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.