Paedo Hunt

"People think it's open season on kids right now."

—This is Wonderland

Nothing better to whip up some outrage in your story than making the badguy a paedophile. More cynical works about this trope will often note that getting people whipped up into a mob-frenzy—over any subject, but particularly one as emotive and genuinely shocking as this—can be a very good way to distract and manipulate them.

No real life examples, please; All The Tropes is not a gossip site.

Examples of Paedo Hunt include:

Comic Books

• Though it was only revealed retroactively, the seduction of Gwen Stacy by Norman Osborn may qualify. While there was no hunt on him for that reason, it did stir up the hate for him.
• Used as a part of the setting in The Filth; Feely is claimed to be a pedophile, which has him almost torn apart in the streets.
• One story arc of The Outsiders has Arsenal and Co. teaming up with John Walsh to hunt down a massive organized paedophile/child prostitution/slavery operation. The arc began with one of the female team members admitting to have been a captive of this gang during her teenage years.

Film

• Hard Candy is a big game Paedo Hunt.
• A short version is done in Pay It Forward. Haley Joel Osment's character decides to run away from home. He's shown at a sleazy bus station counting loose change for a ticket. A man approaches him, talking rather creepily and reaching out to touch him. Then Kevin Spacey's character appears, drags the guy into the bathroom and beats the shit out of him.
• The original Nightmare On Elm Street was vague about the subject, but The Remake gives Freddy a clear element of paedophilia, and thus this trope plays into the parents hunting him down.
• Little Children involves a convicted sex offender being released from prison and moving into a neighbourhood. This is soon followed by one of the other locals spreading warning posters, vandalizing his house and directly assaulting him.
• O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill kills the man responsible for the death of her parents at age eleven. Because he was a paedophile, she managed to get into his bedroom alone with him for the killing.

Literature

• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Goth Opera features an in-text sort-of example from just before paedophilia became the media go-to moral panic; in it, the Doctor encounters a Christian evangelist leading a mob in hunt of 'Satanists' (actually vampires) who he claims molest and kill children in their ceremonies; the Doctor comments that most sexual molestation actually occurs at the hands of someone the child knows, such as a family member or friend. Later, the evangelist is forced as a result of mental control to admit that he actually molests his own daughter.
• This is a recurring theme in the works of former Whitehouse member Peter Sotos.
• Acid Row has the premise of a social worker is visiting the house of a convicted sex offender in a lower-class neighborhood when a child comes up missing. The actual offender is harmless and ineffectual, his father is the dangerous one, and an innocent neighbor is more or less torn apart by the mob.
• In Batman: The Ultimate Evil, Bruce Wayne discovers that his mother had investigated child molesters and child pornography as a social worker. The book revolves around him going after the same group his mother had found out about, who are now organizing sex tourism to a thinly veiled Thailand stand-in.

Live Action TV

• Occasionally discussed on This Is Wonderland.
• In Desperate Housewives, Lynette causes the neighborhood to riot over a suspected pedophile, causing his invalid sister to die of a heart attack. At the end, he informs her that he had never acted on his tendencies because of his sister, and he was now "free" to do that.
  • He may also have been screwing with Lynette's head for revenge. The ending is rather ambiguous about it.
• In the first episode of Blake's 7, the titular hero Blake is slandered by the Federation, who accuse him of child molestation, in order to subvert any revolutionary support he might acquire.
• Subverted (via some parodying of the Double Standard) in an episode of The George Lopez Show; George's wife works the neighborhood into a frenzy over a convicted sex offender living in the neighborhood. When a neighborhood mob shows up on the offender's doorstep, they find out "he's" a "she" - a former teacher who had sex with an underage student, and had served time for it. The crowd (with the now-doubly indignant exception of the wife) disperses with basically an "Oh. Carry on, then."
  • She also says she was going to come around to their houses and explain it personally, but as long as they had turned up as an angry mob, she would do it then. It was a mistake, and she was in therapy for it.. Of course, if she had been a man, she might not even have gotten that much out. George asserts that it can't be rape since the boy would want it. His son later asks for advice on girls. George says to be confident. You see where this is going. He has a talk with Max later, admitting what he said earlier was wrong.
• Played straight in a Saturday Night Live skit in which a computer instructor leads a seminar about MySpace. One member of the class was a concerned mother and the rest were obvious pedophiles. One humorous exchange:

Teacher: [looking at one of their user names] "NaughtyGirlHotStuff." You know, I don't even want to hear your explanation, but you should know you're gonna get a lot of teenage boys wanting to meet you.
Pedophile: [badly feigning shock] Oh no, I don't want that! Why would I want that? Let me just fix that. [mimes typing on the keyboard with his hands about three inches above the keys]

