It's a chain of abuse. Most paedophiles were abused in childhood.
Just like being attracted to women doesn't mean you're a rapist.
You can be, though.
Also consumption of any kind of distrubing porn doesn't mean you actually want to do things you see in it in the real life. This is about the same principle like when people are watching action movies (which is an accepted kind of often very disturbing cinematography), most don't want to go around and shoot/stab people.
Some very tiny percentage will, of course.
No, but it does mean you support the abuse necessary to produce it.
No. If I download old files through I2PSnark - this does not mean that CP will be produced in greater quantities.
Anyway, my point was that pedophilia being mostly caused by child abuse doesn't make much sense. Pedophilia is not child abuse by itself, and thus there's no cycle.
Cycle of abuse would just make you abuse someone in the similar way you were abused. (regardless of any attraction to the victim)
So, how much of the “chain of abuse” thing is just genetic confounding? I don’t know, which is vexing. As far as I can tell, very few of the chain-of-abuse theorists even think of genetics, even though it’s the elephant in the room, and many are hard-line blank slate believers. (I don’t have citations at the moment, but last time I looked at the relevant academic literature it was, broadly speaking, an absolute dumpster fire.)