Australia

I'm all for protecting real-world children. But I think Australia’s current laws are counterproductive; they push non-offending paedophiles into isolation, where they feel unable to seek help.

There are two major arguments here:

• The harm-reduction argument: substitutes like hentai or dolls can reduce the urge to act on real-world impulses ("post-nut clarity").

• The escalation argument: these substitutes may desensitise some individuals and lead them to seek more extreme material, eventually crossing into real-world offences ("gooncels").

Both are true, but not equally. The latter group tends to be predisposed to risk-seeking behaviour, often overlapping with other criminal or antisocial traits; violence, theft, mental illness, impulsivity.

These high-risk individuals are rare. To criminalise the entire category of material because a small subset might escalate is a narrow view that ignores those for whom it actually serves as a safety valve.

There’s no real cost-benefit study on this yet, but intuitively, criminalising such material seems to produce worse outcomes overall. It drives people who haven’t hurt anyone further underground, and away from treatment, support, and accountability.