[Updated on 4/15/07 and 6/17/07]
Law professor Anthony D’Amato, and more recently Todd Kendall (PDF) of Clemson University, have attempted to correlate increased Internet penetration with decreasing rates of rape. Since the Internet is a major vector for porn, they suggest that more porn in the home means fewer people will rape. In short, they claim that porn is cathartic.
We have already discussed some of the flaws in this argument, the origins of which go back over 30 years. A new counter-example has recently come to our attention. Between 2000-2005, the number of Internet users in the United Kingdom increased from 15.4 million to 35.8 million (InternetWorldStats). During this time, the overall population only grew from 58.8 million to 59.9 million, so the proportion of Internet users in the population grew from 26% to 60%.
If the D’Amato/Kendall theory was correct, you would expect a measurable decrease in the number of reported rapes. However, the opposite trend was seen. In the period 1999-2000, just under 8,000 rapes of a female were reported in England and Wales. This level then increased every year until by the 2005-2006 period, over 13,000 rapes of a female were reported (Home Office Crime Statistics). This was during a time when the overall population increased by just 2%.
In Scotland, the trend of recorded rapes is similar. After dipping slightly between the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 reporting periods, rapes recorded by police increased every year through the 2005-2006 reporting period (Scottish Executive). Overall, recorded rapes increased from just under 600 in 1999-2000 to just under 1,000 in 2005-2006.
Government officials in the United Kingdom believe that some of the increases in recorded rapes are due to improved reporting of crimes. Factors like these underscore the risks of drawing simple conclusions from apparent correlations between changes in reported crime rates and changes in other phenomena. The challenges are especially great when discussing heavily underreported crimes such as rape and domestic assault.
When combined with personal testimony and scientific experiments, the balance of the data suggests that porn stimulates rape and confuses people about what’s acceptable behavior (such as whether to take no for an answer during sex). It certainly cannot be concluded that porn reduces rape.
Added 6/17/07:
We note that not only has the presumed volume of porn consumed in the UK has increased since 2000, but that the nature of the porn consumed is becoming more hardcore. The Guardian reports in “Men and porn”, 11/8/03:
In its hardcore form, pornography is now accessed in the UK by an
estimated 33% of all internet users. Since the British Board of Film
Classification relaxed its guidelines in 2000, hardcore video
pornography now makes up between 13% and 17% of censors’ viewing,
compared with just 1% three years ago…
See also:
Testimony in Minneapolis: Researcher sets out to prove angry fantasies are cathartic, finds the opposite
Nancy Steele’s study of convicted violent offenders found that fantasy did not reduce anger or the expression of aggression, contrary to the predictions of the psychoanalytic literature.
Rebutting the ‘Porn as Safety Valve’ Myth
Very few people would likely support a proposal to solve the problem of parents physically beating their children by having them watch movies that show parents battering and torturing their children. Why is it only in the case of misogynistic pornography that so many individuals–including a handful of researchers–believe that exposure dissipates the problem? The plain inconsistency and irrationality of the catharsis theory suffice to dismiss the notion that pornography serves as a “safety valve.”
Interview of Dr. Edward Donnerstein (by phone) by Catharine A. MacKinnon, January 10, 1984
Donnerstein: “The most interesting thing about the X-rated commercially released market is how the violence is displayed, which I think is the most important thing. While maybe only 25 or 30 percent of them contain overt violence, I think we probably all find that 90-95 percent of the time when a women is sexually assaulted or raped or aggressed against someway in these films, she is turned on and shows pleasure, enjoyment and so on and so on…
The problem is that what you are doing is conditioning sexual release, or relief, which is a very positive thing in men, to violence or to rape. One doesn’t have to be a scientist to understand what conditioning does… I think the whole idea of catharsis really has to be put aside…
Paper presented at American Psychological Society conference (PDF, 2004)
“…individuals with certain personality characteristics are attracted to certain types of media content, and…these individuals are affected by that content differently than are other people…. It appears that, rather than serving a cathartic function, pornography may activate or escalate the deviant sexual behavior of sub-clinical psychopaths.”
You say: “If the D’Amato/Kendall theory was correct, you would expect a measurable decrease in the number of reported rapes.”
That’s obviously false. If the D’Amato/Kendall theory were correct, you would expect a decrease in actual rapes. If lots of rapes go unreported, but as time goes by, a) the number of rapes goes down, and b) the stigma associated with reporting a rape also goes down over the same interval, reported rapes could go *up* even while the actual number of rapes goes down. I’m not saying that the stigma is gone, but it’s less than it was 10 years ago. So the number of *reported* rapes is somewhat independent of the actual number of rapes. You should know that.
Did you really not know that, or do you think we’re all stupid?
We certainly appreciate the point that reported rapes and actual rapes are not equivalent. We raise it in this article and earlier. My strong impression is that D’Amato and Kendall are claiming that porn reduces rape based on reported rape rates. Thus, the United Kingdom experience this decade does appear to falsify their theory, since Internet penetration (and, according to their model, porn viewing) soared, and so did the number of reported rapes.
Either actual rape in the UK rose along with reported rapes, or the correlation between changes in actual rapes and changes in reported rapes is extremely weak, at least in the UK. Either way, it becomes highly irresponsible for D’Amato and Kendall to suggest that porn reduces rape based on the data they present.
It’s not clear to me how changes in ‘stigma levels’ would affect reports of rape. On the one hand, reduced stigma of being raped might encourage more reporting. On the other, standards of acceptable behavior might fall along with the reduced stigma, so that a person might be forced into sex, but pursuaded that this is acceptable, whereas in the past they would have realized they were being raped. A major theme of porn, it appears to me, is to portray forced sex as normal, acceptable, and enjoyable for both sides, or at least the person doing the forcing.
