Revisiting the Links Between Sex & Violence
Evidence Shows How Criminalizing Porn and Sex Work Hurts Women
It’s been a few years of The Science of Sex and one thing hasn’t changed: porn and sex are still contentious subjects, arguably more contentious than ever. It seems with each passing year, the anti-sex minority I often speak of on this Substack are becoming more vocal and brazen. I recently wrote two articles about the spate of porn ID verification laws, laws that force porn companies to require ID to visit porn sites. These are, in effect, porn bans, though these laws don’t use the word “porn.” They use terms like “harmful to minors” which encompasses a broad array of activities beyond porn.
Those articles sparked some interesting discussions which made me realize we should to revisit the links between porn/sex and sexual violence. I’m not a big fan of porn. I don’t watch it. Like alcohol or marijuana, I don’t enjoy it, though I have no qualms if you do. That’s as it should be.1
In the states where porn ID laws have passed, non-pornographic material is targeted as well. Porn sites agree that they don’t want their products winding up in children’s hands, but they understand these laws won’t prevent children from getting their hands on porn, they’ll hamstring adults using these platforms legally. The politicians who enacted these bans gloat over their perceived victory as sites like Pornhub have pulled out of Texas and will likely pull out of their states now that theses laws have been passed elsewhere. But their glee masks a sinister truth.
Whenever sex work is banned—whether digital porn or in the flesh sex work—a predictable rise in sex crimes against women usually follows. This is as ironic as it is tragic, because most of the women I know who are against porn are against it precisely because they fear it inspires sexual violence, either against the women performing or the women at home whose partners watch porn and start desiring more extreme or violent types of sex. The evidence suggests this is more myth than reality.
The good news is, there seems to be a clear pattern in the data: whenever sex and porn restrictions are loosened, declines in sexual assault typically follow. The bad news is, several U.S. states are hellbent on further restricting sexuality and other countries may follow.
New Research on Sex and Violence
Brand-new research by Riccardo Ciacci, published on March 14, 2024 in the Journal of Population Economics, confirms what we’ve known about pornography and violence for over three decades: not only does porn not cause violence, all evidence suggests it reduces sexual violence. Only, this time, there’s a twist. The same is true regarding sexual violence and legalized sex work.
Ciacci analyzed rape data from Sweden between 1997 and 2014. Sweden banned sex work in 1999. Before that, sex work of all types was legal. This gives researchers a rare glance into what happens when a country criminalizes formerly-legal sex work.
He found that “the ban increases the number of rapes by around 44-62%.” He also notes that there wasn’t a corresponding decrease in the number of pimps. In other words, it’s likely that a number of the people who formerly hired sex workers began carrying out rapes.2
People have asked if this is because sex workers often don’t report sexual assault, and thus, those number of rapes didn’t actually change, but the people who were getting raped as sex workers (when it was legal) weren’t reporting and those same people quit sex work, found regular jobs, and started reporting the rapes that were happening all along. This is highly unlikely. As Dr. Nicole Prause, Ph.D. said:
This argument supposes that sex workers (basically) never report and the reports did not change (remained basically zero) with the ban. That makes it untestable. It's possible, but I doubt there was a 1:1 transfer of "rape likelihood"…
Additionally, this gets the directionality wrong. It assumes sex workers don’t report rape in countries where sex work is legal just because people don’t report as often in the United States, where sex work is illegal. But sex workers are less likely to report because their profession is a crime, just like drug dealers. Legalization changes the dynamic entirely.
Before Sweden’s ban, sex work wasn't a crime. After the ban, it was. You'd expect reported rapes to go down with criminalization, but they didn’t—they went up. This tells us that it’s not likely an error of reporting rates.
Here’s an analogy: if marijuana was legal, people would report their marijuana getting stolen more and the theft rate would be as high as the marijuana consumers themselves. If you suddenly criminalized weed, people would stop reporting marijuana theft so often, and you could expect the rate to go down. If it didn’t, the criminalization had no influence on reporting rates.
Porn and Sexual Violence at Home
The scientific research has repeatedly shown that banning sex work and porn is followed by a rise in sex crimes against women. The inverse is also true. Scientific research has repeatedly shown that legalizing porn causes a reduction in sexual violence against women. The difference is sometimes extreme.
