Furry 'Fritter' charged with possession of child pornography

I am going to disagree, child molestation has been around for a LONG time, just ask Pochahontas. The difference is that back then, it was legal because we hadn't established many laws here in this country yet.

The Internet has not made it harder to detect rings, in fact I would think it'd make it a lot easier. Since you can act as a pedo an infiltrate an organization a lot easier on the anonymous Internet then searching out a local group. A pedo probably knows how to detect who a cop is in their local community, but a good actor on the Internet can slip in and be a welcome part of the community.

Heck, why do you think they're busting them 30 at a time these days as opposed to one at a time only when responding to a witness's complaint about their behavior IRL? The Internet gives people like that a false sense of security.

This is not a topic that citing research is too helpful for. Either you end up cherry-picking research to make a consistent point, or end up with research suggesting the level of effects all over the place, e.g. I've seen papers suggesting the rate of physical sexual abuse in those that are convicted of possessing child porn being anywhere from 1% to 80%. Furthermore a lot of the studies have severe potential issues due to sample bias, such as many of them only surveying convicted child molesters (imagine what a study on normal porn would look like if only convicted rapist were interviewed) to more subtle issues such as only interviewing those caught with child porn depicting real children. There is very little research on those that didn't do something causing them to get caught, or say using fictional pornography in countries where that is not illegal, as it is so hard to find or expect such people to come forward for such a survey. I think I remember at least one study discussing this issue, that if there is a division between legal and illegal pornography, e.g. due to being drawn vs photographed, once someone is already involved in the more serious crime of molesting they are more likely to ignore that distinction creating a bias in survey of those caught with the illegal kind.

The research doesn't really seem helpful, and in the end it is just an ad infinitum debate of principles: Should people be punished without having harmed a victim or immediate intent to do so, if there is a chance a person like them might in the future? And what threshold of chance should be used? Even some have argued that grouping fictional child porn with real child porn dilutes efforts to deal with the ultimate problem of children being harmed. (And some argue that possession of fictional child porn is harmful to children, even if the possessor never sees or comes near a real child for the rest of their life, that such things are harmful by their very existence with no other impact or influence...) And that is not even getting into the nature of those that look at such porn, and issues like there being at least one category of people with interest in such porn that have near zero chance of molesting children because they identify with the children in such porn, much like people identifying with the victim in rape fantasies are not going to rape someone because of looking at rape porn.

But like most debates on the internet and elsewhere, especially with such much emotional attachmnts, people pretty much chose their side a long time ago and will see what they want in any given issue or datum and not change how they view things.

It's not child pornography because there is no child involved. It's that simple. That's nice to have an abstract that says what you want but where's the actual paper? And what's the chances that that was looking at real child pornography (as in pornography that actual involves children). Does the same link exist for drawings? And how come this link exist for drawn child porn but not drawings of anything else?