Criminology Research Council grant ; (1/80)
This research represents a response to a research note by David Biles in 1979 which raised important questions both about trends in minor sex offence reports, and whether these are in any way related to the circulation of pornography. It was necessary first to distinguish between two prior claims which appeared to be in conflict. The Danish work of Kutchinsky showed a decline in minor sex offences with the liberalisation of pornography in Denmark, while Court claimed an increase in major sex offences in Australia.
Efforts to determine trends for minor sex offences in Australia proved very disappointing due to the serious lack of uniformity across States about such basic issues as categories of offence. Comparisons were therefore confined to a single State, South Australia, for the period 1960-78 with an annotation of legislative changes affecting reporting patterns. Because of the difficulty of knowing whether Australian trends were meaningful or merely a function of unknown error terms, the trends for other countries were compared, in particular for England and Wales, and for New Zealand. Consistently it was found that when all minor offence data were pooled, the total reports rose from the early sixties to the early seventies only to fall to a level little different from the sixties. Where there have been indications of a steep decline in minor offence reports, a large part of this decline relates to reductions in reports of carnal knowledge, which reduction reflects a change in public attitudes to reporting rather than a reduction in the behaviour.
Biles had hypothesised an association between minor sex offence rates and pornography and found no evidence to support this. The present work similarly fails to support that hypothesis. The relationship between minor sexual offences and rape was then explored together with the possible linkage between rape reports and those of non-sexual violence against persons. For these comparisons, data from the various States were available. Great variability within and between States was found such that no consistent relationship emerged between report rates of serious assaults and those for rape. A clear difference did emerge between rape rates for South Australia (increasing steeply) and for Queensland (no increase).
Finally, in an attempt to make some sense of the evidence from several sources of increasing reports of sexual violence occurring concurrently with a decrease in minor sex offence reports, a conceptual model was proposed. The essence of this was to take account of changes in the degree to which sexual behaviour is subject to legal measures, and the question of coercion. It was argued that with a small shift in the acceptance of coercion but a larger reduction in the involvement of the law, one can account for the observation of these two opposite trends. Hence the earlier reports of Kutchinsky and Court, presented by Biles as contradictory, may be better understood as paradoxical but complementary.