Volunteer work for a multi billion dollar company leads to this kind of shit all the time. Why would someone volunteer to work hours a day for a company that could easily afford to pay them? It's because they are getting "paid" in other ways.
They aren't (I am NOT speaking from experience), it's either a disorder of attraction (appearance/personality-wise) or a power complex and control thing where adults/the older party will always have control over kids/the younger part. It's why certain backwards communities have child wives and prioritize family over a formal education, because it's easier to control uneducated and inexperienced victims. People won't whine about being abused if they don't know they're abused, which is why awareness on the topic and education is so important. Raising kids in environments where healthy interpersonal relations and teaching what should be expected as good and what manipulation looks like.
This is actually the mentality behind the currently budding push to stop talking about "pedophiles."
I've seen a good few people bring it up and they're always downvoted to shit but the replies are always in the realm of "nah fuck pedophiles" and none of them really seem to get the actual point - pedophilia is a reason, and abuse, even sexual abuse, occurs for many different reasons. The biggest problem in the Epstein situation is not people who are attracted to children (pedophiles,) the biggest problem in the Epstein situation is people who sexually abuse children. By focusing on "pedophiles," we're directing our attention toward a subset of the populace that does not fully align with the people we actually want to target, that being the people who abuse children. By identifying our targets via attraction, we run the risk of missing the real unifying thread in every case of child abuse, sexual or otherwise, especially in the Epstein case, which is power.
Essentially, rather than directing our focus to find and catch "pedophiles," (though we should absolutely be prosecuting cases of abuse like those in the Epstein files and detracting from this is not my point,) we should direct our focus on creating a society where those with power are transparent and accountable to those without.
Why have Sunday School in a separate location from the parents, for example? Every church I have ever been to absconds the kids away to a separate room for Sunday school, far from the adult service. This is a systemic issue that creates an opening for abuse of power with no accountability. No one can see what happens at Sunday School except the kids and the youth pastor.
Maybe the youth pastor became one because he's a pedophile and wants to abuse children. Maybe he became one because he's genuinely religious, but thinks of religion all wrong, thinks of God as the ultimate authority first and foremost and sees it as about power, and wants to wield the authority of God himself via a position in the church. Maybe he's genuine and really doesn't want to hurt kids at all.
The question only matters because he's given unsupervised time alone with children and generally presumed beneficent in his actions. Remove that, and it stops mattering why he wants to be a youth pastor. Put Sunday School in a room next to the service with a wide window so parents can glance over and see what's happening at any time, and suddenly it's irrelevant, because he's never given the opportunity to abuse in the first place on a systemic level. We not only prevent the youth pastor from ever having the chance to hurt kids, by doing so we make the job less attractive to people who would want to. Rather than focusing on catching the youth pastor if he offends and punishing him, we simply create a systemic structure wherein offense against children is not functionally possible. We create visibility, and therefore accountability, and prevent the action from ever occurring in the first place.
That's just a small-scale example designed to be easy to visualize, but we have similar problems across the entire structure of our society.
Focusing on pedophiles is either nothing but an effort to clean up after abuse that has already occurred without properly preventing it in the first place, or a witchhunt where innocent people will be attacked for supposed thoughtcrime. There isn't really any inbetween because there isn't any way to know what people feel - we can either catch innocents in the large net we cast while trying to catch pedophiles before they abuse, or we can wait until we are certain by their actions at which point a child has already been harmed.
Child abuse is about power, not pedophilia, and we really should stop focusing so hard on the pedophilia aspect of all this. This was allowed due to systemic power structures that allow large scale abuse, and child abuse is itself only one of many forms this abuse takes. While we should ABSOLUTELY be seeking prosecutions (or as a society doing whatever else is necessary to see justice done even if we have to do it ourselves) the focus should be on dismantling the power structures that allow this abuse. Otherwise, even if we prosecute the whole batch today, there will be a new batch cropping up tomorrow.
We can see now the kind of true horrors the power structure of our society allows. We can choose to focus on that singular horror and on punishing those who commit it... or we can choose to focus on changing the structure that allowed it so it never happens again. Not defending pedophiles at all, but in my opinion we really should be focusing on systems, not people. We can focus on people once the abuse has occurred, and we should absolutely prosecute them, but prevention comes first and prevention requires we address the underlying power structures and the openings they create for abuse.
This incident will go down in the history of this site. I don’t really know what to feel about the whole situation anymore because it’s really shocking.
•
u/AI_660i only exist here you haven’t seen me anywhere elseMar 10 '26edited Mar 10 '26
man i was part of this shit 2 months before it happend and i should have just trusted my gut tbhW
EDIt: highjakcing this comment becuase people dont want to scroll so far,
This is always why I am extremely careful with who I associate with on the site. What scares me is that there are probably many others like him but are protected or haven’t been called out on a public scale yet.
I honestly think it’s a combination of loneliness and Not being able to hold stable conversations beyond sex. I’m starting to slowly realize that we are really antisocial as like a race of people because pretty soon that’s gonna be a lot of these GenZ dudes they’re gonna be in teenage subs trying to pick up teenagers if they don’t get their shit together.
Right? Have no clue why this thread popped up in my feed, but after reading that I was like, how insecure you have to be to act like that to a total stranger lol
who would’ve guessed the reddit mod that lacks enough sense to not dive into a short lived intense long distance romance with a catfish also lacks enough sense not to be a weird freak to other people
not that predators are always obvious nor does lack of social skills automatically mean you’re a horrible person etc etc but whatever yall know what I mean
I know it's not about the wife story, but I believed from the start that the whole thing was fake and there was no catfishing. Does this let me enter the "told you so" club?
I was the only guy who called for his resignation at the initial incident before the p*do stuff popped up. I only just now heard about it because this hit popular timeline. Crazy to think I was right to call for his resignation. Of course at the time I called for it due to immaturity etc., but now obviously my reasons are much greater.
I liked micro celebrity drama a lot more when it was something benign like a guy throwing a fit over the classification of corvids. But here's the thing...
it’s so odd that i’ve seen no one in any post related to this individual mention the fact that he was an avid user of character.ai, linked through his reddit profile via his website, for everyone to see.
i find it so weird that everyone thought Riobox was “chill”, and yet interacting with AI chatbots clearly contributed to his social inability and likely grooming behavior. and I mean, using AI in general.
Clowned in him during a whole "No more more" ordeal. When the situation resolved i was kinda sympathetic towards him genuinely hoped guy can turn his life around for the better. Now it turns out i was right to clown on the mf. Like it's literally so easy to not groom children how can you fuck it up.
•
u/whenthe-ModTeam Mar 10 '26
Reminder in case there is any confusion: We removed this guy as a mod back when the original drama happened. All this is crazy though.