EVIDENCE THAT PORN REDUCES RAPE

ANTHONY D'AMATO1, NORTHWESTERN SCHOOL OF LAW - The incidence of rape in
the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to
pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The
Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic
materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that
pornography has reduced social violence. . . The decline [is] steeper
than the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. . . There
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 1000 people. . .

Official explanations for the unexpected decline include (1) less
lawlessness associated with crack cocaine; (b) women have been taught to
avoid unsafe situations; (c) more would-be rapists already in prison for
other crimes; (d) sex education classes telling boys that "no means no."
But these minor factors cannot begin to explain such a sharp decline in
the incidence of rape. There is, however, one social factor that
correlates almost exactly with the rape statistics. 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.

The pornographic movie "Deep Throat" 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 1970s 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. "Deep Throat" has moved
from the adult theatre to a laptop near you.

National trends are one thing; what do the figures for the states show?
From data compiled by the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration in 2001, the four states with the lowest per capita
access to the internet were Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, and West
Virginia. The four states with the highest internet access were Alaska,
Colorado, New Jersey, and Washington. . .

While the nationwide incidence of rape was showing a drastic decline,
the incidence of rape in the four states having the least access to the
internet showed an actual increase in rape over the same time period.
This result was almost too clear and convincing, so to check it I
compiled figures for the four states having the most access to the
internet. Three out of four of these states showed declines (in New
Jersey, an almost 50% decline). Alaska was an anomaly: it increased both
in internet access and incidence of rape. However, the population of
Alaska is less than one-tenth that of the other three states in its
category.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013#PaperDownload