Even if it is too costly to catch the viewers first, there's no better way to find the producers after.
I believe studies exist which demonstrate that suppressing deviant behavior results in it manifesting itself more violently, not less. I wish I had a specific source to cite.
This isn't one of those things where all the evidence just says something general and simple, and then can be specialized to infer what happens for a case like this; it's really one of those times where we need to test what happens in this case in particular.
If you search for sources on that, I think you will find that the evidence is pretty divided. I actually had taken this as fact for a long time, but when I looked for sources to back it up, I found that it's not nearly so clear cut.
What does seem to be the case is that making someone feel ashamed over things they can't control is psychologically damaging. For example, shame seems to be a very strong predictor of whether PTSD symptoms will emerge, both in sex crime victims and in war veterans.
This problem of shame causing psychological problems, I think, may be where the idea of sexual repression being harmful came from. Suppression of sexual urges without shame may be completely harmless, but that's not usually how it happens unless you're doing a controlled study.
As a society, we are completely dropping the ball in this respect. We make victims feel ashamed and broken, which is incredibly unfair, and likely exacerbates considerably the psychological harm that they have to deal with.
And I think we're probably doing a lot of harm by making people who have sexual attraction to children feel ashamed. Given two people who are attracted to children, one of whom is relatively stable and secure, and one of whom has huge mental health issues, which one do you think is more likely to hurt a child?
Moreover, if we teach people that having an urge is already wrong, then what is the moral incentive not to act on that urge? Instead, we should be teaching people that attraction toward children is actually pretty common, and that there's no reason to be ashamed of anything that happens inside your head, but that there are some urges and fantasies that you must not act on (or at least must not act out directly; there are some alternatives like role-play and simulated pornography).
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that evidence is lacking? Because that was my whole point.
>It seems you're trying to believe the latter
I'm not trying to believe anything. That would be a mortal sin. I am saying that we don't have evidence to rule out either 1 or 2, and both seem about equally plausible. It would certainly be convenient for 2 to be true, since it would give us a pretty easy option for deterring child abuse (high quality simulated CP). That's why I think it's important that we find answers those questions.
If 1 is true, I want to believe 1. If 2 is true, I want to believe 2.