Am I reading this correctly that the address where they found the child was where her mother’s boyfriend was living?
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
Sex offender registries are just registries. They only work if someone decides to actually do a query. It might prevent them from getting a childcare job, but it doesn't really prevent them from accessing children at all.
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
“I’m very, very bitter that the likes of Savile and the rest of them were allowed to continue. I did my bit, I said what I had to. But they didn’t air that.”
> an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live
I listened to a podcast that talked about this encampment years ago. The people living there are quite literally trapped. They aren't allowed to move to another city because of their parole and the city they are in has no other location that isn't within some distance of schools, playgrounds, etc that they're forbidden from being near.
One person interviewed had some petty offense like peeing in public when drunk and talked about the violence and crime that occurred in the camp. Listening to him made me so angry at the injustice that people caught in edge cases are subjected to. He drinks too much, pees on the side of a building, and is now forced to live among rapists and predators.
The OP mentioned high school students in totally normal relationships being criminalized. Another example given in the podcast ep was teens sending nude selfies to their bf/gf that got charged and convicted for distributing csam. This is not how enforcement of these laws should work. I'm glad I grew up before smart phones cause I was really stupid when I was a teen.
The only case of public urination -> sex offender which people can point to is Juan Matamoros. He claims this, but the actual case is too old to verify it, and we should not take his word for it.
Arrested in Massachusetts in 1986, charged with two counts of open and gross lewdness, sentenced to two years.
As of [0] lived in Florida, and was in jail for violating probation on a charge of cocaine possession with the intent to sell.
From the article:
Paul Mishkin, the Boston lawyer who represented Matamoros in 1986, could not recall details of the case this week, but said it was clear the judge considered the incident very serious.
“He [Matamoros] told his side of the story to the judge, but clearly there was evidence that made the judge disagree,” said Mishkin. “A two-year sentence in this incident is a fairly severe sentence. You’d have to think there’s evidence to support that.”
It's a weird grey zone of laws where the beaches are not officially nude beaches, but they are advertised this way. Many are run by the federal park police. Most anti nudity laws are state laws and as a result, there is kind of a loophole with enforcing it.
Of course, the act of being nude in public can make many believe they have been assaulted when it's just nudity.
Right but I'll be honest, I've never thought about looking up the people I've dated in the past. No one really talked about it when I was younger. I don't remember my mother telling me to do criminal background checks on people I'm seeing.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
Back when my wife and I were renting, we only found out our landlord was on the list because his parole officer stopped by and asked if he'd informed us as he was legally required to do.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
Honestly I am surprised more real estate agents don’t already bake this into the workflow. Thinking about Zillow as well. There should absolutely be a way to identify all the folks during your home search (buying or renting) that are on the registry.
Of course everyone is ultimately responsible for what they purchase but with the commission earned on a few % off a 500k+ transaction I would expect them to do it.
I had a friend threatened with this by a cop. I was there. We had been drinking and he wanted to change his oil at a Jiffy Lube. Unbeknownst to us there was a park on the other side. He just got a ticket but the cop made the threat. It doesn't disprove your claim but it is an example of why the belief might persist
> I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
When I was in high school, our school police officer once gave our class a talk about how to stay off that list. He strongly warned us against sending nudes, because he claimed 18-year-olds getting nudes from their 17-year-old girlfriends was a common way for 18-year-olds to get on the registry.
So, no it's not a concrete example and it's not as non-sexual as public urination but it's still a thing cops are telling young adults to take seriously.
Right, the registry is public in most places, you can just check. When I open it for some of the places I've lived & surrounding areas it is overwhelmingly very serious crimes, the majority of them against minors, a large percentage minors under 13 which is a different category of offense here.
You sometimes need to get familiar with the local legal jargon to interpret it correctly, for example where I live there is no crime "rape" it is recorded as "sexual battery," things like that. And don't assume something is not serious because it is "second degree" or whatever, look up the statutes or sentencing guidelines. I have to seek pretty hard to find anything that could even plausibly be something like an overcharged public urination.
The first one I found, I looked up the case, and the offense took place at 3:40 pm at a city bus stop two blocks from a high school. Pretty decent odds that guy tells all his friends he got booked for trying to take a piss. He might even say that on reddit and HN.
I think you only see the high level offenders in the stuff you can search.
And you say it occurred in the middle of the afternoon at a city bus stop. Pretty hard to do anything serious there without a million people calling 911.
I'm not sure that's what you meant to link to. The description there is beyond lurid, and that guy only ended up on a registry after a lot of shenanigans.
Are you talking about the link in your parent comment? It's a judgment that overturns the guy's placement on a public registry. (He does seem to be placed on a different registry not accessible to the public.)
