Well the UK Office for National statistics also shows that through the last 10 years there has been a decline in rates of drinking, and when you go round and about into many towns one can see lots of former pubs that have closed down.
Psych Today is junk science, the Slate argument is a little better, but I don’t find it particularly compelling. For this, as well as other types of crime, all we really have are correlational data and wild-ass guesses.
I have nothing against porn, and consume it semi-regularly, but the idea that it somehow prevents rape is inconsistent with everything I know about human behavior and sexual assault. The claim made concurrently, that violent media reduces actual violence is even more outlandish. Sr. Weasel in the early days of his career conducted extensive research, including a longitudinal study on delinquent youth, that examined the correlation between exposure to violent media and actual violence. Since I am not about to have this debate for the millionth time on this message board, I’ll leave it at ‘‘his findings did not support the theory that exposure to violent media reduces violent crime.’’ Check it out if you want.
Sorry if I sound particularly strident, it’s not personal but is reflective of my feelings about the argument itself. I don’t think your claim is good for social attitudes about rape. While I, myself, have been known to consume violent, degrading porn, I suspect it increases aggression against women or at least misogynistic attitudes toward us - in keeping with aggression research, this might be particularly the case among young men already exposed to misogynistic cultural attitudes in their environment. I suppose that makes me a hypocrite, but in the absence of concrete data, I don’t see the point of pushing for social change around the making and distribution of pornography. It would only reinforce the notion that feminists are anti-sex reactionaries while conferring no discernable benefit.
To digress further, I thought it was lead pipe. Three sheets of lead in a triangle with the seams pounded shut. Could the Romans solder in some fashion?
This is my view as well. I think that the lead issue is possibly the most significant, but there’s probably 5 or 7 things that play a part.
Testosterone is a potent drug all by itself.
Rap battle? Yes, I’m going to hell.
Save me a seat.
Obviously the statistical data backs up the OP’s claim that crime is lower and neighborhoods - particularly urban neighborhoods - are much, much safer today than in the 1980’s. But - IMHO time - I grew up through the 80s as well, and I perceive literally no difference between crime then and today. As in, I basically have always felt safe, never felt the need to have my head ‘on a swivel’, etc. Now, I was a kid then, so a lot of the problems of the world were hidden from my view, but that’s why this is an IMHO anecdote.
Lead pipe is actually pretty safe for the most part, because the inside oxidizes fairly quickly. Lead will only get into the water supply if your water chemistry is messed up for other reasons. (Hello Flint.)
I wasn’t aware of a lot of stuff back then either, but I was aware that there were an inordinate number of people who either weren’t quite right in the head, and even more people who were assholes because they thought it was fun.
Has there been any research into cigarettes and crime? Smoking was a lot more ubiquitous back then and there are all kinds of harmful chemicals in cigarettes, and with few restrictions on where one could smoke, heavy smokers were a lot more common.
I believe we are also seeing greatly reduced incidence of teen pregnancy along with reduced incidence of crime. Males and females act out in different ways; it would follow that a general downturn in chemicals leading to poor impulse control would manifest itself this way, too.
I’m agnostic on the lead-as-bane-of-all-society hypothesis, but it is interesting how these behaviors correlate.
But the population has continued to increase in most countries (albeit, not quite as fast) and inequality is also increasing. Yet the crime rate has significantly decreased.
Lead is actually one of the easiest metals to solder. All you need is a hot iron heated in a forge or brazier and maybe some stick lead if you need to add material. The tricky part is to not actually get the iron too hot since you’re essentially soldering solder.
ETA: Look up some videos on making lead pipe organ pipes. It’s fascinating.
Don’t brush it off because of the Psychology Today link. That article is just summarizing some research published in real peer reviewed journals. Just looking at that reference list, I’m not terribly impressed. Lots of stuff by the same author and in the same journals, but that also doesn’t mean it’s junk, just that there’s a few labs who look at the relationship between pornography and sex crime, and that’s all the Psychology Today author bothered to read.
It is really so difficult to identify causal factors for something as complicated as crime. It’s fun to speculate though.
Care to explain why the peer reviewed papers in the Psych Today article are junk science and why your personal experience is likelier to be true than those studies?
These are the studies cited at the bottom of the Psych Today article:
Diamond, M. et al. “Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2011) 40:1037
Diamond, M. “The Effects of Pornography: An International Perspective,” in Pornography 101: Eroticism, Sexuality, and the First Amendment, edited by J. Elias et al. Prometheus Press, Amherst, NY, 1999.
Diamond, M. and A. Uchiyama. “Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (1999) 22:1.
Goldstein, M. et al. “Experience with Pornography: Rapists, Pedophiles, Homosexuals, Transsexuals, and Controls,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (19971) 1:1.
Kutchinsky, B. Pornography and Rape: Theory and Practice? Evidence from crime Data in Four Countries, Where Pornography is Easily Available,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (1991) 14:47.
Kutchinsky, B. “The Effect of Easy Availability of Pornography on the Incidence of Sex Crimes: The Danish Experience,” Journal of Social Issues (1973) 29:163.
Poipovic, M. “Pornography Use and Closeness with Others in Men,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2011) 40:449
Note, I personally believe that psychology has a rather bad problem with replication and isn’t as solid as it should be. However before dismissing research, I like to have a solid reason to dismiss it. In other words other studies which show different conclusions or flaws with the actual studies.
Slee
That’s a lotta pornography for a thread about lead.
In all seriousness, though, the effect of porn on society is something about which many people tend to revel in their ignorance. It’s good to see a cohort of studies like this - though the age of the articles is a little disconcerting. Seven articles, but only two since 1999? It may be arguable that the social effects of pre-high speed internet pornography are not comparable to the impact of explicit material after the millenium.
I agree with the OP. The biochemical mechanism where exposure to lead at a certain developmental stage damages the brain is well known. And I remember an article in one of my work journals about an international study about the effect banning lead in gasoline had on crime rates. The theory was that if the exposure to leaded gasoline at that age was a factor in crime, countries that banned leaded gasoline would experience a drop in crime 15-20 years down the line.
Not only did they find the drop, but also that the drop matched the speed of lead removal, Countries that just banned led had a fast drop, countries that phased it out over time had a more slow drop. Countries that phased it out over a longer time had an even slower drop.
Exposure wasn’t even, the time of peak exposure wasn’t even, and people aren’t the same.
Leaded gas would have been the biggest source for most people. People living near a highly trafficked road would have had much higher exposure than someone living away from traffic. Kids liking to play near the road would get more than those playing in the woods. And your brain is most vulnerable during a certain age. If you avoided exposure or had a greater exposure in the period it would be significant.
Finally, people are not all the same and the exposure did not flick a switch and turn everyone into crime-monsters.
The effect, as I remember, was a reduced impulse control and more mood swings. For people with naturally good impulse control, some damage to that wouldn’t really result in a criminal career. For people who already had poor impulse control however, a lot more of them would go over the edge.
I do wonder what will happen when the attorney of some criminal in Flint brings up the fact that lead exposure leads to crime, and his client was exposed to large amounts by the government…
There are many more variables than that which could correlate to changes in crime. Not the least of which is the capacity to count crimes accurately, even without weighting serious vs. petty crime. There is also fluctuations in opportunity, and a great deal of crime is opportunistic. There isn’t really any metric that remains a constant, so everything else is just fluid.
This is why people study a number of nations with different setups, comparing this one metric.