In brief, it appears not:
But while theorising is all very well, it is necessary occasionally to fine-tune such theories by looking at the empirical evidence. And the most obvious fact about porn and rape is that reported rape incidence — at least in the United States, where a National Crime Victimization Survey takes place every year — has been falling in recent decades as porn becomes ever more available.
[. . .]
Now yes, it is absolutely true that correlation and causation are not the same thing. But at first glance we’d have a hard time claiming that the greater availability of porn led to more rapes: simply because there are fewer rapes reported while there’s definitely more porn.
[. . .]
In D’Amato’s paper, he uses Freakonomics-style statistics (one of his colleagues wrote the Freakonomics abortion and crime paper with Levitt) to try to tease out evidence of something more than just correlation.
What he found is that the lower the internet penetration in 2004 in a US state, the higher the rape rate had risen and that the higher the internet penetration, the lower rate had fallen.
We expect, for those societal reasons, that the reported rape rate will have risen over the time period. And where there’s no or limited internet access, it has. Where there is high internet access it has fallen, the fall being greater than the general societal rise.
Thus we have an empirical connection between internet access and lower rape figures. Whether it’s porn or not is a different matter: they could all be playing Second Life instead. An unlikely way to bet though really.
