Children are usually considered precious and deserving of the utmost protection, so any sexual abuse or misbehavior towards them is considered one of the worst crimes a person can commit. This unholy matrimony of Child Abuse Is a Special Kind of Evil and Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil is a way to show that a character has crossed the Moral Event Horizon or that they have become a more unlikeable and irredeemable villain. Pedophiles in fiction are usually middle-aged shady strangers who prey on multiple children. Even if they don't commit any sexual acts, their deviant fixation is very much frowned upon. And if an innocent person gets accused of this crime, it causes more drama compared to others.
In real life, pedophilia has been the subject of Media Scaremongering and has sometimes sent citizens into a moral panic, reaching Witch hunts for hidden predators in some cases. This might have influenced the number of pedophile villains.
Some specific kinds of villainous pedophilia include Creepy Gym Coach, Pedophile Priest, Pimping the Offspring, Parental Incest and Lecherous Step Parent. Compare to Child Abuse Is a Special Kind of Evil, Child Hater and Would Hurt a Child. Contrast with Comedic Lolicon, who are more common in Eastern media and Played for Laughs, and Friend to All Children, for characters who are fond of children in a positive (and platonic) way.
Examples:
- Kagurabachi: At one point, a group of yakuza Mooks heavily imply that they attempted to kidnap a young girl for their boss's "pleasure." This scene mainly serves to establish Hakuri as a good person when he rescues the kid and to make it clear that the yakuza had it coming when Chihiro mows through them a few pages later.
- Kaya-chan Isn't Scary is an Action Horror manga centering on Kaya, the five year-old ass-kicking Kid Hero, fighting ghosts with the help of her Kindergarten teacher Chie. Despite the supernatural premise, however, the series will occasionally veer into some major Realism-Induced Horror, showing the very real dangers that children are subjected to. In chapter 5, Chie saves Kaya and Yuzu from an apparent child predator who was stalking them in the woods, though he later turns out to be a paranormal investigator who was trying to protect Kaya and Yuzu from a ghost. Played entirely straight in chapter 32, where Kaya momentarily gets separated from her parents on Halloween and is almost kidnapped by a child predator in the middle of a crowded street when he poses as her father. Sometimes the scariest monsters aren't make-believe...
- Manhole: Five years ago, Masaki Tamura, the second (intentional) victim of the Filaria, kidnapped a girl in the fifth grade and raped her for hours while recording the event on video. Although the girl was later rescued by the police, Tamura waited for the event to die down in the media and then tracked down the girl's home address and mailed her family the recordings of their granddaughter's assault. His only reason for doing this was so that he could pleasure himself knowing that he was traumatizing his victim's family. Every other character in the story justifiably views Tamura with pure disgust and revulsion. On top of that, it's later revealed that the true culprit of the Filaria was the girl's grandfather, Hiroshi Kurokawa. The sheer depths of Tamura's depravity radicalized Kurokawa into taking drastic action to protect society from scum like him, to the point that he's willing to commit biological terrorism for the sake of removing the desire for criminality from the population. Despite Kurokawa being the Big Bad, his motivations are portrayed in a sympathetic, or at least understandable, light, with one police officer even musing that he can't say for certain that he wouldn't do the same thing as Kurokawa if he was in his position.
- In The Boys, after learning of the dark secret of the G-Men and how they "recruit" children by kidnapping them and giving them everything they ever wanted to groom them into Sex Slaves, even the Reluctant Warrior Hughie is eager to Pay Evil unto Evil. Thankfully, Red River beats them to it and prevents a Bolivian Army Ending.
- 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.
- The Other History of the DC Universe: Issue #3 briefly revisits the events of The Judas Contract, and unlike it (which mostly blamed Terra for her sexual relationship with Deathstroke), pulls no punches in condemning Deathstroke for grooming and raping the underage Terra, openly calling him a "pedophiliac rapist" and showing disgust with how his reputation was kept intact while his victim was demonized by history.
- The Punisher: As a father himself, Frank Castle is especially vengeful towards people who harm minors.
- In the story A Brief Rendevous from the Girl Comics anthology, Frank poses as a 14-year-old girl on the Internet to lure out a Serial Rapist before shooting him with a Gory Discretion Shot.
- A much darker instance occurs in The Punisher MAX #44 when Frank brutally murders two parents who were making "films" with their own young children. He blows the mother's brains out immediately before shooting the father in the throat and allowing him to choke on his own blood for a moment before doing the same to him.
- Sin City: Junior Roark, the title character of the story "That Yellow Bastard", is one of the more loathsome bad guys in the series for this reason — he's a Serial Killer who gets his jollies from raping and killing little girls, and especially likes to hear them scream. What especially puts this trait in stark relief is that when he gets his hands on Nancy Callahan again, who has grown up in the eight years since Hartigan went to prison after rescuing her from him the first time, his main complaint is that she's "a little too old for him". His end at Hartigan's hands is very well deserved.
- The Perry Bible Fellowship lampshades this trope with Kitty Photographer
. A man lines up a photograph of his cat, but as he takes the picture, his toddler son runs across the shot while nude. When the film is developed, the developers are outraged and call the police, leading to the man's arrest and brutal beating by his cellmates.
- Danganronpa: Paradise Lost: Haiji Towa, building off his comments in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls about liking women "as young as possible", is depicted as a shameless pedophile who associated with real life child predator Jeffrey Epstein and raped his own little sister Monaca, leading to her mental instability. When Kenji Shima finds out, he is disgusted enough to murder Haiji, Monokuma considers him to have gone too far, and even protagonist Daisuke Hiyori agrees that Haiji's death was well-deserved.
