Regardless, if you're saying we should focus more on treatment and less on caging people, I can get behind that. If you're saying we should just abolish the law and do nothing on the consumption side - we likely disagree on the harm done or the role of government in society.
Same. But just lately it seems like the push is toward normalization, and that complicates the matter considerably.
Not only would this expand the scope of "criminal" to include people who have not committed such crimes (and may never do so), but I think it's a futile and petulant exercise, albeit one with benefit to intrusive law enforcement (and I'm echoing feedback provided elsewhere in this thread).
In any case, these are all currently crimes in their own right, so they fall under your first category, rather than your second, so I'm not quite clear what sort of point you're making here.
I was answering the question below:
>Your proposal ignores it - legalizes its distribution, in fact. Why?
If, in response to my answer, you conclude that committing a crime is an action tantamount to sharing, viewing, or possessing information about it, I disagree, and I think your outlook is frighteningly authoritarian. "Action" was a poor word choice. "Actions which entail direct harm", such as raping a child, should be illegal, I should've said. "Actions which entail indirect harm", such as possessing, sharing, or viewing data, should not be, in my opinion.
That doesn't matter if you're ignoring actions' directness and level of harm altogether and arguing that, since a judicial body classifies an action as a crime, it is a crime, and so I should agree that it should be a crime. But, in that case, I also disagree, and I think you're being a poor advocate for orthodoxy.
>ongoing harm to the victims, which, while not unreasonable, I think might be a weaker argument than that distribution in particular may make and expand a market even when not done for money
Here, I think you're doing it more justice. Incidentally, though, I'm the other way around. The "harm to victims" angle is much more salient than the "increasing demand" one, but both are pretty spurious to me, and certainly seem like underwhelming reasons to imprison and permanently cripple the lives of people whose only actions consisted of manipulating bits in storage media to the direct harm of no one.
You're also underplaying your hand here somewhat, I think - either that, or you find your own arguments unconvincing. You've already conceded, in your concept of "indirect harm" (still harm, but less so?) and the weaksauce relative-injury argument which constitutes your last paragraph, that the distribution of child pornography does inflict ongoing harm on those abused in order to produce it - but you don't think that that harm suffices to justify the injury inflicted upon those who engage in such distribution, but not such production, in the course of being convicted of and punished for that crime. That the former are innocent, and the latter are not, seems not to move you; your concern appears instead to be purely utilitarian.
I don't suppose it would be surprising if you were indeed unconvinced of this - it strikes me as a very difficult position to defend! But I'd be interested to see whether and how you do so, nonetheless. Or perhaps I've misgathered your point?
I don't think anyone would argue this "cures" the tendency - certainly I will not! But, at the very least, I can't see how it could do other than make a pedophile less likely to graduate to child molesting, to have built a strong habit of not acting on the urge - and, again, vice versa.
There are also other forms of harm than the physical. I am not myself moved to dismay by the possibility of images of my own abuse circulating on the Internet, although that may have more than anything to do with the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no such images were made, and in any case said abuse occurred long before the dawn of the era in which such distribution became trivially simple. But I hardly imagine it is my place to tell someone who does find such a possibility - or a certainty - dismaying, that she is wrong to feel that way, or that she should not consider herself to be harmed thereby. Nor do I believe it is anyone else's place to do so.
Reinforcing the circuits to reward yourself with more porn, not with molesting children. Your whole point is exactly the kind of pseudo scientific rationalising every authoritarian uses to push their "moralistic" agenda.
Real studies have actually shown that exposure porn reduces recidivism and tendencies to molestation, except in a small class of pedophiles which already have violent tendencies.
All of the studies purporting to demonstrate links between possession of child porn and child molestation are plagued with methodological errors [2]. This issue is so emotionally charged that most of the science around it is garbage. The stigma against child porn is no different than claiming that consumers of staged rape fetish porn must all be closet rapists, and viewing this porn will simply make them act on it. It's a patently absurd claim.
About the only possessors of child porn that are at high risk of molesting a child are the ones that actually produce it, and so had already sexual abused children [4].
[1] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1123799?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
[2] https://www.fd.org/docs/training-materials/2012/FJC2012/Chil...
[3] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-010-9696-y
While it would be a stretch to postulate that the effect of child pornography on those disposed to it exactly matches that of drugs which provoke massive dopamine release on those who take them, the effects of dopamine on sexual behavior in the human male, and its role in the brain's reward system in general, lend I think considerable plausibility to the hypothesis that engaging in pedophilic behavior centered around child pornography, and obtaining sexual satisfaction thereby, tends to potentiate further engagement in the same behavior.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01497634940...
This shouldn't be surprising. Consumers of rape fetish porn are unlikely to actually rape someone, but actual rapists are likely to consume rape fetish porn. Furthermore, in countries where porn of all kinds was legalized, including child porn, enjoyed falling rates of child molestation.
The OP is making some of the same old arguments people have trotted out against porn for decades, just couched in pseudo neuroscience. The fact is, we don't understand these relationships to the degree the OP needs to justify his causal claims.
On the other hand, children are extraordinarily vulnerable to many forms of abuse, this among them. In a system of laws one of whose explicit purposes is to afford those vulnerable to mistreatment protection under law, I don't think it is on its face unreasonable to argue that children merit extraordinary protection as well. While there is perhaps a fair question to be asked around whether the sort of law under discussion actually serves that end, I would at the very least suggest anyone raising the question in a serious way be very well prepared to answer objections and counterarguments of every imaginable sort.
How about creating child pornography being a crime? That's what's actually hurtful.