Benjamin Britten and paedophilia

Urgent and key phrase there. The "huge anxiety about paedophilia" revolves mainly around cases where this is not so. A virginal, "chaste" paedophile such as Britten appears to have been is not doing much, if any, harm.

The current rationale for handing out draconian punishments for the mere possession of paedophiliac pornography is that, by providing financial incentives for creating this porn, the "consumer" of it is as guilty as the creator of it. This rationale is extremely weak, IMO, in that the punishments are in no way commensurate with the degree of complicity.

OTOH, sexually active and predatory paedophiles do immense amounts of harm and everything reasonable should be done to find them quickly and remove them from society for a long, long time.