Jaicee said:
*shrugs* I'd respond further but you've just said an awful lot of nothing. It seems to me that you're basically just reaching for explanations for each development I pointed to that are not linked to pornography. I sourced my claims. As to the topic of rape specifically, the 2013 changes in the legal definition of rape can only potentially explain an sudden statistical increase for that specific year. It doesn't explain similar upticks for all the other years in question, does it? The question of what precisely has caused this recent uptick in the reporting of rapes is assuredly multifaceted, involving factors as superficial as the six-month impact of the Me Too movement in late 2017 and early 2018 resulting in more people feeling emboldened to come forward with their stories and to report surviving sexual abuse and mistreatment in general... stuff ranging from as superficial as that to surges in criminal activity in general in specific years, like in 2015-16, corresponding to waves of Black Lives Matter protests and riots over police killings of unarmed black men and the consequential temporary pullbacks in policing in general. There are still periods unaccounted for by any of this though; periods wherein crime rates overall were falling, but rapes were increasing anyway, for example. At that point realistic explanations have to include cultural factors, like an increase prevalence of porn use. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest that the "Trump effect" was likely also a factor; that his election shortly after the infamous Access Hollywood tape came out likely signaled to some people that sexual assault is now okay the same way that his election resulted in a substantial increase in hate crimes. My point though is that the argument that pornography reduces rape the same way it reduces sex overall in society doesn't exactly hold up to the evidence. What we have today, as compared with a decade ago, is less sex overall, but more rape specifically. That is the picture. And it's not an improvement. |
Rape statistics are notoriously complicated, especially when speaking about reported rapes, so it is very difficult to look at trend lines and make them out to say anything beyond what they are literally saying. To rephrase, from the UCR dataset, you can say that rapes reported to police have been increasing since 2013 (after a steady two decade decline), but you cannot then simply assume that the reason for this is an increase in rape prevalence.
Notably, if you look at NCVS data (victimization survey's which do not require reports to law enforcement), "Rape/Sexual Assault Victimization" was lower in both 2016 and 2017 when compared to 2015, and the most recent data from 2019 is not statistically different from the 2015 data. That said, even this data suffers greatly from variations in reporting (as demonstrated by the #MeToo spike in 2018) and it is difficult to determine whether any trend is a result of changes in reporting vs changes in victimization.