He is appealing his placement on the registry on three grounds:
1. He can't be guilty of a qualifying offense, because he has no prior conviction;
2. The officer who put him on the registry did so solely on the basis that his risk of reoffending was "moderate", when it was also necessary to find that he posed a "moderate" danger to the public;
3. He did not in fact pose a danger to the public.
And the judgment rules against him on argument 1 while ruling for him on arguments 2 and 3, nullifying his registration.
Given that this judgment overturns a judgment below, it is evidence that you can be placed on a public registry for purely spurious reasons. That's what happened originally, and it's what was affirmed in the judgment below.
A peer comment [1] reviewed the guy's history, but the comment ended up auto-flagged because of content. If this guy isn't on the sex offender registry, then it's largely evidence that such a thing is reserved for the absolute worst of the worst.
I see nothing wrong with exhibitionism so long as it's mutually agreed upon. This guy was reported exposing and "playing with" himself on the order of dozens of times with nonconsensual partners, so it's likely that it's happened hundreds of times.
I don't think this is socially acceptable behavior in 'normal' society. And in response to his deciding to visibly 'rub one off' (as I believe this term is what results in auto-flagging) towards his neighbor, his response is that she was a "trigger" for him. So he himself is already claiming that he can't control himself, which is more less the entire point of such registries. Imagine you have daughters, let alone a wife. Would you want to live across the street from such a person?
And again I'd emphasize he actually got removed from the registry. So imagine the sort of behavior required to stay on one. It's damn sure not just urinating in public or whatever.
A peer message quoted the PDF of the things he did, before finally getting put on a registry. It wasn't just being naked in his home to say the least. The message was auto-flagged because of its content.
It's a stupid meme. Public urination, like actually taking a piss in public while no one is around you, is likely going to be a ticket for disorderly conduct if a specific charge for it doesn't exist. You won't get an indecent exposure charge unless you're purposely exposing yourself to others, it requires intent. Sometimes flashers will use the excuse of urinating for their intentional exposure or will lie that their indecent exposure charge was due to public urination and not because they were really masturbating in plain view. There probably have been prosecutors that have tried to slap an indecent exposure charge on an innocent public urinater but like everyone else says, they can't find any proof of it actually sticking.
> some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.
About 0.3% of the adult population is on registries in the US.
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
> But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender.
It’s not a mistake, it’s a convenient assumption to make until it’s proven otherwise, especially when you have basically no other information to go on.
I have no doubt these investigators are intelligent enough to have considered that possibility.
There was an infamous case in the Netherlands were two children were horrifically attacked in a park and it turned out that TWO pedos were at that location at the time. They got the wrong one.
I think what is confusing is likely that the investigators/detectives were probably trying to make sure that the girl was actually in the house where the sex offender was registered or technically living, and not maybe kept somewhere else. A lot of detective work is building the case, but also confirming what you believe is actually true and you need the evidence to also request the warrant on factual grounds. They could have busted in the door of that house and found that there was no such brick to be found anywhere and the girl was sold off to someone else or something like that.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
No, parents do not always "know" about child sexual abuse.
I cited a study about this elsethread[1]. And "Lucy" was young (no older than 12, possibly as young as 7) when the rapes began, which correlates with a reluctance to disclose.
It is possible that the mother knew, but it is far from certain. The article didn't provide that context, because it chronicled detective work that led through a different chain of clues to crack the case. An obsession over maternal guilt has arisen here in the comments that was not present in the article.
No one wants to admit that their child was raped, even if they are open to the possibility — so your assertion reduces down to "there often is a realm where they should have known".
Because the article doesn't give detail, we don't know. The mother could have forcefully spurned explicit disclosures from her daughter. She could even have participated in the abuse.
But there's also a possibility that since the perp was clever enough to hide identifying details while publishing CSAM online that he was clever enough to hide abuse from those close by.
I would condemn participation but forgive ignorance. Other commenters here will never forgive the mother no matter what.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
Bringing the full weight of the legal system down on all parents whose children were harmed by third parties, regardless of whether the parents even knew anything about it, is monstrous cruelty.
Pray tell where did i say that all parents should be responsible whose children were harmed by a third part? I’m specifically talking about this case.
Unpredictable random acts of violence happen. Would be lunacy to punish the parents for that. On the other end of the scale here we are talking about abuse ongoing for years. By someone who the mother brought into the child’s life. Somewhere between those two ends of the scale i run out of sympathy for the excuse of “she didn’t know”. Where exactly the bundary is I don’t know. What i know is that in the scenairo described in the article i strongly believe we are in the “she should have known” territory.
Think it through. Do you think that the kid who was praying for someone to come help her, and for whom the law enforcement officers were sufficiently concerned about that they started learning brick manufacturing, do you think that kid was not at least a little bit off? You know, just enough for their mum’s to become concerned and start looking for an explanation?
