1. Background
   1. Problem of Definitions
   2. Evidence and Standard of Proof
2. The Evidence
   1. Changes in Rape Rates
   2. Correlational Evidence
      1. Danish and Other Cross-Cultural Data
      2. Sex-Magazine Circulation
      3. Sex Offenders and Pornography
      4. Conclusions from Correlational Evidence
   3. Experimental and Clinical Evidence
      1. Arousal
      2. Effects on Attitudes Toward Rape- "Disinhibition"
      3. Overall Evidence for "Causation"
   4. Evidence Against Causation
3. Conclusion
4. Notes

The Evidence

Because direct experimental research on the alleged causal relationship between sexually explicit materials and sexual violence is impossible, or at least unthinkable, we are unhappily left to examine evidence of an indirect nature. That evidence, when it comes from the work of social scientists, tends to take one of two forms: correlational studies and laboratory experiments. The former is a useful launching point for an overview of the issue, because it measures statistical relationships between actual violence and actual consumption of sexual materials. Were no significant relationship found to exist between those two phenomena even on a statistical level, any causal connections between that be extremely difficult to demonstrate through work in the "artificial" setting of a laboratory. Such a setting is useful, however, for exploring possible causal relationships between statistically correlated events; and that is the sense in which experimental evidence is relied on here. Before either correlational or experimental evidence is examined, however, it is crucial to consider first whether sexual violence is a problem which might ever be affected by social change, and whether, in fact, as an aggregate phenomenon it has increased during the period in which sexually explicit materials have been widely available.

That first question is easily answered. Rape rates do seem to be related to social change, for they have increased alarmingly during the past 25 years. From 1960 to 1970 the rate of reported forcible rape rose by 95 percent, but that increase seems to have been no more than part of an explosion of violent crime generally, which rose fully 126 percent during the 1960's.' Since the report of the 1970 Commission, however, the rate of reported rape has risen almost twice as fast as violent crime generally;^[8] from 1970 to 1983 the rape rate virtually doubled, while the rate of reported homicides, for example, remained constant.^[9] In 1970 one out of every 20 violent crimes was a forcible rape; by 1983 the proportion had become one out of 16.^[10]

Was this extraordinary rise in rape a "real" occurrence, or merely a product of increased reporting of rape? The possibility that increased sensitivity to rape-fueled by movements for women's equality-led to increases in the willingness of individuals to report rapes is not one that can lightly be dismissed,^[11] for rape is highly underreported crime.^[12] Nevertheless at least three pieces of evidence suggest that the increase of reported rape is not tied to increased willingness-to-report. The National Crime Survey, to begin with, which attempts to gauge actual (as opposed to reported) crime figures through a scientific public survey, showed no significant change in the percent of rapes reported to police from the period 1973-1977 to that of 1978-1982.^[13] Yet between those two periods the average number of estimated actual rapes increased substantially.^[14]

Second, the 1978 survey by Professor Diana Russell found an increase in the "true rape rate" throughout most of this century;^[15] thus historically no serious misrepresentation of trends in this area is found in police data. Finally, correlational data from recent studies of state-by-state rape rates and measurements of the status of women indicate only a small, although significant, relationship between the two.^[16]

Rape appears, therefore, to be a phenomenon subject to fluctuation, and during the period that sexually explicit materials have come into general circulation it has been a phenomenon on the rapid increase. That last fact, however, in no sense "proves" or even substantially "suggests" a relationship between the two events; only detailed correlational analysis can begin to do that.

Statement of Father Bruce Ritter