Law & Society Blog

David Friedman points us to a recent article by Todd Kendall on Pornography, Rape, and the Internet. Here is Friedman’s summary:

One argument sometimes offered for laws against pornography, or against some kinds of pornography, is the claim that consumption of pornography leads to violence against women. A counter argument is that it has the opposite effect, that imaginary sex, including imaginary violent sex, is a substitute for the real thing. I recently attended a talk by an academic who had found an ingenious way of using a natural experiment to find out which was true. Access to the internet makes pornography more readily available—not only cheaper and easier to find, but more private and so less likely to lead to embarrassment and other negative social consequences. Internet access increased at different rates in different states. Data on rape rates by state is available. So he looked to see whether, controlling for other variables, increased access to the net correlated with an increase or decrease in rape. It correlated with a decrease—about a ten percent drop in rape for a ten percentage point increase in internet access, with the exact numbers varying according to just how he did the analysis. There was no similar relation for murder, which suggests that the result is not simply picking up the effect of some third variable that correlates with both internet access and violent crime.

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