Fighting rape with porn

Over at Reason magazine, columnist Steve Chapman points to Clemson University Economics Professor Todd D. Kendall's much-discussed paper (PDF) concluding that the increased availability of pornography in the United States in recent years has helped to reduce the rate of sexual violence. As Chapman points out:

Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent.

How can that be? Isn't pornography supposed to awaken the beastly libido in poorly restrained men? Alternately, isn't rape a crime of violence, rather than sex -- and therefore one that should be disconnected from sexually explicit material?

Well, Kendall can't be absolutely certain, but he does have an interesting theory as to why the rate of sexual violence has plummeted even as the most explicit material has become easily available on millions of Websites.

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

Kendall's paper isn't a substitute for a commitment to free speech as a matter of right, regardless of possible abuses of that right. But Kendall's findings do supply valuable ammunition for people looking for a pragmatic argument in favor of allowing adults to produce and exchange sexually explicit material -- because permitting such exercises of free speech can have socially beneficial effects.