This being the case it doesn’t matter if science finds some useful end to porn. For those who are true followers of Christ porn is their enemy. Repentance is the key to dealing with porn.

Rapes went down drastically from 4677 cases in 1972 to 1500 cases in 1995. (That’s a suspiciously round number.)

While population increased from 107 million to 125 million.

However, sexual assault actually increased from 3139 to 3644 cases.

And, very telling is that other serious violent crime went down during those years: Murder dropped by 40 percent, and physical assaults dropped by 60 percent.

Unless one wants to argue that access to pornography affected all crime, it looks to me like Japanese society was undergoing a transformation anyway. That might be attributed to an aging population, as violent crime is mainly the domain of teens and young adults. (The figures I’ve heard is that the majority of people outgrow it by 30, and almost all by age 40.) So when those 20-something violent criminals hit 40, they almost all stop being violent criminals. And the next cohort of 20-somethings is much smaller in number. (The study did span over 20 years.)

It looks like the incidence of rape decreased by about the same percentage as physical assaults, but sexual assault (other than rape) actually increased.

Sexual assault (other than rape) did not follow the overall trend. If one wants to put forth a guess, it might be that access to pornography actually caused a number of sexual assaults that otherwise would not have occurred.

Another hypothesis is that Japanese cultural shifts of the 70′s and 80′s (women’s rights, feminism, etc.) made women less tolerant of sexual assault, so it was reported more. Also, In the 70′s and 80′s more women entered the workplace in most industrialized nations. If that was true in Japan, then perhaps that cause more opportunities for sexual assault in the work place.

My conclusions: 1) Since all violent crime went down, I think rapes would have decreased anyway.

2) Since sexual assaults other than rape actually went up, even against an overall trend of decreasing violent crime, the claim that porno lowered sex crimes is doubly dubious.

Let us follow the pathway of faith in this matter. No amount of “science” or “studies” can return findings more significant or strongly directed. We need not subject ourselves to the confusion of the world. There remains no question but that any usage of pornography is wrong and unjustified by those who would follow the counsel of inspired leadership.

That is where I want to go. Others, I hope and pray that you get the message too.

The Japan data is being completely misrepresented by djinn.

Example from the report on Japan:

“In 1972, 33.3 % of the offenders were between 14-19 years of age; by 1995 that percentage had decreased to 9.6%. Thus, over the period in question, there was a major shift in the proportion of victims and offenders from the younger categories to older categories.”

A quick look at the demographic data for japan will show that in the period from 1972 to 1995. Japanese society aged greatly as fewer and fewer children were born Hence the shift from younger victims and perps to older perps and victims.

Wasn’t intending to kill the thread.

BTW, use of porn is so widespread that there’s really no way of widening its reach without selling it openly to children or at churches. Not that children and people at churches aren’t using porn as it is, but those are the places in society where it’s not already openly justified. And there is plenty of harsh and twisted porn that’s available for free. More than you can likely imagine. The free stuff is used to hook people and sucker them into spending money, and it works well enough to fund a multi-billion dollar industry.

I think very few folks have heard of it, let alone visited. I’ve been trying to find opportunities to ask this question on a number of blogs that aren’t OT, and it’s not easy — I just had an email to ldselect timeout after three days of attempted delivery, and I’ve yet to get a response to a handful of requests at various blogs.

http://www.ldsr.org/blog for the interested. It should be noted that the site has posted boundaries that are enforced, but the purpose of the blog is a bit different from the average Mormon blog.

29 — I have no interest in persuading anybody in power that porn is dangerous. There’s little they can do that they’re not already doing. I’m talking to the people here, and there aren’t many messages the prophets of the last few decades have been more clear and consistent on than this one. They haven’t spent the amount of time they have because this isn’t a problem among Latter-day Saints. It’s a huge problem, and it’s very difficult to address.

At LDSR, we have people who show up all the time with variations on the same theme — they’ve tried for years and years to quit using porn, and failed every time. They are relieved to find that there is a place where they can talk to others who share their struggles. It is nice to be understood.

And then they never come back. The work is hard. You don’t just talk to your bishop for a few weeks, pray a lot, and have it all go away. It is a lifetime struggle. It’s not 24/7 Hell. Things do get better, but it’s a challenge that keeps on being a challenge that takes consistent attention. It’s a good thing to address.

Liberalizing the porn industry does more than increase the availability of porn, it would also change the way porn is produced. When porn is made by criminals and desperate people then the whole industry is bound to be fraught with coercion and crime, where sex is involved that coercion and crime easily becomes rape. Government approval and regulation could play a large part in protecting actors from others in the industry or in changing or preventing the situations that drives them to the industry in the first place.

Another aspect is a change in the type of porn being produced. In the states most of the porn that is professionally produced caters to the most extreme consumers because those are the most money reliable and lucrative consumers. This situation creates a feedback loop where the extreme consumers want increasingly violent imagery, and since they are the primary consumers the industry gives it to them. I would wager that these extreme users are the ones most likely to act on their fantasies in illegal ways.

More casual users are less likely to seek out porn that is hidden away in the back of seedy stores so they either do without, or use free stuff they find on the internet. When porn is widely available for casual users (who are uninterested in violent imagery) to purchase, they become a larger share of the market. The industry then begins to cater to casual users and stops producing the increasingly violent porn that feeds the fantasies of the more volatile and potentially criminal consumers.