So I looked this up, and surprisingly the law actually does not cover cartoons. I don't want to regoogle this on my work computer (I checked on my phone), 18 US Code Section 2256 goes into this.
That being said, all in all it's that's a horrifying amount of people in so short a span.
I know the law doesn't, hence some of the shit that can be put online as "anime". 5,000-year-old dragons and all that. That post itself was more about how a paedophile would be talked to and treated when discussing rehabilitation/any sort of content where kids are involved.
I'm not actually 100% happy with how I articulated the whole post, but if it's not obvious enough with all the repetition of statements, I think the core message was clear. If anyone wants to talk about rehabilitation they need to accept the concepts of zero-tolerance around normalisation. Whatever the form of content is, even legal content.
The mind of a paedophile could sexualise a child in a bikini on the beach, whereas for you or I, that's simply a child in a bikini on the beach. It's not illegal for a child to be on the beach in a bikini. Many of them do not exist in the realms of people who can see children and
just see children. There is often some sort of predatory or attraction based response, and therefore content that is sexual in nature or that can be viewed as sexual by them, often has to be restricted/taken away/monitored. So while some anime might be legal for you or me to watch, for a paedophile it would very likely be considered content they could use to normalise their sexual attraction to children. The legality of it isn't so much the concern here, but how content will be used to continue fueling sexualisation. It's why any sort of misguided post to seek out a "legal alternative" isn't the right way to go about tackling the way a paedophile thinks and/or has acted.
Louis Theroux did a fairly interesting singular documentary on paedophiles ~
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x55lp3g The fact of the matter is no, we do not live in countries where we line up and execute criminals. So yes, there does at times have to be conversations around rehabilitation and what do to with people who may be a danger to society. Some do remain locked up for life, but others do get back out into society. Like any criminal that serves time and gets out, we have to be as certain as possible they will not offend again, and in the case of paedophiles that get out a lot of that is risk management. Such as a sex offender list, relocating away from schools, never allowing them to work with children and as I expressed zero-tolerance policies around normalisation to convince them how severe it is for them to think sexually about children, let alone act. I'm not as familiar with all the routes of medication for management (such as SSRIs/tranquillizers/etc). I know people can opt for chemical castration, which is obviously a major response. IIRC that is something in the Louis documentary above (I'm sure one of the patients opts for it). I am 99.999% certain it is not legal for the Government to actually enforce chemical castration. Life behind bars would be the default legal response for such a high-risk criminal.