It’s an oft-repeated fallacy that adult entertainment leads to more sex crimes. This misguided mindset has been proven wrong again and again by legitimate research, but it’s nevertheless a long-standing concept that refuses to die. That’s why new research is always welcome—especially a new study published in The Economic Journal, which concluded, in no uncertain terms, “We find that these [adult] businesses decrease sex crime.”
The businesses in question included strip clubs, escort services, adult cinemas, and book shops in New York City from January 1, 2004 until June 30, 2012. During those eight and a half years, the number of adult businesses in the examined area ballooned from 76 to around 280. The researchers combined data on the exact location of police-reported sex crimes with the day of opening and location of adult entertainment venues. In a result that surprised researchers Ricardo Ciacci and María Micaela Sviatschi, the data found that sex crimes decreased significantly in the areas around new adult entertainment establishments.
The Oxford University Press, in a statement on the study, wrote, “The researchers…find that the presence of an adult entertainment establishment in a given precinct leads to a 13% reduction in sex crime in the precinct one week after the opening.”
Furthermore, the results indicated that opening adult establishments did not affect other types of crimes, which means that the drop in sex crimes wasn’t due to more policing in the area. They also suggested that sex-related businesses do not attract other types of criminals, such as drug dealers—another anti–sex work hypothesis that has stood the test of time.
The results revealed that there’s a correlation between adult entertainment venues and lower sex crime rates. But the study did not go so far as to suggest the cause for this decrease, nor did researchers claim the study represented a wider swath of the human experience than the New York–based data it examined.
Nevertheless, Niki Adams, a spokesperson for the English Collective of Prostitutes, told The Independent that this new study was “dubious and lacking credibility” because “it is premised on the idea that if men are able to see a sex worker they won’t go on to commit rape and that is absurd.”
And Rosie Hodsdon, an academic who specializes issues around sex work at at Sunderland University, said: “The way researchers are describing sex workers as a substitute for sex crimes is difficult framing because it paints sex workers as sacrificial human beings to keep the rest of society safe.”
Both Hodsdon and Adams make good points about the dangers of making more of this study than its results reveal. Still, it’s nice to be able to put some hard numbers and new science behind the reality that adult entertainment does not lead to criminal behavior, and may in fact decrease it.
