Saturday, May 25, 2013
Some good news?
Actually there's quite a bit, if you step back from the media circus. By a circuitous route, I came across this, for example. Rape is notoriously under-reported to the police, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics does an annual survey of 40,000 households and 75,000 people called the National Crime Victimization Survey. (Yes, I know, that's social science and therefore un-Christian and a threat to our freedoms. No doubt the Republicans will put a stop to it soon.) It turns out that the "of completed or attempted rape or sexual assault against females from 1995 to 2010" fell by a lot -- from 5/1,000 females 12 and over to 2.1/1,000.
I don't know why -- people have various hypotheses about this. But violent crime in the U.S. in general has fallen a lot in the past couple of decades. Think about it.
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The ongoing fall in violent crime is a nearly universal trend in the developed nations, following a 25 year rise in violent crime beginning in the early 1960's. As it stands no one really knows why this happened (though that hasn't stopped various entities from talking credit) and speculation abounds. Over at Mother Jones they are peddling an atmospheric lead theory, which makes about as much sense as anything else I've heard.
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