Stop Rape? Ban Booze and Porn, For the Kids.

In a surprising new White House initiative, Native Americans are prohibited from drinking firewater alcohol and viewing pornographic material from now on.

At least that's what would happen if America took its cues from Australia.

Australia will ban alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal communities across the country's vast Northern Territory to combat widespread child sexual abuse, Prime Minister John Howard said Thursday. Describing the plight of Aboriginal children as "a national emergency", Howard said he was taking control of indigenous communities from the Northern Territory government because it had not addressed the problem. ...

"This is a national emergency, there is no greater obligation this parliament has than caring for all the vulnerable and young in our community," Howard told parliament. 

I'm not going to go into the unsettling racist undertones of the new Australian policy — other blogs will no doubt be dissecting that particular strain of ugliness.

I will say that Howard is right to surmise that there is a correlation between pornography and sex crimes. It just happens to be the inverse of what he believes: porn reduces the incidence of rape. In other words, and in broad [ahem] strokes, more porn equals less rape.

I wrote about that here.

Of course, Howard's contention is far more questionable than that. He apparently thinks that images of adults having consensual sex lead to child molestation. That's not just illogical — it's lazy and scurrilous.

And it's not much different with the alleged alcohol link. Sure, alcoholics have problems, often domestic ones. And yes, alcohol does lower inhibitions. But I'd wager that beer and booze prevent as much sexual abuse as they cause — and probably more. As Shakespeare knew, alcohol provokes the desire but takes away the performance. Howard deplores the stuporous drunkards he seems to detect especially among Aboriginals, without asking how men so intoxicated they're barely able to walk can suddenly turn into raging, overpowering sex machines.

I'm not being flippant. I don't deny the involvement of alcohol in a good percentage of sex crimes. But (a) correlation does not mean causation, and (b) the statistics fall necessarily short here. If all you have is numbers that reveal how often alcohol was implicated in sexual assaults on children, those numbers tell only half the story. The missing piece is: how many sex crimes against children, or adults for that matter, did alcohol thwart, by rendering the would-be assailant woozy, sleepy, sapped of energy, and unable to get it up?

Even disregarding that huge unknown, there is scant evidence that alcohol is a prominent trigger in cases of sexual child abuse. Howard might have pondered these findings from a U.S. study about child molestation:

Generally speaking we have not found any social or demographic characteristics that differentiate the child molester from the general population, not his race, religion, intelligence, education, vocation, socioeconomic class, or the like. ... We have also observed that alcohol and drug abuse play a relatively minor role in the commission of such offenses. 

To be fair, that's research from the 1980s. But has the picture changed much? Not really, it seems. More recently, the federal Bureau for Justice Statistics said that

Violent offenders with child victims reported less involvement than adult victimizers with drugs or alcohol at the time of the crime. About 6 in 10 inmates who committed their violent crime against an adult reported that they had either been drinking alcohol, using drugs, or doing both at the time they committed the offense. About 6 in 10 child victimizers reported that they were using neither drugs nor alcohol at the time of their crime.

Howard's draconian decisions have the promise of law-and-order toughness and the sheen of moral certainty. But they're likely to be fig leafs that clumsily hide, rather than illuminate, the cultural and socio-economic realities that are really at the root of the problem.

Comments

[Token]

Now, that's just silly. You can't use criminal data from America to challenge Australian laws; they're completely different cultures. You know - kind of like "regular" Australians and Aboriginal Australians.

[ben]

Weren't those aboriginals living happily ... until the white men appeared?