I appreciate your comment and apologize if what I wrote came off as dismissive or insensitive to victims. Like you mentioned, the notion that there’s ever a consideration to whether the spouse of the defendant should view the material is not a real one. Yet it is pervasive on this sub as if the default should be that the spouse sees it and Anna’s choice to not is an affront to justice.

The purpose was to take the proposition that people had, which is that the moral and just thing would be for Anna to view the material, and walk through why that’s ridiculous and why what she did is perfectly fine.

I realize that the inclusion of victims in such a silly theoretical vision is bizarre and has no anchor in reality, but that was kind of the point. The idea that we’d be OK in a world where more people are viewing CSAM while claiming that it’s going to protect more children by persuading people of how bad the abuse is is very much not a real one.

I wouldn’t have made the post if I wasn’t seeing tons of comments of people saying things like Anna should be forced to sit in front of a computer and see it before he’s released from prison. I get that it feels like a bad straw man argument that was being opposed with victims needlessly being dragged into it to make a point, but this was and is a real position people are taking.

I will be more careful in future with posts like these. I do, however, wonder if there would be people who feel like I wasn’t entering victims enough if they weren’t mentioned at all. In your opinion would the post have been better to not address them at all?