>>5128
I believe one angle you can look at it is that by blanketly forbidding it, if you believe that the target group is much more likely to be exploited maliciously, reduces a lot of potential cases.
A lot of people that use other people for sex do so with little sense of wrongness about it, and they hide and obscure what they're doing to make it hard to prove, and hard to make their partner be willing to come out about it.
By making an entire category of people illegal to engage with like this, those that are abused are more heavily pushed to speak up about it, and the abusers can't as much obfuscate the issue. You can't convince people your sexual relationship with a child isn't abusive, and because of that, people abusing kids would have a harder time hiding it.
At least, I think this is a way people look at the problem.
If it were permitted, a lot of people that wouldn't use kids as sex objects now might feel they can get away with it, and kids probably need more of a push to speak up about being abused than adults do.
Is this
right? Is this
effective? I don't know. I am not aware of the gritty details, research, and so on. You can make lots of counter arguments, I can probably think of at least one if not two. I don't think any preventative measure of harm can be without counter-argument.
I can very much understand people being resistant to removing or easing the laws for fear of the crime that might happen as a result.
Like I said, I don't know what the right way to address the issue is, or good the current methods are.