A View From Riverside Drive

Commentary by Ed Hynes
March / April 2008

Law professor shows how to turn an increase into a 'plunge'

A law professor at Northwestern University contends that there's less rape in the United States than 30 years ago because there's more pornography. Honest. That's what he says. We can only wonder why.

He also believes that crime is down because abortion is up. Again, he actually says this.

Professor Anthony D'Amato's theories appeared in Jurist, an online publication of the University of Pittsburgh Law School, in June 2006. For the porn-reduces-rape part of his comments he relies on stories in the Washington Post of June 19, 2006 and the Chicago Tribune of June 21, 2006. We missed it all at the time.

The professor writes, "The headlines are shouting RAPE IN DECLINE! Official figures just released show a plunge in the number of rapes per capita in the United States since the 1970s. . . . there were 2.7 rapes for every thousand people in 1980; by 2004, the same survey found the rate had decreased to 0.4 per 1000, a decline of 85%."

He fails to mention that the actual number of rapes in the United States in 2004 was an appalling 95,089, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. This was an increase of nearly 15% in the incidence of rape from the 82,990 rapes recorded by the FBI in 1980.

Rates per thousand are useful, of course. For one thing, they permit an increase to be described as a "plunge."

Would it console the 95,089 rape victims of 2004 to know that the rate per thousand had "plunged"? Would it seem to them that we're getting better as a nation in the rape department? Would they feel better about pornography? But wait. Could that be what the professor is after, or does it just seem that way?

Professor D'Amato offers a theory to account for the phantom plunge. He writes, ". . . some people watching pornography may 'get it out of their system' and thus have no further desire to go out and actually try it." Clinical psychologists, people who actually know something useful about such matters, say something else: masturbating to pornographic images is addictive, and the addiction escalates to compulsive acting out of the pornographic fantasies, which is where rape and prostitution sometimes come in. Pornography users don't "get it out of their system."

Professor D'Amato gives us this further thought about the "plunge" in rape: ". . . Internet pornography has thoroughly de-mystified sex. Times have changed so much that some high school teachers of sex education are beginning to show triple-X pornography movies to their students in order to depict techniques of satisfactory intercourse." He doesn't explain how de-mystification reduces anything, let alone rape.

Outraged parents would have something to say about the inappropriateness of showing pornography movies to their children, even - or, perhaps, especially - in school. So would a conscientious prosecutor.

Professor D'Amato should know better. Common sense should tell him what effect "triple-X pornography movies" would have on youngsters already struggling with their hormones. And as a lawyer he must know that the distribution of hardcore obscene pornography violates federal obscenity law and the obscenity laws of most states. Yet he says nothing about breaking the law.

Mary Ann Layden, Ph.D., is qualified to speak on the effect such films would have on high school boys and girls. She is a clinical psychologist and co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy. She says, "If you want sexual violence on campus you can tutor it using pornographic movies. Movie imagery is massively potent to tutor behaviors."

Professor D'Amato's ideas are at best questionable.

For example, if pornography is good for sexual behavior, why do we have a new slave trade, with some 800,000 women and children trafficked into prostitution each year, some 20,000 of them into the United States? The Council of Europe has developed a convention on trafficking that is up for adoption by the European Union. Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council, said, "Every year, more than 600,000 people are sold in Europe. . . . 70 percent of them are forced into sexual servitude." Others are traded for forced labor, illegal adoptions and organ transplants.

If pornography is good for sexual behavior, why do we have amber alerts for missing children? Why are missing children attacked and murdered at the hands of pornography addicts?

If pornography is good for sexual behavior, why do we have 40,000 new HIV infections annually in the U.S., and 19 million new infections of all the other sexually transmitted diseases?

If pornography is good for sexual behavior why do we have 627,000 registered sex offenders in the United States? And why are 19,000 of them - twice the national average - in Oregon, where the obscenity laws were thrown out by the state supreme court in 1987? Eight years later, on May 7, 1995, the Sunday Portland Oregonian published this assessment of the damage caused by those court decisions:

Portland, a city of 500,000, now has 20 times the number of nude entertainment businesses as Los Angeles, a city of 3 million... (People in Portland) fear Oregon is being overrun by a pornography and adult entertainment industry gone wild, an industry, critics charge, that is running up a big, unpaid bill in the form of increased crime and sexually transmitted diseases, damaged neighborhoods and ruined lives.

In September 2005, the Oregonian reported that the state's high court had struck again, nullifying a state law that banned live sex shows and a local nude-dancing ordinance. On October 1, 2005 the Oregonian said in an editorial that this latest decision "continues to move Oregon's concept of free expression well beyond that of any other state... The court's course since its landmark 1987 decision in State v. Henry also has helped make Oregon a national mecca for the sex industry and its unsavory side effects."

It was a different story in Oklahoma City in the 1980s. Five years of law enforcement closed 12 of 13 pornographic bookstores, 75 topless and bottomless bars, 21 houses of prostitution, and 27 of 42 escort services. In addition, three hardcore porn theaters switched to edited-for-TV versions. The district attorney summed up the results this way: "... [While] the number of reported rapes in the State of Oklahoma continued to increase... in five years, the number of reported rapes [in Oklahoma City] dropped by 138, or almost 25 percent, and the only thing we had done different in Oklahoma County was the crackdown on obscenity and pornographic, sex-oriented businesses."

Leering, oh-so-hip porn imagery in publishing, fashion and entertainment was accurately described by the late and lamented Bill Buckley as "the creepy wallpaper of our daily lives." This stuff is all over the place. Why, for example, are "erectile disfunction" and "male enhancement" now problems that we all, children included, have to learn about in print and TV advertising?

On the abortion-reduces-crime matter, Professor D'Amato is persuaded that legalized abortion not only correlates with a reduction in crime but causes it because "prior to legalization there were many unwanted babies born due to the lack of a legal abortion alternative. Those unwanted children became the most likely group to turn to crime."

So much for the scientific method.

First we kill the kids. Then we spare them a life of crime because we know they are "the most likely group to turn to crime."

This is a kind of eugenics the Nazis would have understood. Eugenicists seek to improve the human species, a noble purpose. How they do that is sometimes another story. Methods have ranged from controversial to malevolent. The range has included selective breeding, prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, abortion and other forms of birth control, in vitro fertilization, genetic engineering, and state-sponsored discrimination, forced sterilization, the killing of institutionalized mental patients, and, in some cases, the genocide of whole populations judged to be "inferior."

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist, said her purpose was to "create a race of thoroughbreds." Thoroughbreds were all the rage in the early 20th century. All we have now is millions of aborted babies.

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