Czech Legalization
In the Czechoslovakia, a communist state established in 1918, porn was illegal for a very long time. Then, as communism disintegrated there in the early 1990s, and Czechoslovakia became Czech Republic and Slovakia, porn was abruptly legalized and rates of sexual violence were cut nearly in half. This research from 2010 perfectly supports Ciacci’s research published in March.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to only Czech Republic. The same thing happened across several vastly different cultures. Contrary to most people’s fears of porn access causing a rise in violence, researchers haven’t observed a rise in sexual violence in a single country that has legalized porn.
The researchers of the Czech study wrote:
Following the effects of a new law in the Czech Republic that allowed pornography to a society previously having forbidden it allowed us to monitor the change in sex related crime that followed the change. As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase. Of particular note is that this country, like Denmark and Japan, had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and, like those other countries, showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.
Multicultural Research
A 1991 study analyzed the period between 1964 and 1984 to see if the introduction of widespread pornography in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the United States correlated with a rise in sexual violence. The study authors were concise in their conclusion:
The results showed that in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape.
Data From the U.S.
This is true even in the U.S.. Another study found that, as the great porn explosion of VHS tape and then the Internet happened, in the mid-1990s, the rates of sexual violence went down. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which researchers consider a far more accurate measure of violence than police reports, sexual assault rates in the U.S. have plummeted by 44% since 1995.
We would expect to see rates of sexual assault rising, not falling here if porn caused sexual violence.
Hostile Masculinity
This population-level research is important because individual-level data can only tell us so much. If researchers find a link between research subjects’ porn-watching habits and violent tendencies, they don’t know if the porn caused the violent tendencies, rather than violent people consuming more violent pornography.
Thankfully, the individual-level data also challenges the “porn causes sexual violence” hypothesis. A 2020 research paper by Taylor Kohut et al. analyzed the porn use and violent tendencies of nearly 1,700 teenage boys in Croatia across several years of their lives to see how their answers to questions about sexual values were impacted by their porn use over time.
They analyzed three factors: porn use, hostile masculinity (men who report misogynistic beliefs about women), and impersonal sexuality (a desire for casual sex). The research showed that impersonal sexuality and porn use weren’t linked with sexual aggression, either by themselves or combined. Only hostile masculinity was linked with sexual aggression. The study authors write:
While we observed the link between hostile masculinity and self-reported sexual aggression in both panels, we found no evidence that impersonal sexuality and pornography use increased the odds of subsequently reporting sexual aggression—regardless of participants’ predisposed risk. This study’s findings are difficult to reconcile with the view that pornography use plays a causal role in male sexual violence.
As David Ludden Ph.D. explains in Psychology Today:
…hostile masculinity did predict sexual aggression in some analyses but not others. What this suggests is that even harboring hostile attitudes toward women is insufficient in itself to drive men to act in a sexually aggressive manner. No doubt, there are plenty of frustrated men who blame women for all their problems and may even enjoy watching violent porn in which they can vicariously aggress against them. Still, they would never act out these desires in real life.
In sum, there’s little evidence that porn use leads to sexual violence. To understand why this would be the case, perhaps we should consider an analogy to video games and violence. For instance, many young people play Grand Theft Auto, but very few of them hijack cars in real life. Porn, like video games, provides a fantasy realm in which people can act out their deepest and darkest desires, even though few would ever follow through with them in real life.
A lot of research has mirrored these results and hostile masculinity is considered the “third variable” that puts people at risk for sexual aggression.
The Causality Problem
A 2000 study asked 100 women in rape crisis centers about their abusers’ pornography consumption. Published in the academic journal Violence & Victims, we can assume the goal was to prove that porn caused violence.
The study did the opposite.
Of the women, 28% reported that their abusers used pornography, while 12% reported that they imitated pornography.
Alcohol consumption causes alcohol addiction. If we went to a rehab and analyzed 100 alcoholics in treatment for alcoholism, we’d expect to find precisely 100 of them had been drinking alcohol.
Finding out that only 28% of alcoholics in rehab consumed alcohol would present a significant problem for the theory that alcohol consumption causes alcohol addiction.
Same for porn.
Porn and Violence on Set
Most of the criticisms I hear about porn or the porn industry fall under one of two categories:
Completely untrue statements typically pushed by activists that have no basis in fact. These are the vast majority. Stuff like “porn is addictive like a drug” or “all porn is rape”—both are demonstrably, empirically false.
