CSAM is some pretty bad stuff but case numbers are often wildly misleading. A big share (in my country some 40+ %) are minors and teens sharing images of themselves or receiving images from their bf/gf.[1] Another chunk is parents or teachers trying to report it and invariably finding themselves in possession of CSAM (e.g. teacher sees pupil has image of a naked 13yo on their phone, takes phone from them => teacher intentionally gained possession of CSAM => will be a felon shortly). Traditionally such cases would be dropped, but around here it was recently updooted to felony status, which means cases cannot be dropped.
[1] Jurisdictions vary wildly in how they prosecute this but many seem to have funny age combinations where e.g. a 13yo sending an explicit image to a 14yo means the 13yo can't be charged for producing CSAM but the 14yo committed a felony by possessing it. Some jurisdictions have charged people for sex trafficking themselves in these situations. It's all pretty insane if you ask me.
Edit: Worth pointing out that the organizations that push hardest for legislation like this (mostly christian fundamentalists) also care the least about these side-effects, because sex before marriage is a sin and ought to be illegal anyway. A conspiracy theorist would hypothesize that these side-effects are actually the intended main effect for those groups.
A teenage couple in high school (just barely underage) were both charged with possession and production of CSAM because they sent images between each other. As I understand it from the local papers they ended up getting off fairly easy with something like 100 hours of community service. But only because our local prosecutor understood that they were kids, a couple, and sharing between each other, and almost of age to begin with. If we had a prosecutor less understanding they would have been facing at least 5 years in prison each.
Another factor is that the numbers are almost always "reports" - because there are so many reports generated. People doing this content moderation are very much operating on a "better safe than sorry" approach (for obvious reasons). The result of that is that statistics I've seen put it at somewhere between 70-90% of these reports don't actually correctly identify CSAM and are discarded at the first stage. But it's always the much larger, initial number that is used to illustrate the apparent size of the problem.
[1] Jurisdictions vary wildly in how they prosecute this but many seem to have funny age combinations where e.g. a 13yo sending an explicit image to a 14yo means the 13yo can't be charged for producing CSAM but the 14yo committed a felony by possessing it. Some jurisdictions have charged people for sex trafficking themselves in these situations. It's all pretty insane if you ask me.
Edit: Worth pointing out that the organizations that push hardest for legislation like this (mostly christian fundamentalists) also care the least about these side-effects, because sex before marriage is a sin and ought to be illegal anyway. A conspiracy theorist would hypothesize that these side-effects are actually the intended main effect for those groups.