The law might sentence differently for severity of the crime (length of sentence), but this is a misguided comment. No one should "normalise" paedophilia in any way. That is why people are hostile to the "open discussions" you are asking for. Going to seek help because of thoughts you're having is one thing, but not accepting the severity of said thoughts is not a path you want to go down under "cartoons/clothed children". Even a psychologist would tell you that. Normalisation is not the answer/acceptable behaviour, it's incredibly damaging and fuels the cycles of paedophiles. If you want to argue about rehabilitating paedophiles then you will have to accept part of that rehabilitation is the explicit stating of what is wrong/illegal and the attempt to completely and utterly nuke any sort of normalisation in the mind of the person. So no, no room is given to "but what happens if its just kids in clothing I sexualise? It's not real nudes!". That is unacceptable behaviour and these kinds of attempts to skirt the law to "aid" the paedophile are not acceptable. Absolutely no form of rehabilitation is going to play ball with these concepts, let alone actively encourage someone to just seek out clothed children instead. Or even cartoons. If someone is sexualizing children then there will be an effort to remove/restrict them from any sort of content that depicts children sexually, yes, even cartoons or animated content.
It may seem like I'm going in strong here, but if there's one thing that infuriates many it's apathy and/or normalisation of paedophilia that occasionally goes on. If any paedophiles read forms of "normalisation" across the internet all that does is reinforce in their minds oh, it's okay if I suppress my urges by downloading CP because "people online say I'm not really hurting anyone". Or, "there are different types of paedophilia, so I'm one of the better paedophiles". None of this is helpful, and in fact, it's potentially dangerous. Amir0x appeared to give that statement when arrested and charged, that he "just did what he did to suppress urges". Apparently going for "I'm one of the better paedophiles" argument. That cannot be accepted or normalised when the core issue with paedophiles is the sexualisation of children. You might get a shorter sentence depending on what you've done, but you're still going on a sex offenders list and you like any other paedophile still have the same core problem, sexualising children. To try and tackle that zero tolerance can be given to any sort of sexualisation of children, however they are depicted.