Help! Violent porn fiends are everywhere! Fucker all your oripices (eek, spoonerism; I meant pucker all your orifices), ’cause these pervs want to forcibly act out their disgusting fantasies on you!
Extreme sexual fantasies are being normalised because of the rise in deviant pornography on the internet, psychologists have warned. Researchers now believe there is a ‘causal link’ between the rise in explicit images available online and an increase [in] extreme illegal behaviour in real life.
That’s a claim from England’s Daily Mail newspaper, repeated pretty much verbatim in other fine publications, like the Telegraph and the Times of India.
What is this “extreme illegal behavior” that is reportedly on the increase? The Daily Mail doesn’t say, and neither do the editorial copycats elsewhere. Read the article for yourself and marvel at how insidiously and glibly it suggests that rape and other types of sexual assault are on the rise without actually stating so.
The reason it isn’t stated outright is probably that it doesn’t happen to be true. At least not in the United States. Here’s a quick overview of twenty years’ worth of crime data, 1990–2009, courtesy of the FBI. As you can see, the incidence of forcible rape decreases year after year, even though two factors might have suggested to the casual observer that it should be going up. To wit: the fact that the population increased by 23% over that period (which ought to result in proportionally more sex crimes), and the fact that the availability of both plain-vanilla and ‘deviant’ porn has absolutely exploded after the arrival of the Internet in appr. 1993.
But in an irrefutable and long-term trend, rape in fact dropped by no less than thirty percent. Which is reason for rejoicing, not panicking.
Is the picture somehow much more ambiguous or dramatic in the U.K.? It might be, but the Daily Mail isn’t saying, providing not even a glimpse of the data that lay behind the more-porn-equals-more-illegality meme. Instead, the paper quotes two psychologists, Tim Jones and David Wilson, whose research is
…based around a series of interviews with a convicted paedophile named ‘James’ who is serving a 14-year sentence for numerous sexual offences involving children.
And that’s it. Messrs. Jones and Wilson have a sample group of one porn aficionado — who would also seem to be a bit unrepresentative because he (a) committed a series of sex crimes, and (b) targeted children. On James’s apparent say-so, Dr. Jones feels qualified to opine that
‘The internet is fuelling more extreme fantasies and the danger is that they could be played out in real life.”
Which isn’t an erroneous statement, per se — sure there’s a danger that someone, somewhere, will play out extreme fantasies in real life. With or without internet porn. (In his youth, serial killer Dennis Rader dreamed about tying up and assaulting Mouseketeer Annette Funicello; maybe social scientists should look into the link between vapid Disney shows and sexual violence?)
The question is not, could Tim Jones’s scenario ever happen? The question is, does it happen in statistically significant numbers that can withstand five seconds of scrutiny, and that clearly point to a causal link between porn and crime?
And the answer is: Judging by the preponderance of evidence, nope, it still doesn’t.