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More porn means less rape
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Bureau of Justice statistics department
It has long been said that there's a connection between pornography and rape and other sexual crimes and attacks. Recent evidence shows that there is indeed a connection, but it is that the more porn there is available, the lower the incidence of rape.
This goes against two powerful strands of thought in American society, strange bedfellows though they may be. From the conservative side (best exemplified by Ronald Reagan's Commission on pornography and obscene materials) there is the allegation (perhaps supposition is better) that exposure to more sexual material in the form of porn leads to more sexual acts, of which rape is simply one.
In what is a case of very strange bedfellows indeed there is also a critique from the feminist side: that as porn objectifies women exposure to it will lead to more rape as those exposed to porn will continue to objectify women.
Both groups are therefore claiming that the more porn there is around then the more rape there will be. The only problem with this idea is that in recent decades the incidence of rape has dramatically declined. As the above chart shows, since the mainstreaming of porn into American lives in the early 70s, marked by the release of "Deep Throat", the incidence of rape per capita has declined by an astonishing 85%. Yes, this does include rape and attempted rape, homosexual and heterosexual. Something, clearly, fairly major has been going on in our society. It's also true that we've seen an explosion in the availability of pornography over this period, so perhaps the two points are linked, the availability of porn and the prevalence of rape?
An economist would lay out the question thusly: are porn and rape complements or substitutes? That is, does the use or consumption of porn make someone more likely to rape or does porn make someone less likely to do so, whatever urges leading to rape being satisfied by the porn instead?
We might, for example, think that exposure to porn, as the feminists say, leads some men to think of women as less than fully human, objectifying them, and thus making their desires less important than those of the rapist. Porn therefore leads to rape.
We might also think that someone who has exhausted their sexual urges while watching blue movies is less likely to rape: there are, after all, limits to how often a man is going to become sexually excited.
As with so many matters economic, it's almost certainly true that both in fact happen. Some men are indeed desensitized by porn, start to objectify women and thus are more likely to rape. Some men will indeed find their fantasies catered to by pictures or movies and will therefore not rape where they otherwise might have done.
What we'd really like to know (again, in common with many economic questions) is which of these effects dominates? If porn and rape are both complements and substitutes, perhaps for different people or for the same people at different times, what is the net effect overall on exposure to porn and the incidence of rape?
It isn't exactly news that the rise of the internet and the web has made pornography vastly more available. Where once there was, at least widely, only the mildest of cheesecake available in the likes of Playboy now every act and perversion can be viewed with a few simple clicks of a mouse. If exposure to porn did indeed cause rape, if on balance they were complements not substitutes, we would have expected an explosion in the incidence of rapes. As that chart shows, we haven't. So there's at least a strong suggestion that the two are substitutes for each other.
But can we go any further? Can we find more detail rather than simply pointing to more porn and less rape? Yes, we can, by using the roll out of the internet itself as a proxy for the availability of porn. That was done in this paper by Anthony D'Amato and the results are quite striking:
TABLE 3. COMBINED PER CAPITA PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN INCIDENCE OF RAPE.
Aggregate per capita increase or decline in rape.
Four states with lowest internet access Increase in rape of 53%
Four states with highest internet access Decrease in rape of 27%
I find these results to be statistically significant beyond the .95 confidence interval.
That is measuring the changes in rape from 1980 (very definitely pre-internet) to 2000.
As above, there may well be those who are enticed or urged to rape by exposure to porn: those who find that they are complements. But we also see that for the majority of would be rapists, they are substitutes. The availability of porn drives down the incidence of rape. This of course is not much consolation to those few who are indeed raped by those excited and driven on to attack but it is of course excellent news for that very much larger number of potential victims who were spared.
Porn and rape are, in aggregate, substitutes, the more porn there is around the fewer rapes there will be.
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