Clearly, the only solution is to not only kick the lolicon aspect out of anime, but to really kick the objectification of women in anime out. All character design should be handled by yoshitoshi ABe, as we know from Haibane and NieA he's great at drawing of age characters with an adult build, frumpy clothes, and nothing more than, oh, B-cups. If there is to be a young girl featured in an anime, it may only be in a Ghibli picture, as we all know all Ghibli heroines are positive role models of assertive young women.
While were at it, the objectification of men in anime is also problematic. After all, all those bishonen and gar males make me feel inadequate and unattractive, and the gradual increase of shota-appeal males only makes my following call that much more important. Namely, all male character design should be done yoshitoshi ABe as well, as we all know he's also quite good at designing dumpy looking, relatively unattractive guys too. I mean, who would objectify the guys from Niea? Nobody, that's who.
Oh, what's this that just came across my desk...
People turn to animation as a means of escapism and entertainment, and that in fact, are often using it as means of living vicariously though someone else's story? Hmm, that's unexpected. Further still, that most of the anime that comes to the US, outside of the big shonen and shojo titles, is aimed at otaku in Japan, and thus whatever trends and social attitudes that are prominent amongst their otaku community often dominate the medium, regardless of foreign taboos? Wow, that could be problematic.
Alright, with that massive piece of sarcasm out of the way, let me say anime, for the foreseeable future, is going to be saddled with a ton of objectification of people, and the regardless what kind/type of person is being objectified you'll find someone objects to it, and on moral grounds at that. Further still, it's going to have a serious piece of it skewing young because Japan's taboos just don't fall on that stuff the same way as it does in the US. I mean, it took what amounted to the threat of trade sanctions to get Japan to ban child pornography, and that happened only a decade ago. As it stands, the age of consent in a lot of prefectures is still only 14 (of course, that's no different some localities in the US,) the enjo kosai (compensated dating) trend among jr. high and high schoolers in Japan is still going strong over a decade after it really began to take off, and even with the child porn laws on the books, you still have horrendous photo books of child models in bathing suits because that just scoots into legality.
To put it another way - yeah, pedophilia is exceedingly taboo in the west, as it should be (science backs that up - plenty of studies say it's a bad thing.) Japan's morality doesn't fall nearly as close to us on that as one would think. That's going to be reflected in their media, especially in otaku-centric anime where it is escapism for nerds with various issues a lot of the time. If anything, the more serious Japan gets about clamping down on real-world pedophilia - banning the kiddie photobooks, cracking down on enjo kosai and so on - the more that anime escapism is going to end up becoming more prominent; that cultural element will find away to be reflected in the culture. All things considered, it's probably better to have that in the fantasy media than happening in real life though.
Does that mean that it's palatable product to western otaku who'd probably much rather have Rally Vincent and Ryoko over Minnie May and Sasami? No. Is that a decline in the storytelling per se? Perhaps only cross-culturally, but it does mean that for some people, the more that turns up, the more it's going to detract from anime as medium for them. Of course, as I said, you can say that about any given element of a medium if you find the right element and the right person, and depending on the element, you'd have them detesting it on moral grounds. As such, it makes whether the raise of an occurrence of an element is indicative of a decline in the quality of a medium a much more personal assessment than one might think.
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