I appreciate that you probably have given this difficult area more thought than I.

I don’t think that fictional material really is considered the same as real footage, but I do think that possession of fictional material should still be a crime.

A criminal court process has two parts: firstly deciding whether the defendant is guilty of the crime they are charged with, and secondly deciding the punishment given the severity of the crime and the impact on the victims.

In Australia, if you’re charged with possession of CSAM then the fictional nature of the material is not a defense. Possession is a crime and it’s the same crime as possession of real images.

However, in the second part the judge is of course going to weigh the impact on victims in determining the sentence.

There’s a longer conversation to be had about the objectives of the penal system, but the abridged version is that I genuinely believe that disallowing the fictional nature of images as a defense helps prevent harms to potential victims. It would be dramatically more difficult to secure convictions against abusers if police need to identify a victim in each case.