the June festival.—Rolling Stone

Carrie Fisher Fans Want Leia Designated a Disney Princess
Fans of the late actress have launched a petition urging Disney to make Princess Leia an official princess. Signed by more than 30,000 people, it asks the company "to do away with the rule that an official Disney princess must be animated."—TIME

Iggy Pop to Appear in New Terrence Malick Movie
Forthcoming Terrence Malick movie Song to Song will feature cameos by Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Florence and the Machine. It stars Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara, and Ryan Gosling as two couples navigating the music scene in Austin, Texas.—Noisey

NASA Announces New Asteroid Missions
NASA has announced two new missions to asteroids for its Discovery Program. A spacecraft named Lucy will journey to six Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, while Psyche will go to 16 Psyche, the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet in the asteroid belt.—Motherboard

Airbnb to Lose Millions after UK Cracks Down on Rentals
As Airbnb begins to comply with a new UK law limiting rentals to 90 days a year, new analysis shows it could mean $400 million less in bookings. AllTheRooms has revised predicted annual revenue from Airbnb bookings in London from $1.24 billion to $812 million.—VICE News

Dementia Linked to Living Near Heavy Traffic
A huge new study by Canadian researchers has revealed people living next to busy roads with heavy traffic are more likely to develop dementia. It shows air pollutants getting into the brain via the blood stream can lead to neurological problems.—The Guardian

What Comes After Standing Rock?

0
0

A cheery spirit of industry runs through the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. You can hardly walk 50 feet without coming across someone sawing wood or pounding in tent stakes or lugging a crate of canned tomatoes to the kitchen. A small army of independent documentarians-turned-butlers scurry from tent to tipi carrying thermoses of coffee and bowls of powdered soup to tribal leaders. The lawyers in Legal Tent deliver their spiels about bail funds and the Fifth Amendment with steady compassion. The cooks in the kitchen smile as they labor over steaming, industrial-sized stockpots filled with cabbage and well-stewed meats. But the most important enterprise—and certainly the only truly accurate marker of whether or not a bunch of people can stay dug in the tundra—are the shitters. When I arrived at camp in early December, the economy of shit had mostly been handled by clusters of meticulously maintained porta-potties, each one stocked with hand sanitizer and toilet paper. This, I was assured, was only temporary—that very week, a specialist had arrived with experience with hot and cold composting toilets.

A city was being built, and although everyone agreed the city should grow, not everyone knew why. In one of the long lines for the porta-potties, I overheard a conversation that reminded me, absurdly enough, of my time in the old Condé Nast cafeteria, where I would listen in on young editorial assistants chatting about what actress had agreed to be in a sponsored-content video or what Grace Coddington had said or how they had gotten out to Montauk without having to step foot on a bus. The topics were different (as, of course, were the clothes)—the campers were talking about all the reasons why their terrible bunkmate hadn't come for the right reasons—but the tone carried the same performative, perpetual exasperation that the world and all its ugly demands had dared to get in their way.

Read more on VICE News

A University Professor Wants You to Look at Porn for Science

0
0

Any excuse to look at porn is good.

A new app being developed by researchers asks users to look at pornography for the purposes of scientific research.

Professor Taylor Kohut specializes in social psychology at Western University and is working to develop an app that he hopes will map the specific characteristics of an image to determine if it can be considered pornographic and why.

"The Porn Genome Project is an attempt to gain a better understanding of content differences in pornography," Kohut told VICE.

The app has users flip through images and identify the various details. When they get bored of one, they can check out another.

The idea stems from Kohut's background in investigating the mental representations of pornography. This involves techniques like distilling concepts down into discrete, identifiable features. 

"I borrowed that set of ideas and applied it to the concept of pornography," said Kohut, "and showed people different images and asked them to describe to me what they saw in them and what followed was a large list of about 800 different features in that particular study. Everything ranging from "I see a table lamp" to "I see trees in the background" to "there's just a naked woman sucking on a man's penis."

The goal of the project is to distill "porn down to its constituent elements so we can figure out what sort of porn is similar to one another and what sort of porn is very different from one another," said Kohut.

The researchers hope to develop a system of categorization that better organizes and separates porn, creating more concrete boundaries for things like violent porn versus spanking. The idea is that by understanding pornography at its most basic level.

The researchers set up an Indiegogo page to help gather donations to create the app and use a satirical approach to generate interest in the project. "We could've gone doom and gloom, 'porn is everywhere; omnipresent and destroying the world,' but we thought why don't we do something just more light-hearted," said Kohut.

Kohut explained that getting formal funding for this type of project can be tricky. His team instead developed a pseudo-research company called Proctor and Lever and a website called PornforScience.com as an amusing alternative to the usual anxiety-inducing dry, clinical vibe.

He says that in his experience, he's noticed that studies that could potentially paint porn in a negative light is favoured amongst grant and funding agencies.

"It's really hard to get money to do basic research about porn," says Kohut. "Doing porn research is kind of a controversial thing. Some people believe that people like me should be doing research in the first place. Other people take issue with the types of research that I do or the conclusions that I come to following the data that I collect."

Kohut says that he hopes that his research will eventually account for differences in porn content and ultimately benefit future research on porn.

"We all know that different sexual representations contain different elements, but those differences aren't very often accounted for. We're aware the differences matter, but we're not sure how to show that, how to test that, what differences are most important for what outcomes in part because we don't have a very solid organizational structure."

Follow Lisa Power on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images