Saturday, August 17, 2019

Has more "play choking" in porn led to more strangulation homicides?

Mass shootings always get people talking about the causes of violence, but these are rare acts that in some ways are atypical.  For one thing, most homicide involves a single victim, and the perp typically has a specific beef with the victim.  Mass shooters often shoot "symbolic" victims: more or less random members of a class of people they have a grievance against.

Women are usually murdered by a man they have they have a current or former relationship with. With the rise in recent years of "play choking" in pornographic scenes, I thought I could test the psychologists' hypothesis that witnessing images of acted-out violence, even play violence, can put ideas into the heads of people, especially violent-prone individuals, that increase the risk of homicide.

The CDC has a great website that allows you to generate trends on specific causes of mortality.  I was able to make a chart of the rates of homicide by choking among female victims since 1999.
























Over this period, this type of homicide has fallen from 3.3 to 1.8 deaths per 1 million females, so the pornography hypothesis is not supported.  While the rate has flattened over the past several years--the years where play choking has gotten more popular--there is no increase as the hypothesis would predict.

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