Why Aren't There Sex Killers Everywhere?

A small Dutch Christian party, the SGP, is smitten with the British bill that would make possession of "violent" and "abusive" porn punishable by three years in jail. The SGP's parliamentarians want the Netherlands to adopt the same law. Then, they say, it's time to expand the measure across the E.U.

I've dealt with the idiocy of the U.K. proposal here. But in addition, something else bothers me.

The bill results from the murder of a school teacher, Jane Longhurst, by a man who is said to have been obsessed with Internet images of rape and necrophilia.

Obviously, then, there must be a causal link between such an obsession and the murder. Come on, there just has to be, right?

Sorry. Neither logic nor statistical data suggest a connection between looking at nasty pictures and committing rape or worse.

First, consider the following sentence: All baseball players sometimes eat hamburgers; therefore, eating hamburgers turns people into baseball players. Ridiculous on its face. Now, here's the exact same reasoning but with different nouns: All sex killers have looked at extreme porn; therefore, extreme porn causes people to become sex killers. How is this any less dumb than the preceding statement?

Or think of it this way: When police searched serial killer Dennis Rader's house earlier this year and found his Bibles (Rader was, after all, a devoted Christian and the president of his church council), was there an outcry for a ban on the Holy Book? Well then.

Second, even with all that supposedly "violent" and "abusive" porn out there, the crazy sex killers are not exactly thick on the ground, are they? The Internet, now about ten years old, has made finding the offending material a quick and private matter, so you'd think that the increased availability of so-called violent porn would've produced a prolonged spike in rapes and sex killings, starting in about 1995. Well, no dice. Certainly, the perception that sexual perverts are everywhere is widespread — the result, I'd wager, of high-profile cases such as the Michael Jackson trial, and the media's insistence on bringing you the important news that thieves are after Jennifer Aniston's panties. But as for the actual data: no spike. On the contrary. There's been a pretty radical decline in serious sex offenses and other violent crimes in the last two decades. Almost every year, the picture improves. Here are the FBI's latest numbers (PDF format).

Nuff said. Looking at extreme bondage pictures doesn't turn you into a violent sex fiend any more than being a priest turns you into a pedophile, or eating Twinkies causes you to off public officials. That whole line of reasoning is rather like noting that there's a very high incidence of cancer among lab rats, so rats must be especially cancer-prone. It has the appeal of the obvious, but exposes the proponent of the belief to richly deserved ridicule.

Comments

[Matt]

Oh, if only it _did_ work that way...the price of utopia would be merely the provision of lots and lots of twinkies. :)

[Pete Guither]

The question I have is whether there actually is a reverse relationship. It seems to me that sexual violence or sexual misconduct is more often connected to repression.

Assuming you could actually do away with porn, I think you'd find a noticable increase in sexual violence.

[Ragingpundits]

http://ragingpundits.com/?p=227

[a. jean]

I agree with you principally, but the hamburger/extreme porn argument isn't particularly sound. The portion of the general populace that views extreme porn is ostensibly somewhat smaller than that which eats hamburgers, which I'm sure you're aware of. I doubt highly that watching extreme porn has an effect on the probability of becoming a sex offender, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if a sex offender was more likely to have watched it than your average citizen, which is a useful correlation from a profiling standpoint.

[George Arndt]

This shows that Europeans can be sexually repressed too.