So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort?
The article linked earlier in this thread concludes: "after adjustment for response rates and definitions, the prevalence of child sexual abuse was not found to vary significantly over the three decades reviewed".
If that conclusion is indeed correct, then apparently our efforts to put a halt to it haven't worked. There are then two possible conclusions:
1) We haven't done enough yet. Doubling the available budget will improve the situation.
2) Our current methods are pointless. No amount of effort will do the trick, and going after child porn is indeed a wasted effort.
Personally, I think it's a combination of the two. The advent of the internet has made sharing illegal content orders of magnitude easier. Even if our efforts at curtailing child porn are effective, those efforts have largely been outpaced by technological development. In this it's similar to general internet piracy.
On the other hand, it is questionable whether going after child pornography is the right way to combat child sexual abuse at all. The jury is still out on the question whether watching porn increases one's likelihood of committing sexual assault, though recent studies seem to conclude this is not the case, even for violent porn, and that there might even be an inverse relation.[0]
If that is indeed the case, then child pornography is not a trigger for child sexual abuse, merely a result thereof. Then going after child porn is justified to prevent the abuse of the children involved, but no more important than preventing the abuse of children whose abuse is not recorded and distributed: we should be focusing on preventing child abuse altogether, and place less emphasis on whether there's a camera present or not.
[edit] In my comment, I implicitly assume that (violent) legal pornography is to sexual abuse as child porn is to child sexual abuse. That may not be entirely accurate. See derefr's post[1], which discusses some of the differences in economic incentives between the creation and distribution of normal porn and those of child porn.
If that conclusion is indeed correct, then apparently our efforts to put a halt to it haven't worked. There are then two possible conclusions:
1) We haven't done enough yet. Doubling the available budget will improve the situation.
2) Our current methods are pointless. No amount of effort will do the trick, and going after child porn is indeed a wasted effort.
Personally, I think it's a combination of the two. The advent of the internet has made sharing illegal content orders of magnitude easier. Even if our efforts at curtailing child porn are effective, those efforts have largely been outpaced by technological development. In this it's similar to general internet piracy.
On the other hand, it is questionable whether going after child pornography is the right way to combat child sexual abuse at all. The jury is still out on the question whether watching porn increases one's likelihood of committing sexual assault, though recent studies seem to conclude this is not the case, even for violent porn, and that there might even be an inverse relation.[0]
If that is indeed the case, then child pornography is not a trigger for child sexual abuse, merely a result thereof. Then going after child porn is justified to prevent the abuse of the children involved, but no more important than preventing the abuse of children whose abuse is not recorded and distributed: we should be focusing on preventing child abuse altogether, and place less emphasis on whether there's a camera present or not.
[edit] In my comment, I implicitly assume that (violent) legal pornography is to sexual abuse as child porn is to child sexual abuse. That may not be entirely accurate. See derefr's post[1], which discusses some of the differences in economic incentives between the creation and distribution of normal porn and those of child porn.
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[0] http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/pornography.pdf
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155015