[disillusioned]

What does it say about us, as a society, or just as _humans_, where the scale and magnitude of this problem is so great and only growing? Where and how are we failing ourselves that the sort of mental illness that percolates and drives this sort of behavior festers, amplifies, and converts into actual, illicit action?

These numbers are mind-boggling, and while I understand that a "few (extremely) bad apples" are probably responsible for an outsized amount of production, AND that AI-generated imagery is flooding the zone disproportionate to the amount of actual human children being physically harmed, it's still absolutely wild to me that we collectively are producing and consuming so much of this content, despite it being largely universally considered essentially the most abhorrent thing possible.

What would fixing this at the root cause even start to begin? How do we apply whatever combination of therapeutic intervention or further societal pressure or whatever might work to reduce the incidence of people having these urges, exploring them, feeding them, and sometimes acting on them? We see signs in every airport bathroom telling us to look for signs of trafficking. Trafficking intervention training is a huge deal in the travel industry in general. There are early intervention and detection systems for social workers and case workers.

But has anyone spent any real time looking at this from the other side: the side of the offender? I imagine there's research on the typical chain of how someone gets "onboarded" here: it probably starts with some early abuse, or if not that, early exposure or early curiosity, and then snowballs from there. I'm just thinking out loud about how large the magnitude of the problem is on the offender side if we're talking about this volume of images, and how we might be able to evaluate things from the "ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure" side of things, because damn is this depressing.

[Loughla]

Images are interesting though. You can have a massive amount of images for only a few consumers.

I would be interested in statistics related to the percent of adults who would be considered child predators. I have zero scope on how large this issue is by percent of population.

If we're talking about 3% of everyone who is sexually attracted to children, that's one thing, but if it's .0000001% then the issue really is just the producers of content.

Does anyone here know of any studies or statistics? My basic googling hasn't really turned up anything trustworthy.

[disillusioned]

That's what I'm getting at with the "few bad apples" reference: it's _possible_ (and I'd hope) that the percentages are very small... but the insane volume of things like _grooming_ and other behaviors, to say nothing of just how many women report some form of sexual assault or abuse by the time they reach adulthood being in, what, the high 30%s?... it's not great.

[formerly_proven]

As per Wikipedia there is really bad/no data on this because almost all research relies on convicted pedophiles and going around making “are you a pedo, perchance?” surveys in the general population simply does not work.

[ainch]

Germany has an anonymous support programme for people who feel paedophilic urges but don't wish to offend. I believe they've used that network for research, but I think it's probably quite a limited, and potentially biased, sample.

[adi_kurian]

I think it is around that. I remember being startled hearing it.

https://scispace.com/pdf/how-common-is-men-s-self-reported-s...

Ghastly.

[throwaway55553]

You can't have any meaningful statistics as long as people flip out whenever this topic comes up.

For some, "child predators" are those who do harmful things to toddlers.

For others, "child predators" are anyone who you want to accuse of it, like in this story: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/ke...

[TurdF3rguson]

What percentage of pornhub visitors click on the "barely legal" category? I'm pretty sure that data is available.

[PunchyHamster]

It's also worth considering just parent taking photos of the child would hit the positive on classifier. And it can be CSAM and not CSAM at the same time, because it is fine to be on the device of the parent, but it can also be stolen and distributed by maliciosu actor.

> What does it say about us, as a society, or just as _humans_, where the scale and magnitude of this problem is so great and only growing?

That the people in power have too much power and they get away with it often enough that there is actual money to be made supplying them.

[tbrownaw]

I remember when the official terminology changed from "child porn" to "child sexual abuse material", and how this was meant to emphasize that it was produced by actually abusing an actual child.

[PunchyHamster]

and yet people keep putting 2D jpgs and AI made slop in CSAM category for some fucking reason