You call what i say monstrous cruelty. I tell you what i think is monstrous cruelty: no kid, ever, in the history of humankind has ever had the opportunity to consent to being born. Giving life to a kid is a choice. Especially in this day and age. By choosing to father a kid or give birth to a kid one becomes responsible for the wellbeing of said kid. How far and how deep that responsibility goes can be debated. I strongly believe that the parents (both the mom and the dad) is responsible who they bring into their young kid’s life. They are responsible for knowing what is going on with the kid. (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.) The parents are also responsible to have a relationship with their kids where they would be confided by their kids if something goes terribly wrong. So the kid would go ask them for help, before praying for some help comming from who knows where. These are basics. And these are separate but interlacing failures on the part of the mother. And that is why i think what she did (or didn’t do) is monstrously cruel.
I'm reminded of the Gene Weingarten's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning article, Fatal Distraction, on parents whose children have died from hyperthermia after being left in cars[1].
Similar to this case, some people believe that such parents should be criminally liable, and that there cannot possibly be any extenuating circumstances — despite the correlation between the rise of back-seat children's car-seat laws and the prevalence of such deaths.
> Think it through.
I have. The article provides very little to go on, and it is not hard to imagine that an abuser who is clever enough to publish CSAM material online for years without getting caught is clever enough to keep the abuse hidden from the mother and manipulate a child into keeping their trauma secret.
> (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.)
There are vast numbers of parents who do not find out for years[2]:
73% of child victims do not tell anyone
about the abuse for at least a year.
45% of victims do not tell anyone for
at least 5 years. Some never disclose.
Given how often sexual abuse happens, we're talking about millions of parents. I do not believe that every last one of them is morally culpable because they did not "know the large stuff, like for example are [their children] being sexually abused" and that they should be criminally charged.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
I dunno. The skeeziest people I know would show up squeaky clean on paper, and several of the ones I trust the most have some kind of shit in their past, at least on paper.
I agree that the singling out of the mother for condemnation in this comment section is conspicuous and dismaying — thank you for pointing it out. Nevertheless, I would offer the father the same grace that I think the mother deserves, and I think you will be sympathetic.
We know little of the mother's circumstances, and we know basically none of the father's. He may not even be alive. He could be an "absentee", or even an abuser himself — we have no information. But he might also be active in Lucy's life yet tragically unaware of his daughter's plight.
The whole thing about people getting put on the sex offender registry for public urination is a myth and there's no verifiable cases of it happening. There are two cases that are relatively close. The first is James Birch, who pled guilty to indecent exposure for peeing on a Taco Bell because he was representing himself and didn't understand that meant he'd have to register as a sex offender. He realized his mistake and the court let him undo the plea and the charges were dropped. The second is Juan Matamoros, a meth dealer from Florida who claimed in the mid-2000s that the reason why he got put on the Massachusetts sex offender registry in the 80s was public urination. Due to the age of the case and Massachusetts privacy laws the court records aren't publicly available and his lawyer from the 80s responded to a request for interview about the case with "no judge I am aware of would allow someone to be put on the sex offender registry for peeing in public".
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
Are you entitled to a jury trial for peeing in the bushes in the USA?
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
95% of cases are settled before reaching jury trial. Usually a plea bargain for criminal cases. Settlement for civil cases. Or dismissal. The other 5% are expensive.
Generally speaking, there are two levels of crime in the US; misdemeanors and felonies. Both will land you with a criminal record, but a misdemeanor-only record will not show up on some standard background checks and does not remove your right to bear arms or vote, for example. Felonies are much more serious, and generally mandate a minimum prison sentence of 1 year unless plead down, while the sentencing for misdemeanors generally caps out at a year and typically just gets reduced to fines and community service, or a short stint (e.g. a couple weeks) in the local jail instead of a prison.
In some states, first offense non-violent felony convictions (e.g. exceeding the speed limit while fleeing police in a vehicle) can be expunged from your record when you turn 21 (if you were convicted and served out your sentence before turning 21). Otherwise felonies generally stay with you for life.
We have civil offenses, the most common example would be minor traffic offense (speeding but not recklessly, etc). These were criminal at one time, but arresting people for minor speeding was deemed inappropriate.
Then we have misdemeanors - everything from reckless driving through basic assault (no injuries, no weapon). Usually/always <1 year in prison as the max punishment. Some financial crimes. Usually don't appear on basic background checks, but might on details checks (like when working for a bank or the government).
Then there are felonies - assault with a weapon, major financial crimes, etc. Typically >1 year prison sentences. As noted, these can impact your rights as a citizen and they will appear on most background checks.
As I mentioned in another comment, district attorneys frequently charge as many individual crimes as possible as a tactic to get cooperation/plea from the accused.
For example, you get pulled over for DUI/drink-driving. You're blotto, and you get out of your car and try to walk away. Police tackle you. The chargeable offenses would be at least...
