> possibly encouraging a 'dormant' pedophile to act on his/her urges when they normally wouldn't have.
Like how the violent computer games obviously encourage 'dormant' murderers? You could argue exactly opposite way. It could help potential abusers channel their urges.
> Stopping the distribution of photos of children being raped -> less children being raped so that photos can be distributed for profit.
That "->" sign in your statement for me comes with huge "?" inside. Profit from distribution comes mostly from copyright. And I would never dream to grant anyone a copyright on images of child abuse. My point is that suppression of distribution and possession is not necessarily best tool, not that we should destigmatize images of child abuse somehow and repackage it into commercially tradable commodity.
Higher availability of existing material might cause less demand for production of new material. Production would be as illegal as always or even more so and more dangerous as there is wider number of people trying to track those bastards down.
Many people expect rise in the demand when such sick material becomes widely available and that this rise in the demand will increase the number of children being abused. That, I think comes from belief which I don't share that lots of people (given opportunity) are potential pedophiles.
When internet became popular, availability of images of human corpses massacred in different ways massively increased. Some people already liked looking at such pictures, others discovered that they like them, some liked to look at a few of them but fed up or seen something so horrible that they reached their limit and found them disgusting altogether.
And yet we didn't notice any sudden spike of people maiming others in order to create such pictures.
> I'll even argue that legalizing distribution of such images will normalize the behavior in sick individuals.
Yes. Probably. Some of them might live less disturbed lives. Some might even seek help. The only harm I could imagine that could come from watching pictures of abused child (if you personally can bear it) is that some people will strive to produce new such for fame in the community (no copyright so I believe financial motivation will drop not raise). But such sick fame could only be attached to a nick not the real person. And such fame would be very dangerous. I could compare such fame to fame of the crackers. But some of them do get caught even though at least 60% of internet user love them, or at least love the job they do. I think this would never be the case with child abusers. I think even some people who can look at such images and even find pleasure in looking at them would gladly out someone who hurts children to the police.
I'm sorry for disturbing your peace with my thoughts but I don't advocate encouraging any kind of child abuse economy. There's some economy in all human activity. Even in abusing children. This economy is already actively influenced by people who want to reduce how much of it is going on (and that amounts to pretty much almost everybody). I'm just not sure if common sense attempts to influence this economy are best for the goal in mind. People tend to make mistakes when they act intuitively instead of scientifically and there is very little data when it comes to such grave social issues.
As for why children are suffering child abuse... In my opinion is that it mostly because there are sick people who like abusing children. And also in my opinion that's a very small subset of people who like to watch images of child abuse. I think that producing images of child abuse is sort of a sideshow to actual child abuse. There are probably some people who exploit children strictly for profit but I suspect most of imagery is produced by pedophiles who would exploit children anyways but they also like taking pictures.