I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.

> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life

Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.

That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.

Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.