- whatever initial infraction caused the traffic stop (speeding, swerving, whatever) - that was probably civil.
- The DUI - a misdemeanor unless it was excessive or a repeat offense
- "Fleeing and eluding" or equivalent for walking away - misdemeanor, usually.
- Assaulting a law enforcement officer (by forcing the police to tackle you) - automatic felony in many states.
The DA will often accept a guilty plea on everything up to the felony assault, or reduce the assault from "against a LEO" to normal assault (non-felony) to clear their plate.
No idea if this is common in the rest of the anglo-sphere, or anywhere else.
Unfortunately in the US we do in fact go so far as to criminalize urinating in public. It's weird to me that speeding (up to some limit) in a school zone is ranked below pissing in a shrub along the road.
> the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).
The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.
There are a lot of women out there drawn to criminals of every kind. The primary demographic of true crime shows are women for a reason, not to mention the letters murderers and such receive. I would be curious to know why this is, and if it happens in other cultures too.
Relatively speaking there aren't plenty of women in prison for violent crimes. It's about a 9:1 ratio. Men obsessively sexualise everything in our patriarchal society.
You've been downvoted into grey-blivion because that claim is wrong. It is an example of the underlying supposition that the behaviour of men and women is identical. This runs counter to the findings of psychology and sociology.
You could still run the sofa customers list against a list of known offenders but is there a federal list? Maybe the number of states where the sofa was sold was to large and getting the full list not feasible?
Sorry, but the wording isn't confusing, I think you just didn't read it properly. All they knew was a girl, somewhere, was being abused. They didn't know who her mother was or, obviously, who was taking the pictures.
I mean, from the sound of it you start out with literally a picture, so hindsight is obvious, but they didn't know who was living in that house until really close to the end.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
The investigators will be able to calculate how many rounds of abuse the victim suffered. The more it happened, the less likely it is the mother was unaware. And if course, the victim can tell us directly whether the mother knew. If so, she deserves a decade of her life in prison as well.
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
> But it was estimated that from 30% to even 80% of victims do not purposefully disclose their misuse before adulthood.
[...]
> Arata found an inverse relationship between the disclosure and severity of abuse. Subjects reporting contact sexual abuse were significantly less likely to disclose it than those reporting non-contact sexual abuse.
> The duration of sexual abuse has a significant impact on its disclosure – the longer children are abused, the more hesitant they may be to disclose their abuse.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Completely agree. It shouldn't be treated as an excuse but it's silly to ignore this as a HUGE risk factor. Probably should be considered when making policies etc.
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation.
Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners.
One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically.
I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives.
Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing.
You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés.
It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
The tell-tale phrase of a soon-to-be victim in a relationship with an abuser is "he's not like that when we're alone", not "I can fix him".
There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.
Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.
An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.
The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things.
There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth.
There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
The second most recent video from the YouTube channel you linked uses a "triggered feminist" meme image from 2016.
The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.
I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.
_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.
Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.
We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.
If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.
There's a reason why "nice guy"
is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.
Both the "nice guy" and the "asshole" are insecure. The latter is just better at masking their insecurities in such a way that others mistake it for confidence.
This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.
Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context?
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al.
(2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu-
dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler
et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked
from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether
they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim-
ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very
broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the
effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica-
tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater
than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges
according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the
original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait
characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan-
guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable
body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified
as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
I think the point OP is making isn't "it's strange that the mother had such a boyfriend", but rather "it's strange that so much forensic effort was required to suspect the boyfriend when he should have been an obvious first guess".
I mean, there is no official database of “boyfriends”. Even after you identified the girl, and found the mom, how would you figure out if she has a boyfriend, and if so who?
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
Uhh. No. No, we're generally not drawn to abusers. It's the other way around, abusers are drawn to those at risk of abuse. Maybe don't pose ideas formed through confirmation bias as truth?
If you look at the dating history of typical abusive males, they have a long list of women who they've been involved with. In comparison, if you take the median male, their dating history involves a few chance encounters, one or two actual relationships, and a lot of struggle with loneliness. As a matter of statistics, women are very much attracted to abusive men, and not attracted to normal men who are not abusive. There is some level of personal accountability with that.
source? Even if said statistics are true, there are plenty of other explanations. For example, the abusive relationships may not last as long, the abuser might have multiple partners at the same time, the abuser might be more confident, or the abuser realises it's much easier to force or pressure a vulnerable woman into a relationship
> and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children
Huh. It, uh, sure is a choice to declare you deliberately only date women with underage children and then blame those women for being too stupid to recognize when they're dating dangerous men. The added bit about men getting away with abuse because women let them is also something.
Abusive men deliberately find vulnerable targets, exploit them, and then blame them.
> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house