I don't understand the desire for people to stop posting in this thread until a moderator moves it to a different subforum. To me it just seems like it is not at all a big deal. None of us can move the thread, until it is moved it is here, there is no reason to ignore it simply because nobody who can move it has moved it yet. I agree. Neurotypical people are more empathizing and Autistic people are more systemizing. You cannot help but have emotional reactions to the subject of child pornography, which of course severely impairs your ability to think rationally about the subject. On the other hand, I cannot help but to logically analyze child pornography as a system, without having a strong emotional response to it as I lack in empathy. Your natural inclination is to see the big picture of child pornography, which includes lots of abuse at various levels, and therefor you desire to burn everything to do with it to the ground. My natural inclination is to see the components of child pornography and classify them by various criteria, including the damage they do to people, and only to desire to remove the components that are damaging. Of course it does not literally cause children to be raped, although it is hard to tell if anybody actually believes it does or not. Certainly a lot of people use language that comes across as saying every time an image of CP is viewed, the depicted child is molested all over again. I would very much like to think that modern civilized humans understand that this is impossible, but when they keep claiming that this mechanism exists it is extremely hard to conclude that they don't actually believe it. But even assuming that it is used as a metaphor it is simply a dishonest metaphor. Once I saw somebody arguing against ephebephilia and they used an image of a 10 year old to show what ephebephiles are attracted to. I pointed out that ephebephiles are in no cases attracted to 10 year olds, and they gave a similar response to me as you are right now. They said they were not using the image to be age accurate, but rather as a metaphor for 'ephebephiles being attracted to defenseless children'. Using this logic it would make sense for me to post a picture of a female baby and claim that this is what average males are sexually attracted to, because it is a 'metaphor for males being attracted to females'. You see the dishonesty? In either case the humiliation caused by CP to the victim is still not the fault of the person viewing the CP, it is the fault of the person who produced the CP and initially published it to the internet in the first place. When somebody views an image of CP there is not even really an ability for the depicted child to know that this event happened. If they have had CP with them in it published to the internet, they will always have to wonder if somebody is looking at the image or not, even if nobody ever does. So the pain caused to them is caused by the person who took the photograph in the first place, it exists independently of anybody viewing the image or not. When somebody views an image there is no inherent information transfer to the person depicted in the image, without any information transfer there cannot be any change in the child's emotional state linked to the viewing of the image. In most cases the children who ARE aware that individual people are viewing their CP, are only aware of this fact because they are part of restitution programs where they ask to be notified by the police of each such incident so that they can sue the viewer for financial restitution. Clearly the people who take part in such programs value the financial gains they make from people viewing their CP more than they value not being made aware of, and therefor not having emotional reactions to, people viewing their CP. Ephebephiles are not attracted to 12 year olds, the lowest cut off age for ephebephilia is 14 years old and some sources put it at 15. I don't understand the mechanism by which viewing CP worsens the consequences of the original crime, perhaps you can explain it for me. Unless there is information transfer then there quite literally cannot be causative change, so if somebody anonymously looks at an image of CP I think it is pretty obvious that this causes no causative change to take place in the victim. The only cases where such a link can be established are in cases where the victim is made aware that individual people are viewing their CP images. This is usually because of police programs, and if this damage is truly what you have a problem with then you would favor legalizing possession of CP so that police stop informing formerly abused children every single time somebody is arrested with one of their images. Additionally, there are technological solutions that can ensure a lack of information transfer to the abused victim. If all CP is transferred with 'private information retrieval' it can be made impossible for *anybody* to determine that *anybody* has downloaded a specific CP item. Usually when I point this technological solution out to people, they change their tune and begin to argue that damage is done to the child even if nobody can know that anybody downloaded CP with the child in it, belying the claim of revictimization being only a metaphor. Another good point is that some CP features only children who are currently dead. Do you believe that after a child passes away it should be legal to view all CP depicting them, as it is therefor impossible for viewing of the CP to cause a change in the emotional state of the child? What about cases where the now adult child consents to allowing people to view CP with them in it?