Well damn I typed out a long response to this but then I lost it. First of all I want to say that after this thread was locked I deleted it because I figured that there is no point to debate with people who think emotionally rather than logically. I knew that DPR didn't care about this thread, due to the fact that he commented in previous CP debate threads in the past. However, now that the thread is back, I think I will leave it anyway, simply because people keep going off topic in other threads and derailing them, and I don't want to see Astor's head explode . I would also like to apologize for calling names a bit in this thread, usually I keep a much cooler head when debating this issue, but in this particular instance I got quite pissed off trying to argue with someone who in my perception was kind of just trolling me. When a person pays for meat and then consumes it, they are supporting the meat industry. If nobody paid for meat and nobody ate it, then nobody would kill animals. There is a causative relationship here, people pay for and eat meat and this causes people to kill animals. This is why the vegetarian is using flawed logic, if their goal is to stop the killing of animals. The more meat that is paid for and consumed, the more animals will be killed to meet demand. On the other hand, viewing child porn, isolated from all other variables, does not have a clear causative relationship with the production of child porn, and for this reason the analogy does not hold.  If your argument is that viewing child porn creates demand and then this demand is filled by children being molested, the PIR argument makes perfect sense. Although I disagree with the demand/supply argument when it comes to child porn viewing / production, if I did believe it was real I would focus on ways to make it impossible for the demand to be known. Even if child porn consumption is illegal people are going to download and view it anyway, so if the danger of people downloading and viewing child porn is that it creates demand, I would think that a solution that hides the demand is better than a solution that criminalizes the people who create the demand. There are several technical solutions that can perfectly mask the demand for child pornography, while still allowing people to view it. One of the solutions would be Encrypted Keyword Search / Private Stream Searching. In these sorts of systems, a server exists that holds various items and associated keywords. If a child molester creates child pornography and uploads it to such a server, it would first be encrypted and tagged with various keywords that describe it. At this point it would be uploaded to the server, which would be oblivious to its content. Somebody who is interested in viewing child pornography would be able to query the server with a list of keywords of interest, the server would then be able to search for items that match those keywords and return them to the searcher, without being aware of any of the keywords searched for or any of the documents returned. Many people would use the same Encrypted Keyword Search server for various other activities, similar to how Tor is used for various activities with child pornography being only one of them. If the child pornography viewer keeps their CP related activities confined to the Encrypted Keyword Search system, nobody will be able to determine there demand for child pornography. The server will know they searched for something, but it wont know what they searched for and it will not know what they obtained. Likewise, the person who produced and uploaded the pornography (illegally, I am not saying this person is not a vile criminal by any means), will be totally incapable of determining that somebody downloaded the item that they uploaded. Therefor, the demand is perfectly hidden from anybody, and it seems that therefor if demand for child pornography is the reason for its production, that such a system would allow people to view child pornography without creating identifiable demand and therefor without contributing to the supply of child molestation. It is not the same thing as anonymity, it goes a step beyond it. Anonymity would mean that the server knows it hosts child pornography, and it knows somebody has downloaded child pornography, but it does not know who downloaded child pornography. This would mean that the demand for child pornography could still be identified, just not where the demand came from. With a private information retrieval based solution, the server would not know that *anybody* searched for or obtained child pornography. This means that not only is the user who downloaded the child pornography anonymous in doing so, but they create no trace of what they searched for or obtained in the first place. Clearly solutions similar to this can make the demand for child pornography unknown to anybody, while still allowing people to download and view child pornography. If the reason that downloading and viewing child pornography is bad is because it creates a demand for child pornography that is filled via the molestation of children, then it seems like this a great solution to that problem. When you say demand I take it to mean "an identifiable request for child pornography". When somebody downloads child pornography from a P2P network, there is an identifiable request for child pornography in that the peer they download it from can tell that somebody downloaded child pornography from them. The same is true in the case of child pornography hosted on a server and accessed through the clearnet, and in the case of child pornography hosted on a server and accessed via Tor or I2P, and indeed even in the case of child pornography hosted distributed throughout Freenet. None of these solutions mask the demand for child pornography, they only mask who is demanding it. On the other hand, Encrypted Keyword Search solutions can mask the demand for child pornography and therefor also mask who is demanding it. If by demand you simply mean "A desire for child pornography", then I have to assume that you wish for the death of most pedophiles, as most pedophiles have a desire for child pornography even if they do not act on that desire. Do you really wish to kill even the pedophiles who do not act on their desire to look at child pornography, simply so you can reduce the amount of desire for child pornography in the world? That seems incredibly cruel and unfair to me, pedophiles do not get to decide if they are pedophiles or not any more than homosexuals get to decide if they are homosexuals or not. A great many pedophiles would do anything possible to stop having sexual desires for children and therefor child pornography, and several of them do not even act on their desire for child pornography (although I have to imagine that looking at child pornography is prevalent in the pedophile community, as I imagine most straight men attracted to legal age people would continue looking at pornography even if it was outlawed to do so, and I think we see proof of this in the countries that have outlawed all forms of pornography). That said, I still find the idea that somebody will see a few hits on a servers log files and run out and molest some children because of it. To me that idea seems preposterous indeed, but to many people it seems obvious so whatever. Certainly in the past there have been instances of children who