It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.
The problem with the public outrage however is that is makes any rational discussion almost impossible
When the topic of child porn comes up, emotion takes over and logic goes away.
One of the largest problems with child porn is the actual definition of child porn. To most people when they hear of child porn, they think of a Person under the age of puberty being forced to engage in a sex act with an adult person.
However 2 17 year olds having sex and video taping it is also child porn, they can (and have been) charged with producing, and distributing said child porn
Many many many teens were arrested and convicted before states starting passing exceptions to the law, and many states today it is still illegal for a 17year old person to send a nude photo of themselves to another 17year old person, haven forbid a 17 year and 364 day old person send picture to a 17 year and 366 day year old person....
Yes, a lot of "child porn" charges are deeply stupid. When we talk about child porn rings and websites, we are not talking about those. We are talking about the "raping 8-year-olds" kind.
That's really not important though is it. If you're being prosecuted (at least in the UK) for such crimes then the age of the children and the level of the pornography is assessed and taken in to account in your sentencing. If the only image you'd acquired was a nip-slip of a teenager -- or you had a selfie with a same-age partner -- then the sentence would be entirely different to having thousands of images of pre-teen rape. Whilst USA law is often ridiculous it doesn't seem to be that lame that such differentiations aren't being made.
Where are you trying to go with this rhetorical question?
Did you? No? Then you don't have any more information than I do.
Nobody visits a darknet site called "The Playpen" to trade pics of consenting 17-year-olds. For all you or I know, the site never existed in the first place and the FBI set up the entire thing as a cover to silence dissidents. But that would be a problem with government corruption, not with the definition of child porn.
It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.