• • In another skit, an adult goes trick-or-treating "as" a sex offender, bringing with him the papers for his neighbors to sign as part of his "costume". He, of course, insists that he's doing this for the realism while dancing around the question of whether or not he is an actual sex offender.
• In an episode of Being Human (UK), Mitchell mistakes one of his unlabeled discs of "vampire porn" for a Laurel and Hardy movie, and lends it out to one of the neighborhood boys. The result is a massive pedo hunt, complete with (misspelled) graffiti, eggings, angry mobs and being spat in the face.
• The Daily Show mocked one of these Paedo Hunt specials by pointing out how, in the "dramatic re-enactments," the online predator was typing with one hand.
  • This is, of course, due to the fact he was using the other hand to enjoy delicious whipped cream straight out of the can.
• In In the Heat of the Night an older male school teacher (with one count of a past sexual offense, as was found out) was accused of molestation by a child, and despite the lack of evidence, and partially thanks to an overzealous-for-sensationalism reporter, it quickly got out of control as people harassed him and shot at his house. Eventually the guy was driven to the point of killing himself. It was found out that his previous sex offender charge was a trumped-up issue from him mooning someone as a teenage prank, and in the end the child had only accused him to cover up the molestation actually done by his father. Tragic stuff.
• Arguably Anonymous' Crowning Moment of Funny: Getting Oprah to warn America that there are "Over 9,000 penises" raping kids across the country.
• CSI episode "Harvest" used this trope. A 12-year old girl is reported missing and later found dead. There seems to be evidence implicating a convicted paedophile in the region. In reality, the girl's family were covering up her death, and they used an internet watchdog site that lists the locations of such people to look up the closest one to implicate.
• In Dexter the titular Serial Killer Killer makes an exception to his "only kill killers" rule in order to kill a paedophile who is targeting his step-daughter, Astor.
• A more literal application of the trope happens in one episode of Without a Trace. A young looking woman poses as underage bait, a fledging, wheelchair bound unofficial cop (an accident prevented him from getting a badge), and a cameraman (who was later revealed to have been raped during a home invasion when he was 12) set up a sting operation to catch paedophiles, a la To Catch a Predator. Unlike the Chris Hanson manned operation, this version is more vigilante based and not exactly full proof to prevent people from escaping, which one guy managed to do. The cop goes after him, and gives him a Reason You Suck Speech, which drove the pedophile to shoot himself with the cop's gun. To make things even better, when the cameraman realized the cop was about to tell the police about what happened, he tried to kill him to shut up, though was unsuccessful. By episode's end, the cop survived the assault but by killing the cameraman.

Music

• Insane Clown Posse has a song, "To Catch a Predator," concerning a man who uses the show's methods to lure pedophiles to his house, whereupon he kills him. As the chorus puts it:

I'm probably gonna burn for this
There's no lesson to learn from this
There's nothing I'mma earn

But it sure is fun!

—"To Catch a Predator"

• In the Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip song, "Thou Shalt Always Kill", one of the commandments is:

Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile. Some people are just nice.

• The Peter Paul And Mary song "Talkin' Candy Bar Blues" is about a man caught up in a hunt after innocently offering a child a candy bar.

Video Games

• The in-game internet in Grand Theft Auto IV includes a Schmuck Bait website titled "Lil' Lacey's Birthday Surprise." Visiting it immediately grants the player a 4-star wanted level.

Webcomics

• The Perry Bible Fellowship lampshades this trope with Kitty Photographer.

Web Original

• Russian segment of LiveJournal once tried to pull it in the "best" American Moral Panic style, with a deranged spearhead to look "moderate" in comparison and use as a scapegoat if things go too wrong. They had bad luck with it: before it gained much momentum, their trailblazer psycho ran with the standard "anyone who defends a witch is a witch" schtick straight into a member of Runet equivalent of Kibology. Which is to say, someone not easily impressed by internet lunatics, let alone intimidated. This helped to quickly attract a lot of attention to the whole affair - right at the part where the facts are being dug out and paraded, such as: this dude has a wife older than him, while Mrs. Psycho was divorced from a husband almost half her age. Naturally, much finger pointing and howling laughter ensued. And, of course, it became obvious that the "abuse team" sorta kind supports a crackdown, but is willing to be wonderfully tolerant and understanding when the rabid ones harass other users, which helped to start one more wave of exodus to other services.
• The Other Tropes Wiki's headlong rush to embrace censorship in 2012 was framed as a Paedo Hunt, using this trope as both a rallying cry and as a tool to discredit dissent and dissenters. It conveniently allowed the P5 to tar any work they disliked as "pedoshit" and anyone who disagreed with their agenda as a "pedophile". While admittedly TVT had attracted an unsavory and frankly creepy element that did need purging, the extent to which the campaign was (and continues to be) taken—and the targets it was pointed at—suggest it is more a political/economic tool than a kneejerk Think of the Children reaction.

Western Animation

• Satirized by the Paedofinder General character in Monkey Dust. Remember: "Under the basic principles of English law, every man is innocent until speculated guilty!"
• South Park:
  • The kids accused their parents of being pedophiles to have them taken away, leading to the town being nothing but the kids.
  • Averted in the episode "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy," where upon learning that Ike's female kindergarten teacher is having sexual relations with him, many of the townspeople simply congratulate him on "scoring".