One reason I think Lolicon/shotacon/Cub should be legal is that it's a waste of time to investigate and prosecute it. Any resources used for investigating drawings could be used for investigating actual CP. There is so much CP that police, platforms, and groups like the NCMEC or IWF are unable to deal with it all. It's not just on the darkweb either. Here's some data from the NCMEC's cybertipline. The vast majority of reports they receive are about CSAM. In 2024, 19,854,300 out of 20,512,803 reports were about CP. Source: https://archive.today/https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata In 2024, Facebook filed around 8 million reports to the NCMEC and Instagram filed around 3 million. Source: https://archive.today/https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/cybertiplinedata2024/2024-reports-by-esp.pdf In 2023, Facebook filed around 17 million reports to the NCMEC and Instagram filed around 11 million. Source: https://archive.today/https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/2023-reports-by-esp.pdf This isn't all the CP on the clearweb or even Facebook/Instagram, that's just the stuff that got caught. A different group used a webcrawler to detect and report CP. >The vast majority of CSAM detected by Project Arachnid is not physically hosted on the dark web. However, the dark web does act as the main conduit for directing individuals on where to find it on the clear web. Source: https://archive.today/https://protectchildren.ca/en/resources-research/project-arachnid-csam-online-availability/ In the USA there wouldn't be enough space in prison to hold everyone who consumes CP, so it's not even worth trying to crack down on people for possessing fictional material. >“I think that people were always there, but the access is so easy,” said Lt. John Pizzuro, a task force commander in New Jersey. “You got nine million people in the state of New Jersey. Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000 people.” Source: https://archive.today/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html For comparison, there's a little under 2 million prisoners in the USA. Source: https://archive.today/https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/criminal-defense/mass-incarceration-in-america-stats-and-facts/ Here's some data from Britain: >Police were alerted to 2,866 suspects in 2012 but only 192 of them – or one in 15 - were detained, according to data from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). Source: https://archive.today/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10109506/Most-people-who-view-child-porn-escape-arrest.html I don't think there's much point prosecuting someone for possession of fictional material, when most CP consumers will not be caught.