Do you feel sorry for this guy

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He set up a sex date with what he thought was a 13 year old girl, bringing with him three boxes of condoms. He was almost 20, and did not have a relationship with her, but sought her out on the internet. It was a trap though, and that was who was waiting for him when he arrived.

I don't think the video gives enough information for me to answer the poll? Does he deserve what he got? I don't know, did he end up getting a jail sentence for this? Community service? Just the embarrassment of being on TV?

The other thing to note (more from a legality standpoint) is that this is clearly some sort of setup. It is kind of impossible to tell if this were a real situation would his actions been the same. I mean, they are doing this for TV setting up what I assume are fake identities of children online and kind of egging people on? Or does this TV program intervene at a later stage in all of this? If the whole situation was fake to begin with then this TV crew could have just made the 'conversations' he had online too perfect for him to really second guess things. I don't know.

Do I feel bad for him though? No, not at all.

Interesting points. I was confused though part of it and thought he had already done something.

I thought Rich was chatting with a real 13year-old girl & they had intercepted the messages somehow & caught him when he went to meet her. I didn't know the whole thing was a set-up.

This may be a little off-topic but How can someone get a job pretending to be a 13year-old girl online to catch predators I think I might would be fairly good at it because I have some understanding of the psychology of pedophiles, I'm very immature & into tween culture

why dont you have a seat over there.

But it's still a completely arbitrary age. If there really was some age at which people could be tested as "grown up", some sort of biologically provable age, then we wouldn't have ages of consent varying between 14 and 18 years old.
So those various ages are arbitrary and determined by local customs/society/beliefs/whatever.

To give this some sort of perspective - until relatively recently the age of consent in the UK for homosexuality was 21 - yet at the same time the general age of consent was 18.
At 18 people could vote, get married & have children, and be trained by the military services to kill - so if they're considered "adult" enough to do all these things, why would homosexuality apparently need those extra three years? (and, BTW, this never did apply to female/female relationships: only male/male)
It's a ridiculous, irrational nonsense and I'm glad it's all been levelled out.

But how do you feel about the age of consent being 16 here, as opposed to 18 where you are - do you think 16 is wrong or too young - if so, why? (genuine question)

He brought it on himself.

Thanks for telling me.
Why'd he need three boxes??

Well, he brought it on himself. To be fair though, I've seen a guy and thought they were hot, and they ended up being 13... People are overgrown these days. It can be hard to decipher age.

it was a chatroom, and they purposely tell him she was 13 to prove that he is a pedophile or whatnot.

There has to be some reason they chose that age. It's not like someone was like: "Give me a number between 10 and 20"..."18, that sounds nice"..."ok, lets make it law!" I bet there was some research and science put into it. If I wasn't lazy, I'd probably google it about right now.

I wasn't trying to argue the gay thing, I was trying to argue the ability to handle the pressures and consequences of sex at a young age, therefore that argument isn't really proving the point....it's a whole nother argument that I don't want to get into.

If you really want me to think this out and reply genuinely, it'll take some time.

The age on consent is useless if you live in an area where statutory rape is is seldom prosecuted unless the sex is/was gay like my area. There's lots of cases in my area of 13year-old girls running around with guys in their 20s or guys in their 30s moving in with 15year-old girls after they get em pregnant. The age on consent in 17 here & parents can not give permission for their kids to have sex yet about the only time the cops bother arresting is when the parents have some kind of political connections or they're rich or something. The cops refused to do anything about the 19year-old guy my 12year-old neighbor was screwing even thou he had been giving her booze & drugs. My point is that enforcement of the age of consent is extremely voluntary & Rich probably would of never of gotten in trouble if he would of met a 13year-old girl offline in my area instead of going online

Probably not as much as you (or I) might like to see, and I suspect that most of it is just some vague society-driven consensus thing.
Otherwise there would likely be a common age of consent globally, if it was at all possible to pin it down through research.

I appreciate that, and neither am I - but I mentioned it only to illustrate the irrationality involved in making these "age of consent" decisions, and that something utterly bizarre happens when sex is included in the equation.
If it's deemed acceptable (back then) for heterosexual 18 year-olds to take on the responsibilities of marriage and raising children, why would two 20 year-old gay guys be deemed incapable of having reached the same emotional maturity, to the extent that the law must step in and forbid any such relationships?

The same arbitrary decisions were made then, and they are now.
It's only ever "what seems acceptable" for any given society at the time and has little or no basis on fact - and as nick007 mentions, the enforcement of it is equally arbitrary.

i completely agree. dude dug himself a grave. the best way to escape statutory rape charges is to avoid having sex with underage people (yes i know that it isn't always possible to tell age, but i am speaking about the people who know a partner is underage and do it anyways).

however, i couldn't care less about how he chewed his gum.