Porn Consumption Is Not Correlated With Rape

Free, hard core pornography is currently ubiquitous on the Internet, something that has been increasingly true since 1995 when the Internet first started to catch on.

In the time period from 1995 to 2015, the number of rapes per 100,000 people meanwhile has declined by roughly 50% in an era where any issues related to failure to report rapes is likely to have increased rather than decreased the number of reported rapes (from about 44 per 100,000 to about 22 per 100,000).

Bottom line, a massive, population-wide increase in pornography access has coincided with a massive decrease in rape.

This is inconsistent with the widely touted hypothesis that pornography consumption is a leading order contributor to the likelihood that someone will carry out a rape.

In reality, it is unlikely that porn has a first order, or even a second order effect on rates of rapes committed.  The decline in the rate at which rapes are committed per 100,000 people from 1995 to 2015 is quite similar in magnitude to declines in the murder rate, the aggravated assault rate, the robbery rate, and the car theft rate, in the same time period, for example.

At a leading order level, the number of rapes are committed in the United States is mostly a function of overall population size and the overall rate of serious crimes committed.  Second order effects are probably factors like urban v. suburban v. rural population density, regional cultural variation that is stable over long time periods, economic conditions, incarceration rates, and local race and ethnicity mixes.  

Any impact of pornography consumption on the number of rapes committed has less impact than any of those other factors and can only be determined on a statistical basis.  It is probably, at best, on the order of +/-5% or less of the final rate, and that may be a generous estimate.  Certainly, there is no strong correlation between pornography consumption and the number of rapes committed.