this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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There is an argument to be made that allowing people with unhealthy desires a safe and harmless outlet, they will be less compelled to go with the harmful option.
And, actually, I kinda want to disagree with the premise too. Even if it was provably true that noone gets hurt if there wasn't porn, you can flip the question; why should it be banned if it doesn't hurt anyone? Do you want to live in a world where anything that's perceived as bad is just outright banned without much thought?
You are already making assumptions about whether or not producing artificial CP is harmful. But in truth nobody knows. And studies have shown that media indeed does influence us. It's quite naive to assume that somehow just porn doesn't.
Artificial or not, this isn't really a new idea. A similar argument can be made for existing CSAM and providing it under controlled conditions.
And yeah, "nobody knows", in huge part because doing such a study would be highly illegal under current CSAM laws in most parts of the world. So, paradoxically, you can't even legally study how to help those people, even if they actively want to be helped and want to help you do research on it.
Edit: Also, I'm not really making any assumptions; I literally said "there is an argument to be made". I'm not making that argument because I don't actually know enough. Just saying that it's an option that should be explored.
This would go directly against the needs of the victims.
I was able to find an organisation which helps pedophiles and also conducts anonymous surveys. The pedophiles themselves reported they feel addicted to CSAM, most have come first in contact when they were minors themselves and nearly half want to seek contact to children after watching CSAM.
Survey of German pedophiles
Survey of Russian pedophiles
Research about the surveys