Beliefs that have a nugget of truth in them, or that used to be true, but are either mostly false or are no longer true. Most of these are legitimate criticisms of how the porn industry was in the 1980s and 1990s. Free, unregulated, and drunk on the 1980s push to remove any restrictions from businesses, it’s easy to see why there were so many problems with the industry in this era (many other industries were the same). Stuff like, “the performers are forced to do sex acts they wouldn’t normally do,” was likely once true, but it hasn’t been for a long time.
Adult film performer Chloe Cherry explained consent checklists that are used by porn companies to know what the performers are and are not okay with doing. These checklists have a litany of sex acts that performers can check off, yes if they’re okay with it, no if they’re not, and these forms are pretty lengthy. Things we don’t usually associate with porn, like kissing and hair-pulling, find their way on there.
Consent Checklists
Anti-porn activists never mention these because they aren’t trying to show you a balanced view. So, a lot of people don’t even know they exist. Here’s one from the APAG, the Adult Performers Artists Guild, that lists all of the things that performers can consent to before the filming begins and people are in the moment.
Simply put, porn is no longer the male-dominated industry it once was. In the 1980s and 1990s, the men had the cash and cameras and if the women wanted to be involved, they needed to subordinate to the guys. Today, technologies have expanded so anyone with enough grit and an iPhone can make commercial-quality pornography.
This helped offset the power imbalances that existed in decades prior. Why would a woman subject herself to humiliation and discomfort working for a porn company that didn’t respect her boundaries when she can easily create solo content on OnlyFans or as a Pornhub model? It’s pretty much safe to say that in virtually all cases of pornography filmed today, the performers are okay with the kinds of sex they’re pretending to have.
Though the industry is far from perfect, I assume, this shows it’s headed in the right direction, prioritizing performer consent.
Is Porn Becoming More Violent?
Many people worry porn is becoming more violent when the opposite is true. Research from 2018 published in The Journal of Sex Research found that porn isn’t becoming more violent. It’s becoming less violent for a predictable reason—porn consumers don’t like violent porn.
Eran Shor and Kimberly Seida tested two hypotheses:
Is porn really becoming more violent?
Do porn-viewers like violent porn more than non-violent porn?
They analyzed the most popular videos over a decade on PornHub. Not only did they find that porn was less violent today on average, but that:
…videos containing aggressive acts are both less likely to receive views and less likely to be ranked favorably by viewers, who prefer videos where women clearly perform pleasure.
This makes sense once you think about it. The average man simply isn’t prone to sexual violence—a very small minority of men are.
In the United States, sexual sadism rates fall typically below 10%. And having sadistic tendencies in the bedroom is a far cry from sexual assault. The vast majority of sadists keep the kink where it belongs, with consenting partners, and never become sex criminals. Only a minority of those people ever act out violent fantasies.
Sodomy Laws and Violence
Another paper published in April, 2023, by Riccardo Ciacci along with Dario Sansone, found that when sodomy laws are repealed, there’s a subsequent decline in arrests for crimes other than sodomy, including disorderly conduct, sex offenses, sex work, and drug-and-alcohol-related offenses (like drunk driving):
We provide the first evidence that sodomy law repeals led to a decline in the number of arrests for disorderly conduct, prostitution, and other sex offenses. Moreover, in line with the hypothesis that sodomy law repeals enhanced mental health and lessened minority stress, we show that these repeals led to a reduction in arrests for drug and alcohol consumption.
The authors include evidence from a plethora of papers spanning from 2014 to 2021 that all come to the same conclusion: repealing the sodomy laws that target sexual minorities and criminalize certain non-commercial sex acts between consenting adults leads to a fall in other crimes. 3
They hypothesize this is possibly because sodomy laws targeting minority groups are a proxy that facilitate other arrests. An example would be drug criminalization. The illegality of drugs gives police officers license to police more aggressively and thus more people get arrested for crimes besides the possession of the drug.
My hypothesis is this: that when the law forces people to sublimate their sexual desires, they turn to other areas (some criminal, some violent). What all of the research discussed here seems to imply is that there’s a certain subset of the population for whom sexual expression is a form of necessary catharsis who turn to other means when deprived of that outlet. It’s why you see a regular stream of sex crimes in the Catholic Church, where priests are sworn to celibacy.
Both are plausible, even likely, and not mutually exclusive.
Conclusions
None of this is meant to imply that we should just let everyone do everything they want sexually, that there is not moral code that applies to sex. There are definitely some limits, like non-consensual sex. But there are trade-offs with these decisions and if it comes down to legal porn and less rape or illegal porn and more rape, the answer is obvious. Rape should never be the price we pay for banning a form of perfectly consensual sex, including porn and sex work.