had naked photographs taken of them simply so somebody could sell the photographs and make a profit. There have been three big Eastern European studios, one of them paid about 1,500 girls ages about 8-17 to allow them to photograph them nude or semi-nude, for the production of softcore pornography. This studio took hundreds of photographs of each of the girls (all of which agreed to the shoots and had consent from parents as well, not that this justifies anything, I am just pointing out that they were not violently raped and then killed, as the person I was arguing with seems to think that nearly all CP involves brutal rape and snuff). The studio then sold them on the internet to make money. So indeed, if it was not for people buying child pornography on the internet, this studio would never have taken so many photographs of so many underage girls. In fact, earlier in this thread I said that these studios were responsible for the majority of child pornography, now I need to back track a little bit from that statement because I don't actually have statistics on the matter, but I still am sure that at least a large percentage of child pornography on the internet, by number of photographs, originated at these studios. So yes, in these cases, thousands of children were photographed naked who would not have been photographed naked had it not been for the financial demand for child pornography on the internet. However, these studios operated with the intention of making a profit. People who paid for the photographs often put them on Usenet and similar, where they were then downloaded by people who did not pay for them. If it had not been for the people paying for the pornography, the production studios would not have continued to produce it. They did not give a flying fuck if people downloading it for free liked it or not, and in fact they were upset that there content was being pirated as it lost them sales. So in these cases we can see that the people paying for the child pornography were indeed fueling the demand that led to a supply of sexualized photographs of naked minors. We can therefor say that it should be illegal to pay for child pornography, and it goes without saying that it should be illegal to produce child pornography. On the other hand, the people who were downloading the child pornography for free to view it, had no effect at all on the production of the child pornography, and therefor it makes no sense to say that their demand for these images fueled the supply of them. There is simply no link between them viewing the child porn and the producers producing it, the only link in these cases was between the people paying for the child pornography and the people producing it. There are other cases where children are molested because of child pornography as well, and I would actually argue that many of these children would not be molested if it were legal to view AND distribute child pornography. These cases arise from the private underground trading communities. To gain membership to some of these groups you are required to submit original content, this is because they use it as a security mechanism to prevent the police from joining the group. They know that no police are going to abuse children on camera in order to infiltrate them, so they make new recruits abuse children on camera in order to gain membership. The other sort of group that leads to child molestation, and indeed the most worrying groups in modern times, are the forums like Dreamboard. These groups require members to upload new content every period of time in order to maintain there membership. The content that they upload cannot be content that is already part of the group collection. This puts pressure on pedophiles to molest children to produce original content, after the group invariably gets to the point that their collection is so large that individual members no longer have any new child pornography that the group does not have. When this time arises, the member is forced to either molest a child to maintain membership in the group, or to lose their group membership. This puts pressure on pedophiles who want to continue having access to child pornography but may not really want to actually molest a child. The reason many of these groups do this is because they want to keep law enforcement out as well. If the viewing AND distributing of child pornography was not illegal, these groups would have no reason to require members to continuously upload child pornography as a security mechanism, as they would not be breaking the law in the first place, and therefor would not need to keep the police out of their groups. Additionally, by making it so they can relax their security, the police would have an easier time gaining membership in their groups and identifying newly produced child pornography from an earlier point in time. These are the cases where I think children are molested because of child pornography. In almost all of the other cases, I think it is indeed essentially people who molest kids already and who decide to take pictures of it because they can. I would compare the studios in Eastern Europe to the adult commercial studios, the people in the private groups requiring uploads for membership I cannot think of what they are analogous to, and the other people are analogous to the people creating amateur homemade pornography and uploading it to the internet. Indeed, a huge amount of pornography on the internet consists of people who were having sex and filmed it because they could. Certainly your drug use leads to the cultivation and production of these drugs. Beyond any doubt. Just as a person who eats meat leads to the slaughter of animals. People grow marijuana or poppies because they know they can turn them into financial reward for themselves, because they know you will pay money for the end product. There is an easy to determine causative relationship between you eating meat and animals being slaughtered, there is an easy to determine causative relationship between you smoking weed and marijuana being grown. There is no such easy to determine causative relationship between a person viewing child pornography, isolated from finances and group membership requirements, and a person molesting a child. The reason why a causative relationship is easy to establish in the cases of meat and marijuana is because something of value goes from you to the producer, and that something of value is the end goal of the producer. This is why it should obviously be illegal to pay for child pornography, and indeed there is a causative relationship between people paying for child pornography and the production of child pornography in the Eastern European studios. However, again, there is not a causative relationship between the people downloading the child pornography made is Eastern European studios off of P2P networks, and the production of child pornography by the Eastern European studios. Indeed, if nobody paid for the child pornography created by the Eastern European studios, and everybody downloaded it off of peer to peer networks, they wouldn't continue to make it. The causative link between people viewing those images, isolated from finances, and the production of those images, simply does not exist. You say demand for child porn leads to child molestation, I am just pointing out that demand for banks leads to bank robberies.