More Internet Porn, Less Rape

The research has been out there for awhile, but the suggestive numbers just keep getting stronger: there’s evidence that as access to the internet increases in the US population, rape rates fall. (Dr. Faustus blogged about this, and about a Salon article discussing the same research paper as today’s story, back in 2009, as did I when the research was new, back in 2006.) An attractive theory that might explain this is that access to porn (which as everybody knows, is what the internet is for) reduces the urge to rape — but that, of course, is merely what the data are suggestive of, it’s far from proven.

Today’s link (via Violet Blue) is to a blog by Canadian econ professor Marina Adshade, in which she updates the rape and internet stat numbers and discusses the hoary old research paper in greater detail:

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has recently released the preliminary statistics for 2010. The incidence of violent rape in US has declined once again, this time by 6.2% between June 2009 and June 2010. The most recent decline is not an anomaly; rape rates have been falling since their peak in the early 1990’s (see the figure I have included below which uses annual data from the FBI). Over the same period internet access in the US has skyrocketed; in 1997 (the first year that the current population survey collected this information) only 18.6% of American’s had internet access in their homes. Today that number is above 71%.

It may seem like the relationship between internet access and rape is spurious, but evidence suggests that even after controlling for known determinants of rape rates (such as policing, urbanization, poverty and the age distributions), a 10% increase in internet access coincides with a fall in rape rates of 7.3%.

And here’s why it’s worth revisiting this as the journalistic dinosaurs in TV and print media continue to ramp up their anguished bellowing and braying against internet porn:

[N]ot good results for those who have tried for years, largely unsuccessfully, to prove that access to porn increase male violence. There are also some interesting implications for how we think about the motivation for rape. It is difficult, for example, to reconcile a belief that rape has nothing to do with the act of sex itself if the evidence suggests that teenage boys are choosing to masturbate in front of their computers instead of being rapists.

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