I would also love a good answer. I think most people just don't think that deeply about it. When I questioned about this (as my camera was being confiscated), p

I would also love a good answer. I think most people just don't think that deeply about it. When I questioned about this (as my camera was being confiscated), people were outraged at the thought of legalising child porn. And when pressed further, they will only say its morally wrong (and threatened to turn me to the police! - to which I backed down of course). The best I can come up with is that legislators fear it will lead to copycats. Its been shown that people who hear about a suicide are more likely to both commit suicide and do it in the same manner. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide. "Examples of celebrities whose suicides have inspired suicide clusters include the Japanese musicians Yukiko Okada and Hide and Marilyn Monroe, whose death was followed by an increase of 200 more suicides than average for that August month". And if you consider that copycat suicides may not have happened without the trigger suicide, the thought that copycat child abuse may not happen without a trigger child abuse is not a wild leap. And the trigger child abuse can be that harmless few bits. I'd feel fine about losing some freedom to stop that child abuse trigger. There are all sorts of reasons why some information is protected from the public, and when that information can cause public harm but not be in any public interest the case to ban it is very strong. Child porn may be equivalent to that sort of may be "harmful and not in public interest" category which gets it perma-banned. tl;dr maybe to stop copycats