- Nobody Cared: During Snape's investigation of the Dursley family, he discovers that Vernon Dursley raped at least three boys under the age of ten and was never caught. Vernon also tried to molest Harry, but Harry's magic protected him. Snape tips off the police who come to arrest Vernon on Halloween. Snape mocks Vernon by saying he would probably be killed in prison since prisoners hate pedophiles, which would end up coming true as Vernon dies this way only months later.
- The Wedding Crashers: One of the many things that riles up the Winchesters is finding out that the bride at the titular wedding is ten (and the only reason she hadn't been married at seven is that she wanted to wait a few years), while her husband (who's at least twice as old as her) apparently fell in love with her the second she was born. Similar disgust is expressed towards Quil (who also imprinted on Claire when she was a baby and is openly lusting after the unwilling twelve-year-old) and the fact that the underage-appearing vampire girls are in the same revealing dresses as the adults.
- Hard Candy starts off with a naive teenage girl having coffee with an older guy she met on the internet, but it's eventually revealed that she already had strong suspicions that he was a serial pedophile/murderer and had specifically targeted him. She purposely baits him to get into his house so she can find evidence of his crimes, then torture him, ruin his life, and coerce him to kill himself.
- The bulk of The Hunt (2012) is about a Close-Knit Community turning on a member they mistakenly believe to be a child molester.
- 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.
- 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.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street: The original film is vague about the subject, but the 2010 remake gives Freddy a clear element of paedophilia, and thus this trope plays into the parents hunting him down.
- 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.
- Acid Row has the premise of a social worker 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 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.
- In the first episode of Blake's 7, "The Way Back", 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.
- In the Criminal Minds episode "A Shade of Gray", after prodding by the local sheriff, the team arrests a local known pedophile for the murder of the six-year-old victim. They later find out the sheriff planted evidence leading them to the man to cover up that the boy was killed by his ten-year-old brother to spare the parents some pain.
- In the CSI episode "Harvest", 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 stepdaughter, Astor.
- 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."
- In the Heat of the Night: An older male schoolteacher (with one count of a past sexual offense, as is found out) is accused of molestation by a child, and despite the lack of evidence, and partially thanks to an overzealous-for-sensationalism reporter, it quickly gets out of control as people harass him and shoot at his house. Eventually, the guy is driven to the point of killing himself. It's 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.
- Saturday Night Live:
- Played straight in 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.
- 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.
- Invoked in a skit on The Whitest Kids U' Know: Trevor sings a song to a group of children titled Get a New Daddy
, teaching them that if their fathers annoy them, they can lie about him molesting them to send them away and get new ones.
- 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.
- 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 Insane Clown Posse song "To Catch a Predator" concerns a man who uses Dateline'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)
- The in-game internet in Grand Theft Auto IV includes a Schmuck Bait website titled "Little Lacy Surprise Pageant.", a sting site intended to entrap users attempting to view child porn. Visiting it immediately grants the player a 5-star wanted level and gets them called out as a "sexual deviant attempting to access explicit images".
- Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2: ASIC member CFW Trick has a creepy obsession with children, especially little girls. While it's mostly Played for Laughs, his obsession is treated as abhorrent by even the villains themselves. He's particularly fixated with Ram and Rom, being the first victims he and Linda kidnap so he could lust over them. Re;Birth2 even adds a scene where he licks the two as they helplessly plead for him to stop.
- South Park: The Fractured but Whole: One of the bosses is Jared Fogle, a real life former pitchman for Subway convicted of sex crimes towards children, and he is depicted as a creepy Hate Sink who even Sergeant Yates, a racist cop and cult leader, is dismayed by having to resort to releasing him.
- In The Letters of the Devil, it is revealed that Chuck Castor had an affair with an underage intern and subsequently killed her when she revealed she was pregnant.
- Parodied in Sinfest. Pedotron is so blatant about what he really wants that a bunch of pedophile hunters show up to absolutely obliterate Pedotron while simply saying the word "Die".
- The Final Minutes: One of The Path's rules is that children are inviolable, that sexual interference will not be tolerated, and that violators will be executed.
- Satirized by the Paedofinder General character in Monkey Dust. Remember: "Under the basic principles of English law, every man is innocent until speculated guilty!"
- Smiling Friends: The beginning of "Brother's Egg" has Mr. Boss, with Glep's aid, trick Charlie and Pim into thinking that they will be helping Jared Fogle, former Subway pitchman convicted of possession of child pornography and illicit conduct with a minor. Both of them make their disgust clear:
Charlie: That was too far, man. Jared Fogle is a genuine fucking menace, absolutely not — I did not like that.
Pim: Yeah, he — he's a pedophile. - South Park:
- In "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", the kids accuse their parents of being pedophiles to have them taken away, leading to the town being nothing but the kids.
- Played with in "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy", in which Ike's female kindergarten teacher Miss Stevenson has sexual relations with him. While Kyle is disgusted and reports it to the police, the police and many other townspeople simply congratulate Ike on "scoring". He turns to Cartman, the current hall monitor who's taken on a bounty hunter persona, to get Stevenson arrested for kidnapping Ike with the intention to run away with him (though Cartman's only mad that Miss Stevenson was kissing Ike in his hallways without a hall pass). Stevenson kills herself when she's cornered by the police, but Ike decides not to jump with her.

