The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?
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Comment Does porn cause rape? It could do: rape fantasies causing porn is a certainty. While there are many who would argue that porn causes rape, what we would really like to know is whether it is true.
There's not much actual evidence that it does, that seeing graphic representations of sex, even violent sex, increases the acting out of violent sex scenes.
Parts of the argument have a certain truthiness to them: the objectification of women (the statistics bear out that it is generally women who are raped) is a possible consequence of films and photos in which women are being objectified.
Exposure to only the more outre niches might cause a certain confusion in the young about what sex actually is: but then exposure to no porn at all is likely to lead to similar lack of knowledge of the Tab A Slot A (or B) thing.
But while theorising is all very well, it is necessary occasionally to fine-tune such theories by looking at the empirical evidence. And the most obvious fact about porn and rape is that reported rape incidence – at least in the United States, where a National Crime Victimization Survey takes place every year – has been falling in recent decades as porn becomes ever more available.
Anthony D'Amato, a Professor at Northwestern University's Law School, wrote in an essay titled Porn up, rape down (6-page PDF/28.3KB):
(T)here were 2.7 rapes for every 1,000 people in 1980; by 2004, the same survey found the rate had decreased to 0.4 per 1,000 people, a decline of 85 per cent."
Now yes, it is absolutely true that correlation and causation are not the same thing. But at first glance we'd have a hard time claiming that the greater availability of porn led to more rapes: simply because there are fewer rapes reported while there's definitely more porn.
To unravel the correlation thing we need to look at everything else that has been happening in American society over that time period.
It's probably not the reporting rate which has gone down. Police take sexual assault more seriously in most first world countries, where it has been criminalised, which represents a change in some parts of the world.
The law has changed as well in these countries: marital rape is now a crime in the US and the UK as well as 102 other countries worldwide, as it wasn't back then.
We would expect all of these changes to increase at least the number of rapes reported in the US. But that increase just isn't there.
Internet penetration appears to affect statistics
In D'Amato's paper, he uses Freakonomics-style statistics (one of his colleagues wrote the Freakonomics abortion and crime paper with Levitt) to try to tease out evidence of something more than just correlation.
What he found is that the lower the internet penetration in 2004 in a US state, the higher the rape rate had risen and that the higher the internet penetration, the lower rate had fallen.
We expect, for those societal reasons, that the reported rape rate will have risen over the time period. And where there's no or limited internet access, it has. Where there is high internet access it has fallen, the fall being greater than the general societal rise.
Thus we have an empirical connection between internet access and lower rape figures. Whether it's porn or not is a different matter: they could all be playing Second Life instead. An unlikely way to bet though really.
An economist would lay out this problem by asking whether porn and rape are complements or substitutes. Does porn lead to rape, or does porn substitute for rape?
Quite how the mechanism works is arguable but the evidence of more porn and less rape does appear to be there.
My own guess is that those who've been playing with themselves over "Two Girls One Cup" are, even if thoroughly now convinced of women as mere objects and playthings, less likely to rape even if only for erectile recovery reasons.
This argument has been around for some years of course but perhaps it is time to take it a little further. As Operation Ore shows us, absolutely no one seems to be thinking that this might be true of child porn and sexually assaulting children.
Except, actually, some of the scientists trying to study the connection in the paper "Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic".
Following the effects of a new law in the Czech Republic that allowed pornography to a society previously forbidden to access it allowed us to monitor the change in sex related crime that followed the change.
As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase.
Of particular note is that this country, like Denmark and Japan, had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and, like those other countries, showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.
If it's true, that porn and rape are substitutes and not complements even for paedophiles, then arguably the best method of reducing the harm done to children is to increase, not ban, the production of child pornography.
It would be a very brave politician indeed who was willing to act upon such a scientific finding.
Leaving one final question: what about the children harmed in production? ®
COMMENTS
What about the children harmed in production?
With sufficient camera angles and body doubles no children need be harmed in production.
Of course in these enlightened times where having a nude photograph of you wife, who happens to look under age, gets you on the kiddy fiddling register there is no hope for a rational debate,
For starters...
... one thing wrong about your conclusion is that it's based on the wrong assumption that child molesters and paedophiles are incurable recidivists. A recent US study showed that recidivism rates for sex crimes was considerably less than recidivism for other violent offences (about 2% vs 8%, can't remember more exact details, though).
Some common sense is required here. On one hand, harsh (10+ years) for possession of child porn, life for production. On the other hand, a clear definition that child nudity is not child porn (little kids photographed in the bathtub or at the beach etc). Cartoons are most definitely not children, whatever age they look like, and are unlikely to have been caused any harm while they were being drawn. Teenagers should be allowed to do what teenagers do within a couple of years of their own age, without being branded statutory rapists because the guy/girl they were experimenting with were a few months younger. And pissing in public is NOT a sexual crime
As someone who has worked with sex offenders
There is a fundamental misunderstanding about child sex offenders, which has a significant bearing on this. The fact is that in the vast majority of case these offenders know that what they do is wrong, but it is not a choice whether to go ahead in the way that so many people seem to think.
Most people will accept that there are bum men, leg men and tit men. Let's say for argument's sake that it was decided tomorrow that pursuing a large breasted woman because of her breasts was illegal. Would it stop a man whose interest is large breasts from liking the look of large breasted women, and trying to bed them? No it wouldn't. And that is the issue with child sex offenders.
They may know that what they want is wrong, but their sexual urges cannot be controlled by that. They don't decide to like children sexually - they just are that way. In a small number of cases (and yes it is small - look at the number of legal porn sites which concentrate on the just 18 market), they can't control those urges and they go on to offend.
I find this article very interesting. It is true that conviction rates for sex offences are falling in the UK, although the reasons for that are open to debate (it certainly has nothing to do with the crb regime which is probably now having the opposite effect to that intended). I feel that adults tend to watch porm because of an underlying interest rather than come across it and develop the interest as a consequence, but younger men (and, to a lesser extent, women) up to the age of about 25 can be influenced by watching porn. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule though, and drawing conclusions is difficult when it involves individuals with such widely diverse sexual likings. This is the first I have heard of the internet penetration correlation though, and it is certainly worth looking into.
I doubt very much that child sex offenders are created by child pornography. The question is whether those with a latent sexual interest in children will have that interest brought out into the open by the pornography. If so, then it might be thought that they are more likely to directly offend once that has happened, but the evidence does not point to that. The majority of child sex offences are concerned with images i.e. pornography, and that in itself points to there being an element of restraint even in those with the interest.
The only point I disagree with in the article is the inclusion (however oblique) of marital rape in the general description of rape. It may be the same offence in law, but it is not carried out for the same reasons as say street rapes or child rapes. It tends to be done as a perceived punishment, and pornography is unlikely to play a part in most cases.
Otherwise a good article, and, as has been mentioned above, refreshing to see something on this topic which does not descend to the purely emotional, which does not help to address the problems.
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