BTW, do you really need to add nasty digs to your comments?
Here’s a good example of porn reducing the sense of shame felt by rapists. This doesn’t strike me as a positive development:
I read the two articles you make reference to. The D’Amato article cites Department of Justice statistics concerning rape rates. He does not reference reported rapes as you do; he’s talking about actual rapes, as is the DOJ. The Kendall article is even more careful. Kendall cites FBI statistics that most rapes go unreported, and devotes the final section of his paper to explaining why his results are nevertheless warranted by the available evidence. I have no idea where your “strong impression… that D’Amato and Kendall are claiming that porn reduces rape based on reported rape rates” could possibly have come from. It did not come from the text of the articles.
The “stigma” I was referring to was the stigma surrounding being a rape victim not the stigma surrounding being a rapist. It used to be that people would automatically blame the victim. This contributed to a general reluctance to report the crime. Although it has not disappeared, it is waning. This can be seen by the fact that a lower proportion of rapes go unreported than, say, 10 years ago. The stigma surrounding being a rapist is alive and well. This society is now more cosmopolitan about the sexual rights of women than it has ever been. I don’t believe that you found my remarks to be confusing.
Your central claim here is that if D’Amato and Kendall are right, we would expect a decrease in reported rapes. This claim hinges crucially on a failure to understand the distinction between reported rapes and actual rapes, and that the rate of reported rapes could go up even while the rate of actual rapes was going down. When you understand how that works, your claim is obviously completely false. It has absolutely no merit. D’Amato and Kendall do not make reference to rates of reported rape; Kendall makes a special effort to justify his findings in light of the discrepancy. Your point depends on this confusion, not that of D’Amato and Kendall.
But if you were being honest, there would be no reason to make a claim like the one you make up there unless you were deeply confused about the even the most basic issues concerning how the reporting of rape works. You say you understand the issues. This is why I included the final sentence of my comment: when I read something like this post, it’s very hard for me not to feel that my intelligence is being insulted. When you insult my intelligence, I will ask you about it. I cannot understand how you could include such an insulting and dishonest claim and then complain that I’m being nasty to you.
The rape rates reported by Professor D’Amato are based on Department of Justice surveys. While I concede this is not the same as crimes reported to the police, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the same issues, in particular, underreporting, are present. Some people may not be comfortable disclosing to a stranger (or even a friend) that they have been raped. If you’re going to cast doubt on the utility of reported rape rates from the United Kingdom, similar doubts likely must attend the surveys that Professor D’Amato relies on. In addition, you need to show that the level of reported rapes in the United Kingdom has entirely decoupled from the level of actual rapes. The UK statisticians make no such claim that I can find.
I believe we have successfully raised serious doubts about the conclusions of D’Amato and Kendall. I have alerted them to our discovery. They are welcome to present counter-arguments.
Stigma is a two-edged sword. When it attaches to victims, that’s bad. But when it restrains abusers, that’s good. It’s false to claim that society is more “cosmopolitan about the sexual rights of women than it has ever been.” On the contrary, porn’s unprecedented prevalence, violence and misogyny suggests that the attitudes of many towards women are highly degraded. To this we add the fading sense of shame felt by rapists as mentioned in our earlier comment.
If you’re going to object to shaming women, I’d like to get your opinion on “1 Night in Paris” and “Kim Kardashian Superstar”. For both movies, a major selling point for Capital Video appears to be that high-status women have been caught on tape doing something embarrassing. More generally, calling women derogatory names is a staple of today’s porn.
Many porn viewers also seem to have no trouble shaming women, such as the frat boys who chanted “Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!” during a screening of Deep Throat after Linda Lovelace had given a speech about her experience. We also have seen how porn can be used to create a hostile work environment for women.
Today’s large commercial pornographers like Capital Video are specialists in shame. This is what we are pushing back against.
If D’Amato and Kendall were making the mistake you’re accusing them of, that would be a serious problem for their thesis. I don’t see how D’Amato is making the mistake, although you seem confident he is. It depends very much on how the DOJ conducts its surveys. You haven’t shown that the surveys were conducted in an improper manner. And Kendall is not making the mistake at all.
But this post doesn’t accuse them of that. You only accused them of that after I brought it up and explained how you’re doing it. Your central claim here is this: “If the D’Amato/Kendall theory was [sic] correct, you would expect a measurable decrease in the number of reported rapes.” That’s wrong, insulting, and dishonest. It expresses contempt for the intelligence of your readers. I’ve thoroughly explained why.
I’m very confused by the direction you’ve taken the conversation. You accused D’Amato and Kendall of making a claim with demonstrably false consequences. That’s what this post is about. I pointed out that the claim doesn’t have the consequence you say it does. It only has that consequence if you fail to recognize that lots of rapes go unreported. Now you’re saying that they’re the ones who haven’t recognized that lots of rapes go unreported. This, of course, ignores the fact that even if they’re making that mistake (which I don’t concede), you are too. Which you haven’t addressed or corrected. And you appear to be deliberately misunderstanding a clear point about why there are fewer unreported rapes now than there used to be.
It’s true that clarity is hard to achieve when trying to correlate rapes, reported and unreported, with variables like Internet access. That’s our basic criticism of D’Amato and Kendall. It is irresponsible of them to suggest, based on their flimsy, limited evidence, that the Internet, and Internet porn, reduce rape. Commentators like Steven Landsburg at Slate are propagating their misinformation. We want people to take a closer look at D’Amato and Kendall’s methods and conclusions.
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