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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
More pornography, less rape
A fascinating study by a Clemson professor has concluded that increased access to pornography reduces the likelihood of rape. Steven Landsburg reports:
(Nilu sent me the link to the study a few days ago, and blogged about it here; Gautam John sent me the Slate link today.)
Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.You can read Kendall's study here (pdf link). And frankly, it's exactly as I would have thought. After all, when dudes wank off on the internet, there is an opportunity cost to that: they could easily have been getting it off elsewhere. It's safest if they do it in front of their computer, with nobody else involved. No?
First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables...
(Nilu sent me the link to the study a few days ago, and blogged about it here; Gautam John sent me the Slate link today.)
