To me the possession of child porn is victim-less, just as the possession of media of murders is victim-less, or the possession of media of any other crime is victim-less. The purchasing of media of a crime is dubious, as it may serve to reward people who commit that crime, and the committing of these crimes almost always has a victim (excluding cases for example someone wanting to be murdered or something).
The prosecution of these cases seems to look a lot like crimes of morality than crimes that directly impact someone else's life and happiness. Sometimes I've heard people say that the mere fact of media existing of a crime that they were in hurts them, and hurts them more when people watch it. But to me, prosecution of these cases, if anything makes one more aware of people watching media of these things, not less.
The thing that bugs me the most about these sorts of prosecutions of "thought crimes" is that the trail from the "thought criminal" to the actual crime is always hazy, and definitely not 1-1.
E.g Imagine someone who was really into collecting child porn as some kind of bizarre stamp collecting type of thing. They were never into it per-se, it was just some kind of messed up hobby. They'd trawl forums on the dark web and download every image they see, maybe write a script to do it. It would be very hard to trace a direct line to a victim there. More likely than not, particularly if no money ever changed hands, there probably wasn't a direct victim. Someone may have paid for it at some time in the past, but not the stamp-collector. It seems like these are crimes that convict people who hurt others, but also those who do not hurt others.
