You ask a number of questions within your question. I'll try to address them all as best as my memory will allow me to.
The first issue you raised was one of proportionate sentencing--how serious are these crimes, and are these mandatory minimums an appropriate response to such a crime? I don't know if I'm the right person to answer that question, but I'll give you my views anyway.
What I worry about, with respect to mandatory minimum sentencing, is the potential of having a whole bunch of new offenders in the system. That's a potential, a very negative outcome, I think, of increasing the penalties for say possession of Internet child pornography. I'm not so sure that we want to go that way.
The reason I say that is because in the United States this is the fastest-growing category of offenders in their system. When you think about how available this material is.... I mean, after all, child pornography is defined as images of anybody up to the age of 18. It's unfortunate that it's called child pornography, because these people are minors; they're young, the majority of them, but they're not what, in my language, I would call a child. Certainly they're not prepubertal.
On the other hand, I think you raise a very serious and important issue. What we seek to address is the exploitation of children. You can imagine all kinds of unhappy scenarios where someone is coerced or tricked into doing stuff that's filmed. Certainly I think those offences should be penalized quite heavily. At the level of possession, I'm not so sure. I fear that it's so common that it will lead to problems in administering justice.
You raise the issue of pedophilia. Let me just make some distinctions for you.
First of all, pedophiles are people who prefer prepubescent children. They're not interested in 15-year-olds who have an adult body shape or anything like that. They're not interested in those kinds of people. They have quite a restricted area of sexual interests in terms of the kinds of body types that their victims have. There is no evidence that this sort of preference can be changed through treatment or through anything else.
Treatment for those offenders shades into management, where you essentially have to teach someone to live within their sexual preference structure. They have to find other kinds of outlets. They have to avoid high-risk situations. They have to do all those sorts of things. But I think that most people would agree that this kind of sexual preference pattern—an actual preference for prepubertal children—is not alterable by any kinds of current treatments.