How can you have banks without bank robbery? How can you have humans without murder? Should we ban banks to get rid of bank robbery? Should we ban humans to get rid of murder? Saying we must ban looking at child pornography to get rid of producing child pornography is as absurd as saying these other things. You cannot engage in harmless picture viewing without a child being abused (ignoring jailbait and nudist stuff). But there is something called an arrow of time. It moves forward. Children have already been abused in the past. Not looking at the pictures of the abuse makes them no less abused. The thing to look at here is cause and effect. You can engage in picture viewing without causing a child to be abused. So what it is impossible for somebody to look at a picture without the abuse depicted in the picture having taken place? The abuse already took place! Not looking at the picture doesn't make it go away. I am thinking about the whole chain of events, I think you might not be thinking about the order of events. It is an irrelevant difference. All are victim creating crimes and all are pictures of crimes with victims depicted. The analogy is solid. Seems more fair to me to lower the age of consent to something more reasonable. Some countries already have! A lot of them are even first world and highly populated . Hell, even most of the inflated bullshit statistics from the crusaders agree that the majority of people viewing child porn are not child molesters and are not risks to children. It is not a single one showing the link with CP and reduced sex abuse of minors, also Japan and many other countries as well. Sure can find citations for either argument, I can also find instances where the people arguing the other way have fabricated data and published fraudulent documents so I know who to trust. Although in a significant number of cases I imagine that producing pictures of the crime is a major motiviation (for example all of the commercial CP), I think that in a significant number of the cases producing a picture of the crime is a secondary motivation. Most people do not molest children just so they can take pictures of it, they molest children because they want to molest children and they take pictures of it because they can. And in any case, it is irrelevant. that makes as much sense as saying if I look at pictures of the holocaust I am complicit in genocide. If somebody looks at a picture of a child being abused so fucking what they had nothing to do with it, probably didn't pay for it, probably nobody even knows they did it. how the fuck is that complicit in the production of it? So if it is the watching of the crime that makes someone complicit, then my argument about the holocaust stands. If you say that somebody participates in the crime by looking at pictures of it, then you are probably insane. I already have given citations that there is no evidence for this, but I know you think citations to things on the internet are useless. Okay I have a proposal then. There is a technology called private information retrieval. It lets somebody get an item from a set of databases without the set of databases being able to tell the item they got out of it. If we have a bunch of databases containing CP and various other items, and people use PIR to get items out of the database, then nobody can determine the demand for any of the individual items in the database. This effectively completely hides the demand for any of the individual items in the database. Do you think that if CP is only legal to view if it is obtained from a PIR system that it is okay? Because that handles the demand problem perfectly, nobody will know the demand for child pornography and you cannot use it as your reason to argue against it if it is only distributed via PIR. Well I am pretty clearly attracted to girls at age 14, really I could probably even go somewhat lower than that on a case by case basis. I have no interest at all in anybody who is not at all sexually developed, so I do not qualify as being a pedophile. I am interested in females between tanner stage 4 and 5 I would say, which can range from 13 to indefinite age (some females never even get to stage 5). I don't feel such strong compulsion to have sex with any particular age group that I would bother trying to do anything illegal like sleeping with underage teenagers (not going to find me on to catch a predator, lol), and I still wonder at what age it is okay to have sex with somebody without causing them harm. I really doubt that age is 16 or 18 personally. Damn you did such a good job being pretty rational and not foaming at the mouth and having decent arguments and not sounding like a fucking retard, don't throw it away now !