I work hard to make myself invisible – a pair of jeans and old sneakers, a black sweatshirt and jacket, a woollen hat and Buff scarf – but the Harry Potter specs let me down. I’ve not got another pair. Jesus. I tell Jay. He smiles and says he was going to put me in ‘uniform’ anyways and tosses me a zipless grey hoodie. It has COBRA’s snakehead logo and CHILDREN ONLINE BATTLING REAL ABUSE in large letters on the back. Explains our presence to local gangs, he says, who may otherwise take us for rival hoodlums. His wife, Saz, smokes non-stop. Our destination is a shithole.

‘That’s a lot of masturbating right there,’ Jay says as he gestures at his ‘paedo-pack’ in the backseat. ‘There’s four DVDs in here with 20GBs of evidence and printouts of all the correspondence between the suspect and the hundred kids he “pulled in” to watch him doing it on Facebook.’

Saz tells me they handed this evidence to the police months ago, but the police never acted on it. ‘Something isn’t right about this predator,’ Saz says, ‘but police don’t say what it is.’ What they did tell us is not to ‘sting’ tonight’s suspect because if we do, we will get arrested instead. It is why Jay will hold tight to his ‘paedo-pack’ seeing as we may need to do a runner.

Saz shows me a screenshot of the suspect’s face. He looks young and Mediterranean. Has she told other team members that I’m there only to observe? I ask. Yes, she says and tells me not to worry; that she’s told their security detail to keep an eye out for me ‘so he knows to protect ya, just encase’.

Too anxious to do any serious academic work in the hours before meeting up with Jay and Saz, I scoured recent news coverage of paedophile hunting instead. I read about the suffering of families who were as stunned as anyone to discover what was happening under their roofs. I read about suicides following public spectacles of humiliation. What I didn’t know was that at least one of these would be happening on my watch and nor that they follow an upward trajectory, from a dozen suicides between 2017 and 2020 to seven in 2022, and ten in 2023, not counting any unsuccessful attempts.¹ I read about cases of mistaken identity; about the suspect who bit the tip of a hunter’s finger clean off. About how hunters themselves are vulnerable to attacks online and know it. About how they use Article 24a² of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to justify a ‘citizen’s arrest’ (a term that has formally been replaced by ‘arrestable offence’) and often do so inappropriately.

I read about a predator avenging himself on the hunter who exposed him by telling the police that she posts home-videos of herself abusing her own children, and so why not arrest her instead. So, the police came knocking one afternoon. She said the sight of the police at her door made her sick to her stomach and she barely made it to the toilet. Did the police not know that the predator had sworn to exact revenge on her, and that this is what revenge in the hunting community looks like?

I read about a survivor of abuse who’d helped to convict twenty-eight paedophiles only to discover a doctored photo that showed him calling for a lowering of the age of consent to 6 years of age. I looked at the photo. Frankly, the doctoring looked like a botched job: a slogan saying ‘paedophiles are people’ had been photoshopped onto a placard that originally said much the opposite. But the damage was done. Using Twitter, trolls called for the hunter to be hanged for his sins. In response to complaints, Twitter merely said that the trolls’ actions hadn’t constituted a violation of rules against abusive behaviour, so there.³

I wrote an email to the dean of my university department and also to my police contact, warning them not to be surprised if I ever fell foul of similar tactics and telling them I’d be out with hunters for the foreseeable future. The police were quick to reply, wishing me good luck and reminding me that I have their number should I feel the need to debrief anything I witness. My dean told me I’m crazy.

I cracked open the window ever so slightly as I drove to the small town where Jay and Saz told me they live. I hadn’t been given an address and, after an hour of driving, pulled off the road to text Jay for directions. I figured that information would be dispensed on an as-needed basis and so bided my time, tuning the radio into a comedy programme to take the edge off. Half an hour later, I pulled into a suburban cul-de-sac to see Jay rummaging in the boot of his hatchback. He gave me the biggest smile and why not get in the backseat of their car?

During our drive they brief me on what will happen on arrival in London.

Tonight’s predator has a particular compulsion: he likes being watched by kids while knocking one off and has been at it for over 300 consecutive days. Jay and Saz tell me of another predator like that, who filmed himself ‘at it’ with vegetables. Because of this, the decoy no longer eats vegetables and refuses to go down the vegetable aisle when food shopping.

‘Fucking idiot,’ says Jay, who’s had to view all sixty-four videos in putting together the evidence pack.

Having left our car in the parking lot of a supermarket, we walk into a nearby housing estate. Jay tells us to stay out of sight as he and Vince walk up to one of the apartment buildings and press the suspect’s bell. When no one answers, they push every single button on the intercom until told by one irate occupant that the suspect isn’t at home and, no, he hasn’t seen him around for a while now and, no, he doesn’t have any idea where he could be, and could they please go away.

Not one to give up easily, Jay uses a trick of the trade: he phones the suspect pretending to be a package delivery driver needing to confirm an address. But the predator tells him he doesn’t remember ordering anything and hangs up. So Jay texts him to say that the package will be sent back to the warehouse if he does not confirm his address. Jay says that the predator is onto us, and so the hunt is on.

‘His brother was arrested a few weeks ago,’ Jay says, ‘and done for weapons possession and so our predator doesn’t want to be found.’ To hear that the brother has also been picked up is news to me if not quite the surprise I thought it would be to the rest of the team. They have long suspected that predators’ families are often implicated beyond what they let on.

Jay meanwhile has other tricks up his sleeve and suggests we head back to the car for a sandwich and Red Bull and for him to talk us through Plan B. The popularity of VPNs had made it difficult to locate suspects, Saz says, but that there are no limits to how ingenious hunters are. Once, she says, they identified a suspect’s location by way of two distinctive trees that were in a photograph by the predator posted online and, on the satellite version of Google Maps, had looked just as distinctive. On another occasion, they wore hi-vis jackets and marked off a bit of road and pretended to start roadworks while doing reconnaissance in a neighbourhood they were sure contained the suspect. On yet another they told everyone they were following up on an insurance claim for a road traffic accident and going door-to-door asking if anyone knew where a certain so-and-so lived. It is how we once ended up with a wife ratting out her husband, who happened to be watching TV in the living room behind her. The point is that they will do what it takes to get predators off the streets, Saz says, ‘so they can harm no children no more’. She tells me all this as we walk back to the car.

Plan B involves a night drive across London to an address where, Jay says, the parents of the suspect’s girlfriend live. There isn’t much to be gained by trying the suspect’s parents seeing they may be in on it, and so Jay figures we might as well aim for the girlfriend’s family instead. Even if it means coming up empty-handed, her parents will want to know what their daughter’s boyfriend has been up to. And so, an hour later, Jay and Vince knock on the door of an end-of-terrace in a neighbourhood like any other.

When a middle-aged man opens the door at last it’s red faces all around. The woman we are here to protect isn’t a young girl but the man’s elderly mum, and no, she doesn’t have a boyfriend, and yes, her last name is a common one in Greece, and no, he doesn’t think it okay to take one’s chances and turn up unannounced. To have found two women sharing the same name in a city of nine million isn’t quite the discovery Jay had hoped it to be.

Police meanwhile are ‘blue lighting’ the neighbourhood. Jay, Saz, Vince and the rest of the team make their escape to regroup a few minutes later for smokes on a nearby street corner. No one is in a hurry to go home even though it is now midnight, and they all know it will take at least another couple of hours to get home. Police do a couple of drive-bys and, at one point, slow down for a closer look. One of the hunters makes a half-turn away from the road and towards a garden wall. ‘Can’t afford to be seen by the Old Bill,’ he says.