.. forgot to add: are caught with CP.
Manda Jo, I actually agree with you. I am not an apologist for the downloading or posession of CP, especially not the violent kind.
But my point made in the OP is that I suspect that some, maybe even a majority of men caught in the posession of CP, without any other signs of being a child molestor, are perhaps attracted to the kind of self-loathing that consuming this kind of porn might bring.
Do you have evidence that any of this is true? I see no reason to believe that an increasing number of non-pedophiles are being caught with child pornography, and I consider it unlikely that a significant number of men busted for possession of child pornography are not actually interested in having sex with children.
I can believe that men have been caught with child pornography without having a past record of child molestation, but many child molesters are not caught until after they have molested dozens of children. I would assume that there are also pedophiles who manage to resist the urge to actually molest children, either for moral reasons or because they’re afraid of being caught, but still look at child pornography. I’d have more sympathy for someone like that than someone who wasn’t aroused by children at all and was collecting child pornography for kicks.
Yes, me too. At least with the pedophiles, they’re succumbing to a base desire within them. With the transgressives, the OP makes it sound like they’re not really attracted to children but make the conscious desire to collect pornography of them out of hatred of society. The last thing I’d want is for someone like that to accept themselves. Sometimes I think we as a society go too far with acceptance of sexual urges. I’m not saying everyone should feel bad about themselves for having weird desires, but why do people so often feel the need to bring it into the public sphere, to justify it?
How about downloading out of some sense of morbid curiosity?
Not being turned on by the depravity, or wanting to look at it from a sexual titallation point of view, but just “curious” because it’s gross?
Just look at the success of a site like ogrish.com to see that people like to look at gross things.
I know I have looked at pictures / movies (amongst others) of a still moving man that had been cut in half in an accident, brains splattered across a road, people getting their asses handed to them in fights in a gross way…
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine looking for child porn just to see if I could find it, what it actually looks like and how it is any different from “normal” porn.
But you’re still furthering the abuse of those forced to participate in said acts.
Just to be clear - I have not and will not download child porn, not have I ever done a search for it.
I am more responding from an intellectual point of view. I remember reading (after a link here) about giving fellatio to a dog. That doesn’t mean I want to do it. Or am turned on by it - it was simply “how the hell do you do that” type of reaction.
And I am not so sure that somebody with those sorts of motivations are “supporting and futhering” the abuse of children in any noticable or measurable way. (mind you, I am not sure they are not either). In other words, for the person that is looking for the sake of looking I would be doubtful that they have contributed to abuse.
This is ridiculous.
Assuming rationality on the part of criminals, then a person will commit a crime if the expected payoff of the crime exceeds the expected penalty multiplied by the perceived chance of conviction.
Now of course criminals aren’t fully rational, but even if you relax the assumptions, you don’t get to the position where prison acts as zero deterrent.
From what I gather, said member said he was drunk off his ass when he did that, and it was on a bet.
And I get what you’re saying, but it still squicks me out, and I can’t imagine why anyone would do such a thing, even for curiosity’s sake.
That’s normal. What’s also normal is to go to the next step and think “but those are actual kids that are actually being put through hell. That could be me, or mine. I don’t want to be a part of that in any way.”
Looking is abuse. It doesn’t matter if the child ever finds out about any given person doing the looking. To argue otherwise is like saying that peeping toms are only committing a crime if they get caught and that if you don’t know a man is in your bushes watching you through the window, he hasn’t done anything wrong. And in any case, stuff gets produced because people like to see it. It doesn’t matter why they like to see it.