So it is exceedingly obvious that the penalties for producing CP should be steep in most cases, as the act generally causes great damage to the victim. The only exceptions are for things like teenagers taking pictures of themselves and other things like this, as in these cases there is not a victim from the production and any penalties given to the producer will simply compound damage of the only person who could be construed as a victim. It is not apparent why there should be penalties for the consumers. There are two primary arguments for this. The first argument is revictimization, the notion that every time somebody views an image of molestation, it is like the molestation happens all over again. Taken literally this claim is quite obviously bullshit. Interpreted as a metaphor for 'every time somebody views an image of molestation, it causes some damage to the depicted child' the claim is less absolutely obviously false, but it is still not inherently true. In fact, I am willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases the vast majority of children depicted in CP have absolutely no idea whether somebody is viewing the images or not. In many cases, the only person who knows that the image was viewed is the person who viewed it in the first place. Certainly in cases where the depicted child is incapable of determining that their image has been viewed, we must conclude that the person who viewed the image had absolutely no effect on the child. To claim otherwise is essentially falling back to the magical definition of revictimization. The second argument is called the market theory of child pornography, and it is much more convincing than revictimization. The argument is that child pornography is produced by producers for the sole purpose of providing it to consumers, and that if there are no consumers of CP there will be no demand for CP, and therefor the producers will stop producing CP and therefor less children will be molested. In some cases I can agree entirely with this argument. Certainly it should be illegal to pay for children to be molested, financially funding child pornography should not be legal. In the past this argument made a hell of a lot more sense than it does today, because decades ago almost all consumers of CP paid for it. Today almost all consumers of CP do not pay for it, rather they obtain it for free off of giant anonymous networks, usually P2P networks like limewire. The majority of CP offenders do not socially network with other offenders, or even expose themselves to the social networks of CP offenders. In modern times it is very rare for anybody to financially support a CP industry, and in fact the financial CP industry is so tiny that it is only responsible for a fraction of a percentage of the total CP distribution. My opinion is that in addition to standing on very weak ground, the market theory unjustly shifts responsibility from producers to consumers. If somebody wants to rob a bank just because they know people will look at the video footage, should we blame the people who watch the video of the bank robbery? It isn't a perfect analogy because not many people are really interested in watching video footage of bank robberies, and bank robbers generally have a different motivation than being seen on video, but fundamentally this is the same sort of thing. Do we blame the person who commits an act of aggression, or the person who will watch an act of aggression if one is committed? If the person committing the act of aggression refrained from doing so, there would be no act of aggression to watch in the first place. Clearly the person to blame is the one committing the act of aggression in the first place. Perhaps terrorism is a better analogy. Terrorists will attack civilians largely because they know that people will see the attacks and be afraid. For example, look at the Boston bombing, that was very largely televised and reported on. If people wouldn't have watched the bombing take place at that location, you can be assured that the attackers would not have bombed that location. Does this mean that the bombing was the responsibility of the people who watched the attack on television after it had occurred? Should we outlaw reporting on terrorist events, to discourage terrorists from attacking us to spread terror throughout our societies ?