In a nutshell I think that it causes absolutely no ill effect if you look at pictures of anything. I once myself was not in favor of CP possession being decriminalized, but then I woke up one day and realized that all of the arguments for keeping it illegal are fucking retarded and based on lies concocted by people who have financial reasons to keep it illegal, and all of the arguments for it being legal to look at make perfect sense and are generally not coming out of the mouthes of people who seem to be borderline psychotic and/or fucking retarded. Seriously take a step back, you are in favor of making certain very large numbers illegal. From a strictly technical point of view it is just mind boggling absurd. What if you add +1 to the decimal representation of a CP picture? What if you split it up into a bunch of tiny numbers?? What if you encode it as a book with English words, should that book consisting of words that can then be translated to the picture be made iillegal? What if I change the word encoding program to use different words??? What if I use stego and hide CP in a movie? Or analyze a movie and see which pixels correlate to those in a CP image and then release a program that slices those pixels from the movie and reconstructs them into the CP image or a rough approximation of it? Do you want all digital content to be illegal? From a practical perspective it doesn't make any sense either. The large majority of people who view CP are not child molesters, so their crime is entirely in looking at an image. What harm does that cause? I can not see this magic that so many seem convinced of, that looking at a series of colored pixels has an effect on the world outside of the electrical patterns in the brain of the viewer and components of the electronics used to transfer and display it. What is so wrong about that? it is no different than looking at a picture of a fucking lake or the holocaust. People who say otherwise are simply making shit up to justify their own opinions, it is as if I say "What you eat carrots?! That causes children to die! What the fuck is wrong with you you child murderer!" !! It is called a non-sequitur, it is a logical fallacy and it is more suited to propaganda than any rational argument. Even in the fantasy world where looking at CP causes a rise in demand which in turn causes more children to be molested, there are steps that can be taken to entirely mask the demand for CP while still allowing it to be viewed. Ever heard of private information retrieval ? But of course nobody would even consider this, because their issue is not really with people viewing child porn leading to an increase in molestation, their issue is simply with people viewing child porn. They are demonized by the sensationalist media, they are made to be synonymous with child molesters despite the overwhelming evidence that the majority of them are not and they are hunted down by law enforcement and private industry which makes profits of billions of dollars a year in doing so. There are several dozen cases of falsified statistics which have been exposed from these groups. It is really pointless to even mention these things, because the people who are against CP being legal to view are entirely emotional creatures or they have been brainwashed entirely by the media/government. Their views are empirically proven as wrong and it does not stop them from parroting the same debunked bullshit and peddling the same hogwash about magic processes or ignoring that even in the fantasy world they live in where they are correct about the facts, steps could be taken to completely ameliorate the risks they present, such as PIR to cryptographically mask demand. I wish these people would at least stop acting like they are trying to save the children and instead admit that they are interested in A. making profit B. Attacking people who are harmless, but different from them in ways they can not tolerate my only hope is that they are actually brainwashed and not entirely responsible for their complete lack of reason and blind entirely reasonless hatred.