On a late evening in a shopping centre carpark in Northern Ireland, a middle-aged man stands with his back to the wall, surrounded by a group of men wearing tactical vests and branded hoodies.
The group calls itself Child Online Protection Enforcers (COPE). It is just one of several groups operating in Ireland. Based in Northern Ireland, COPE operates on both sides of the border.
They put it to the man with his back to the wall that he had come to meet what he thought was a 14-year-old girl, having spent several months chatting to her on WhatsApp.
There never was a 14-year-old girl coming to meet him. The half a dozen or so grown men are here to meet him instead. The person operating the '14-year-old girl' account was an adult decoy with COPE.
Prime Time has spent several months speaking to and following COPE and another similar group operating across the island of Ireland.
They are so-called paedophile hunter groups who say their entire purpose is to identify child predators online and publicly expose them before handing gathered evidence to the authorities.
We met with COPE as they prepared to confront one man, but remained at a distance. As their ‘sting’ progressed, Prime Time viewed the livestream from a location nearby.
Online, the group’s leader, Jay Hunter (a pseudonym), barked questions at the target. It was part interrogation, part performance for the hundreds of people watching on the group’s Facebook page.
Most of the questions being asked by Jay pertained to the reams of pages the group had retained of the man’s conversation with the decoy. These have all been neatly arranged in a folder to be handed to the PSNI along with a USB stick containing other relevant information.
The person who operated the decoy account for COPE was a middle-aged woman who used the name Julie.
Julie told Prime Time that there are strict guidelines for decoys within COPE, and around how they behave online. The first is that they can never make the initial request to connect with another profile. They also must then reveal their age within the first three messages – this is usually given as 12, 13 or 14. They also can never be sexually suggestive or initiate any kind of sexual conversation. That, COPE says, must come from the "pred".
In this case, the man initiated what Julie calls a "long groom" over a period of months. It began as mostly innocuous chat about each other’s day.
Later, telltale red flags began to emerge, like him instructing her how to lock the chat so her mother wouldn’t see it on her phone. It slowly veered towards a suggestion that he teach her about how adults pleasure each other.
Crucially, they arranged to meet in a public place and then go back to his home. Messages show the man asking the decoy to wear short pyjamas for when they would lie beside each other in bed and he could show her "the adult stuff."
As the sting progresses live on Facebook, the online feed is flooded with comments from what is a very dedicated following community. Users express thanks to the COPE team and have their say about what they understand the man to have done.
He has not been arrested, charged or convicted but he is facing what critics describe as a form of trial by social media in real time. That is one of the main criticisms of ‘hunter’ groups like COPE.
The man is not being interviewed under caution, he has not been advised of his rights. It is nevertheless livestreamed and, in most cases, these videos remain online unless authorities seek to have them removed.
Jay told Prime Time that he is not concerned about the presumption of innocence being lost in actions like this.
"We know the charges that he's facing. He knows the charges that he's facing. And people say, yes, ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but we're handing the authorities every single proof that we have that he has been talking in a sexual nature to innocent children online," Jay said.
COPE has a long catalogue of previous stings. Hundreds of them.
They tend to follow a pattern. There is usually a moment when the target realises the impact that this will have on their life. Often, they admit to some or all aspects of the accusations being levelled at them. With many groups in the UK and Ireland, though not all, that often comes amid a stream of invective and verbal abuse.
"What's very sad about that is the way they treat the people, the way they speak to them, the way they drive them down into the ground, the way they treat them," says Mick Moran, CEO of the Irish Internet Hotline, a national reporting service for illegal online content in Ireland.
"Among teams that I would have managed in this space, I wouldn't tolerate that type of language. You learn to treat them with human rights at the centre of it."
Mr Moran has spent three decades working in child protection, previously with An Garda Síochána and Interpol. He is deeply concerned about the methods used by ‘hunter’ groups.
"The risks are massive," he says. "The risks of evidence destruction, the risks of public order outrages, the risk of suicide by victims, the risk to witnesses, to perhaps children that this person has access to, that this person is actually actively abusing. All of those things, this type of activity, vigilante activity, has no place in a democratic society."
While Jay Hunter is aware that his approach to confrontations has been criticised, he says that he will not change it.
"I just cannot talk to a paedophile nicely because when I see what they put innocent children through, no paedophile deserves to be spoken nicely to. I cannot change. I just cannot. It's just the passion I have for protecting children," he said.
Evidence gathered by COPE and similar groups has been accepted in courts in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Britain, and used in cases that resulted in convictions and prison sentences.
Mick Moran accepts that the type of work needs to be done but is adamant that hunter groups have no business doing it.
"What they are doing should be done, but it should be done in a proper, structured manner by the existing institutions and structures that exist in society. It shouldn't be done by caped crusaders running around the roads confronting people who have a sexual interest in children," he told Prime Time.
In the carpark, COPE have phoned the PSNI and two blue-light cars arrive in short order. Some of the officers put the man in the back of their car. Others take statements from the COPE team members and Jay hands over the ‘evidence pack.’
In the immediate aftermath he tells Prime Time that ultimately, he is glad that this man was speaking to a decoy and not a real child.
"People can describe us as vigilantes, but our only weapon is a camera," Jay says. "If we were vigilantes, we would be turning up probably masked, probably with baseball bats, we almost certainly wouldn't be phoning the police. We do it the right way, our only weapon is a camera, and we do phone the police."
As the PSNI drive the man away from the scene, day has turned to night and the streetlights have come on.
Jay Hunter is still livestreaming on COPE’s Facebook page. He turns the camera on the departing squad car and addresses his followers.
"There he goes, guys," Jay says. "Another one down. We’ve another two to do on Sunday."
If you've been affected by any issues raised in this article, please go to rte.ie/helplines.
Watch Conor Wilson and Isabel Perceval's special report on the 29 September edition on Prime Time on RTÉ One & RTÉ Player at 9.35pm.
