with respect to People who Possess Child Porn

*TW Trigger warning for discussion of sexual abuse of children*



In light of Mark Salling, former Glee star, allegedly possessing child porn on his PC:

If you watch snuff videos, should you be put in prison for creating a demand for snuff videos?

If you share videos of terrorist acts, should you be put in prison as a terrorist for your part in spreading the original message of terror?

If you eat an animal, knowing that they were tortured in factory farms, should you be charged as an accomplice to animal abuse?

If you think these are ridiculous claims, then it would be morally consistent to believe that people should NOT be put away for possession of child pornography.  Contrapositively, if you think that people should be imprisoned for possession of child porn, then you should also advocate punishment for other consumers-as-criminal-accessories.

But I suspect most people's opinions are split between those issues.  If that's the case, are your views morally consistent and well-constructed, or are you regurgitating modern taboo without thinking about its consequences?

I ask this because we should be doing what protects children.  Raising our pitchforks and crusading against people with a proclivity to do harm is not doing a whole lot to protect victims from those who actively harm them.  Consider that the violent vilification of pedophiles pushes pedophiles into greater secrecy, motivates them to design better means of hiding what they do, and in the long run makes it harder to end the practice of filming child porn.

I don't know what the solution is to sexual abuse of children, but I don't think it's by shutting down conversation on the topic, as is usually the case.  It's a difficult and emotional topic, but with the prevalence of child sexual abuse as it is, what we've been doing (vilifying pedophiles and making the whole topic taboo) doesn't seem to be saving children.  So unless we radically change our approach, children will continue to be raped, and that abuse will continue being recorded and spread online.

I don't want child porn to continue being produced, and I don't have any alternative to draconian punishment of porn consumers.  But I hate when problems are left unsolved because people think they're already addressing them successfully.  If we were addressing child molestation the way we need to, then why hasn't it gone away?