[shasarak]

You'll note the absence of small-print at your link. If you find figures like that on sites where there is small-print, you'll find that the figure is calculated by including things like boys at school trying to look up your skirt in class or (particularly) your parents obliging you to kiss an elderly relative when you don't want to as part of the family gathering at Christmas. Of course the latter is not exactly a joyous experience, but it isn't exactly life-destroying either.

There is some debate on this point, naturally. From wikipedia (link: ):

(emphasis added)

You also need to remember that, even in cases of genuine sexual abuse, this is including a large number of cases where the abuser is roughly the same age as the child at the time - or at any rate well below adult age. I'm not sure to what extent it makes sense to lump cases like that into the same classification as cases where the abuser is an adult. An abusive 11-year-old boy may grow up to be an abusive adult, but that doesn't mean that the victims of his abuse will still be 10-year-old girls; they're more likely to be adults.

On top of that, as shadowfyr has explained at some length, certain investigative techniques result in a vast number of false positives being reported when it comes to child abuse. There was a famous case in England in 1987 (in Cleveland, specifically) where a doctor named Marietta Higgs decided that Reflex Anal Dilatation (i.e. the spontaneous opening of the anal sphincter in response to gentle spreading of the buttocks) was a completely reliable indicator of anal abuse. She, a fellow doctor, and social services managed to get over 100 children taken into care as a consequence, without ever stopping to ask how many of them might simply be constipated.



In 1991 there was an even more absurd scandal in Orkney where a large group of children were supposed to have been subjected to "ritual satanic abuse". It was subsequently demonstrated that there was not a single shred of evidence to back the claims. A supposed hoodd rope, for example, turned out to be someone's graduation gown. One memorably "non-leading" question asked by a social worker of a child in that case was "when were you given the orange drink that made you sleepy?" - this despite the fact that the only thing the child had said about the drink was that it was "orange".



What if they don't pay for it? More importantly, what if the pornography doesn't actually involve any real children?

Another thing to question is the rather curious notion of child sexual abuse being performed on an industrial scale purely in response to financial demand - i.e. the idea that people who have no sexual interest in children suddenly decide to abuse to children solely because there is money to be made from doing it. I find this idea rather questionable. I think it's much more likely that when children are abused on film they are children who would have been abused anyway; the fact that there might be money to made might encourage someone to capture the act on camera rather than keeping it secret, but I doubt that it results in more children being abused. The only difference is that it makes it easier to catch the abusers.

It's a lot more than 40%.