{"id":2665,"date":"2006-08-31T21:37:46","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T04:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/08\/31\/no-porn-doesnt-prevent-rape\/"},"modified":"2006-08-31T21:37:46","modified_gmt":"2006-09-01T04:37:46","slug":"no-porn-doesnt-prevent-rape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2665","title":{"rendered":"No, Porn Doesn't Prevent Rape"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Riba Rambles,<\/a> I see that last month, Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato suggested that more porn leads to less rape<\/a>. D’Amato points out that rape prevalence (as measured by the federal government’s big National Crime Victimization Survey) has gone down in recent years (his comparison – he calls the decline in rape “steeper than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression” – may be the single least relevant comparison I’ve ever read).<\/p>\n

D’Amato points out that even as rape prevalence has declined, porn consumption has gone up:<\/p>\n

There is, however, one social factor that correlates almost exactly with the rape statitistics [sic]<\/em>. The American public is probably not ready to believe it. My theory is that the sharp rise in access to pornography accounts for the decline in rape. The correlation is inverse: the more pornography, the less rape. It is like the inverse correlation: the more police officers on the street, the less crime.<\/p>\n

The pornographic movie \u201cDeep Throat\u201d which started the flood of X-rated VHS and later DVD films, was released in 1972. Movie rental shops at first catered primarily to the adult film trade. Pornographic magazines also sharply increased in numbers in the
\n1970s and 1980s. Then came a seismic change: pornography became available on the new internet. Today, purveyors of internet porn earn a combined annual income exceeding the total of the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Okay, the “sic” was cheap of me. Whaddaya want? I’m running a blog <\/em>here. G’way.)<\/p>\n

Three problems with D’Amato’s theory:<\/p>\n

1) During recent years, the NCVS has found a steep decline in all violent crime<\/a>, not just rape. It seems likely that whatever’s causing the decline in all violent crime measured by the NCVS, is also causing the decline in rape measured by the NCVS; but it seems unlikely that pornography reduces all violent crime.<\/p>\n

2) The NCVS measurement of rape prevalence is crap. Many other studies – including two major studies conducted by the Federal government – have found much higher rates of rape prevalence than the NCVS. Particularly notable is this study<\/a>, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which directly compared the NCVS’s methodology for measuring rape prevalence with modern “best practice” survey design – and found that the NCVS vastly undercounted rape.<\/p>\n

(D’Amato does say that the decrease in rape is collaborated by other sources, but he doesn’t cite any specific sources other than the NCVS).<\/p>\n

3) D’Amato has no measurement of porn prevalence other than internet access, nor does he do any real statistical analysis. In contrast, studies with sophisticated statistical analysis and more accurate measures of porn usage – such as the study published in Four Theories of Rape in American Society<\/em><\/a> – tend to find that porn usage has little or no correlation with rape prevalence.<\/p>\n

D’Amato has one good point; there is no evidence that the rise in internet access (and, presumably, in porn usage) has been accompanied by a rise in rape prevalence. That makes it seem unlikely that porn is a cause of rape, as some radical feminists have suggested.<\/p>\n

My own belief is that whatever porn’s effects on rape prevalence are, they’re probably too small to be measured.<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>: Abyss2Hope<\/a> and Feminist Law Professors<\/a> both have excellent posts critiquing D’Amato’s paper.<\/p>\n

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction<\/a>, where no mouse fears an elephant. If your comments aren\u2019t being approved here, try there.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Riba Rambles, I see that last month, Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato suggested that more porn leads to less rape. D’Amato points out that rape prevalence (as measured by the federal government’s big National Crime Victimization Survey) has gone down … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues","category-sex-work-porn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}