I believe that at some ages a child is incapable of giving consent to sexual activity and thus at these ages it is justified for us to intervene in preventing them from being taken advantage of by their family members and/or others. I do not believe that parents own their children. I do believe that parents have a responsibility to provide to their children up to a certain point and age. I do believe that a child is free to leave his parents if he so desires, and to obtain resources and education in any way he is capable of doing. Primarily I do not think that I own the children of others, and thus I do not believe I have the right to force them to learn the things that I strongly believe to be correct. Essentially there would be private defense agencies. These agencies would be funded solely by their customers. They would have lists of things that they would be willing to enforce. It would be similar to insurance in a way. If your home is burglarized, they may agree to reimburse you for your losses provided that you transfer to them the right to collect from the criminal. Then they will be motivated to find the criminal to recoup on the losses they sustained by reimbursing you. After apprehending the person they believe to be the burglar, they would need to consult with his defense agency as well. A process for determining guilt would need to be agreed upon between the two agencies. If the burglars defense agency is unwilling to do this, then force would likely have to be used against their client and/or them (depending on if they resist the force used against their client). The primary goal of the defense agency is to recover the profit loss of reimbursing their customer and apprehending the criminal, and it is likely that they will forfeit the criminals assets in order to do this. The exact amount of asset forfeiture will be determined by agreement between the two private defense agencies, likely with contractual bindings as well (for example, the criminals defense agency is unlikely to tolerate a death penalty for the stealing of a candy bar). In cases where the criminal has no defense agency, he will be more at the mercy of the defense agency accusing him of theft. However, it will not be in this defense agencies best interests to pay for his long term incarceration, as that will cost them money for no benefit. Also, it is not in their best interests to execute him, as an organization that executes people for relatively minor crimes will come to be seen as a threat by other defense agencies, and preemptively incapacitated. One of the best benefits of having private defense agencies rather than public banditry agencies, is that victimless crimes will soon become impossible to enforce. Nobody in their right mind is going to agree to fund things such as the war on drugs, it would be of absolutely no advantage to them. Now there will still be criminal organizations such as the DEA, who try to make their livings by robbing and possibly even enslaving drug users, but they will be seen as the criminals that they are, and they will have to go up against the private defense agencies protecting the drug dealers. Additionally, even if a drug dealer has no private defense agency representing him, it is in the best interests of all drug dealers in the criminal bandits of the DEA are preemptively incapacitated.  To their slight favor, law enforcement appear to typically use some discretion in order to pursue targets that are more likely to commit crimes against children, and they are less likely to pursue minor offenders, however this is not always the case it is typically true. Their system of determining who to pursue uses a sliding scale that takes into account the extremity of the pornography (simple nudity to torture) the age of those in the photographs/videos (newborns to 17 year olds) the number of illegal items possessed (from 1 to millions) the level of networking the offender is involved in (from none to part of a closed membership security oriented group), the level of involvement the offender has with CP (from viewing without saving to production), and if there are any signs of the offender planning to engage in molestation. That said, with the rise of P2P distribution, law enforcement are much less able to distinguish between people who intended only to view some images and people who are distributors. This is because P2P software generally shares all downloaded content, and the person who would have once been a low priority target for having viewed a dozen CP images, now becomes a much higher priority target for continuously sharing a dozen CP images from his IP address. I do not have exact numbers, but I can imagine that a great many of the millions of people sharing CP on public P2P networks, never intended to be CP distributors but rather only intended to be CP possessors. This has some amount of evidence backing it, it is quite typical for those arrested for distribution to claim that they were unaware their P2P software had made the images available. This is particularly troubling, as the amount of effort LE puts into apprehending CP possessors is much much less than the amount of effort they put into apprehending CP distributors. If it can be proven that a distributor has paid for a child to be molested, then I believe that they should be treated as criminals. If it cannot be proven though, I am not convinced that they have done anything that should be treated as criminal. There is a massive difference between paying for a child to be molested and paying for recycled images from ten or twenty years ago. Ignoring this difference, at the cost of the liberties of those who are paying for old images, in order to be better able to combat those who actually are paying for children to be molested, is sacrificing liberty for security. I think they would have made almost exactly as much. A lot of CP is produced for bragging rights in CP trading communities. Although all of what you have said is true, they also do frequently do it for bragging rights in their own communities. One of the biggest reasons they do it is to be given membership to producer only groups. People were vending drugs online years before Bitcoin was created. A lot of people use western union with fake ID to take payment to this very day.