Some people feel uncomfortable encountering porn. Like me, some people just don’t like it. That’s more than okay. But the solution is to not watch it (and don't let your kids watch it)—not to ban it entirely. That's like banning all music because we don't like certain records, but, even worse, an abundance of evidence suggests it'll make the rates of sexual assault skyrocket.
The same goes for sex. Non-consensual assaults should never be the consequence of banning consensual sex just because an unaffected third party is intolerant of it. It’s not our place to police other people’s bodies.
My gripe with porn is that it’s boring and suffers from the same problems that other Internet products do. Porn is to sex as Facebook is to friendship, that is, poor substitutes that aren’t remotely close to the original.
This is an economics paper published in an economics journal, not social sciences. This puts a unique spin on a paper about sexuality as the author found that the market demand for the suddenly-banned sex work were driving the observed rise.
This is another economics paper, showing that these decisions have ramifications outside of the realm of just the moral, which these anti-sex crusaders seem to think is the sole domain of these laws.
This the best survey and analysis of the alleged porn:violence nexus I’ve umm come across. Scientific data trumps ideology especially a feminist implicitly misandristic one of male perpetrator; female victim.
I am captivated by this subject, even though I find it sad and dark.
I accept what you present evidentially about the link between porn and sexual violence, but if science is to serve our society rather than just explain the horrors of it, do we need to ask a few deeper questions?
I understand that the evidence shows that porn does not cause sexual violence, it appears to reduce it, and as I understand from the research you’ve explained, its a small minority of male perpetrators who mainly cause sexual violence. But at the same time their reach is so depressingly wide that they don’t just affect a minority of women they affect a much more significant number.
The science is important factual stuff and I appreciate your help in getting it straight in my mind, but the emotional side is that none of this is good news for women or children.
Even if there are less rapes when porn and sex work are legal what does this say logically about the quality of sex work? - we know it is dangerous work, at the very least is it fair to deduce from the science that there is a much higher risk in this work of having paid sex with men who are borderline rapists.
It begs the (maybe paranoid) question of how many men are really borderline rapists, what is the price for society of alleviating these men’s tendencies? Are we all dragged down by trying to alleviate this violence? Is there a better way of dealing with it? Is women’s intuitive fear of male violence truly underestimated by society, is it real or paranoid?
“Rape should never be the price we pay for banning a form of perfectly consensual sex, including porn and sex work.”
This seems to me to assume that porn alleviates rape in the way that paracetamol alleviates a headache - I’d like to question this a bit more.
Can the science capture the societal cost of something that does not show because it is absorbed/alleviated by other things, including indoctrination and stigma, resulting in unreported rapes (we rarely get unreported murders)? The available research appears to focus purely on the narrow and extreme relationship between porn and ‘rape’, aren’t there many more negative relationship impacts to research with porn. I wish that Joe’s writing was part of sex education for kids but lets be honest, porn is not just entertainment for adults with free choice, it’s also the main source of sex education for children.
I am unconvinced by the analogy of the relationship of the ‘fantasy’ of Grand Theft Auto to ‘action in reality’ as being a similar thing to porn fantasies and actions in reality. This is because in reality very many men (and boys) often find themselves in positions of opportunity with women and children where they could enact porn fantasies that would not be the case with car theft and murder.
Is there any analogy here with any other crime? Does sport stop people committing murder? Let’s assume porn is as harmless (or necessary for our safety from violence) as sport, quite a few sports are pretty violent. But did murders go up when sports were not possible in the pandemic, no, because as a society we have zero tolerance for murder, not so much when it comes to rape, which is predominately a female issue. Women therefore live smaller lives, its little comfort that porn absorbs some tendencies to sexual violence.
Although it may seem self-evident I think it’s important to ask why porn reduces sexual violence in these men? Does this violence actually have to be absorbed and accepted by society via porn? Does the link logically mean that porn is representative of sexual violence? (otherwise how would it work to absorb these men’s inclinations?). And what does this mean for reducing sexual violence generally, is porn really an antidote or a rotten sticking plaster? This is not a call to ban porn, or to give in to the bible-bashing regressive brigade, but to accept that elements of it are representative of some of the absolute worst of human nature.
I wonder what the better solutions are for dealing with sexual violence, the scourge of our sex lives and relationships?