The unjust, irrational, and unconstitutional consequences of pedophilia panic
But the conjunction of two fraught topics - children and sex - makes it hard for people to think clearly about such matters. The fear and disgust triggered by this subject help explain why laws dealing with sex offenses involving minors frequently lead to bizarre results, including wildly disproportionate sentences, punishment disguised as regulation or treatment, and penalties for committing unintentional crimes, recording your own legal behavior, or looking at pictures of nonexistent children. [...]
Something has gone terribly wrong with our criminal justice system when the same offense can be punished by five days in jail or by life in prison, depending on the whims of legislators and judges. One reason it is so hard to figure out an appropriate punishment for looking at child pornography is that it's not exactly clear why looking at child pornography is treated as a crime in the first place.
The First Amendment ordinarily protects people from punishment for the literature they read or the pictures they view, even if a jury might consider the material obscene. When the Supreme Court upheld a state law criminalizing mere possession of child pornography in the 1990 case Osborne v. Ohio, its main rationale was that the government "hopes to destroy a market for the exploitative use of children." In other words, punishing consumers is justified because their demand drives production, which requires the sexual abuse of children. Now that people who look at child pornography typically obtain it online for free, that argument carries much less weight, and another rationale mentioned by the Supreme Court has come to the fore: "The pornography's continued existence causes the child victims continuing harm by haunting the children in years to come." [...]
It makes no sense to treat possession of child pornography more harshly than violent crimes - more harshly even than actual sexual abuse of children - unless you believe that serious harm is inflicted every time someone looks at the image of a child's sexual abuse. In that case, a large enough collection of images could equal or even surpass the harm done by a single child rape, so that it could be just to impose a life sentence on someone who has done nothing but look at pictures. Federal law enforcement officials claim to believe something like that, but it's pretty clear they don't. If they did, they would never condone the tactics that the FBI uses in child pornography cases, which include distributing it to catch people who look at it.
source: Article 'The Unjust, Irrational, and Unconstitutional Consequences of Pedophilia Panic' by Jacob Sullum; reason.com/archives/2017/03/15/sex-and-kids; Reason.com; April 2017