The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,244

with violence and gender stereotypes, one activity is conspicuous by its absence. The legal scholar Francis X. Shen has performed a content analysis of video games dating back to the 1980s and discovered a taboo that was close to absolute:It seems that rape may be the one thing that you can’t put into a video game.... Killing scores of people in a game, often brutally, or even destroying entire cities is clearly worse than rape in real life. But in a video game, allowing someone to press the X-button to rape another character is off-limits. The “it’s just a game” justification seems to fall flat when it comes to rape.... Even in the virtual world of Role Playing Games, rape is taboo.

He uncovered just a handful of exceptions in his worldwide search, and each triggered instant and vehement protest.59

But did any of these changes reduce the incidence of rape? The facts of rape are elusive, because rape is notoriously underreported, and at the same time often overreported (as in the highly publicized but ultimately disproven 2006 accusation against three Duke University lacrosse players).60 Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.)61 An imperfect but serviceable dataset is the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which since 1973 has methodically interviewed a large and stratified sample of the population to estimate crime rates without the distorting factor of how many victims report a crime to the police.62 The survey has several features that are designed to minimize underreporting. Ninety percent of the interviewers are women, and after the methodology was improved in 1993, adjustments were made retroactively to the estimates from earlier years to keep the data from all years commensurable. Rape was defined broadly but not too broadly; it included sexual acts coerced by verbal threats as well as by physical force, and it included rapes that were either attempted or completed, of men or of women, homosexual or heterosexual. (In fact, most rapes are man-on-woman.)

Figure 7–10 plots the surveyed annual rate of rape over the past four decades. It shows that in thirty-five years the rate has fallen by an astonishing 80 percent, from 250 per 100,000 people over the age of twelve in 1973 to 50 per 100,000 in 2008. In fact, the decline may be even greater than that, because women have almost certainly been more willing to report being raped in recent years, when rape has been recognized as a serious crime, than they were in earlier years, when rape was often hidden and trivialized.

We learned in chapter 3 that the 1990s saw a decrease in all categories of crime, from homicide to auto theft. One might wonder whether the rape decline is just a special case of the crime decline rather than an accomplishment of the feminist effort to stamp out rape. In figure 7–10 I also plotted the murder rate (from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports), aligning the two curves at their 1973 values. The graph shows that the decline of rape is different from the decline of homicide. The murder rate meandered up and down until 1992, fell in the 1990s, and stayed put in the new millennium. The rape rate began to fall around 1979, dropped more steeply during the 1990s, and continued to bounce downward in the new millennium. By 2008 the homicide rate had hit 57 percent of its 1973 level, whereas the rape statistics bottomed out at 20 percent.

FIGURE 7–10. Rape and homicide rates in the United States, 1973–2008

Source: Data from FBI Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.

If the trend in the survey data is real, the drop in rape is another major decline in violence. Yet it has gone virtually unremarked. Rather than celebrating their success, antirape organizations convey an impression that women are in more danger than ever (as in the university bathroom stickers). And though the thirty-year rape decline needs an explanation that is distinct from the seven-year homicide decline, politicians and criminologists have not jumped into the breach. There is no Broken Windows theory, no Freakonomics theory, that has tried to explain the three-decade plunge.

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