A couple months ago, Greta Christina celebrated the success of a Canadian sexual assault awareness campaign, which was immediately followed by an unsolicited comment from Rocko2466, critquing her post in part for rejoicing too soon. As a somewhat belated statistical contribution to the discussion, I’d like to quickly point out three things:
- It would be incorrect to assume that any given awareness program or police force (or any other single localized factor) can claim credit for a short-term decrease in violent crime. Even if North American cities existed in complete isolation from our broader culture, they would be too vast and complex for that assumption to hold.
- A ten percent drop is not particularly surprising if the overall trend for an annual crime statistic is in the right direction. For the four California cities displayed above, an annual drop of at least ten percent has occurred over 25% of the time during the last quarter century. That’s great news, but it doesn’t tell us why and how it happened in those particular locations.
- We need to spend much more effort analysing proven and sustained successes (such as the above cities) to see if we can tease out the sociological factors which have contributed to this encouraging trend. Pointing to a single awareness program and a couple of annual data points isn’t going to help us pinpoint what has worked in the past.
More broadly speaking, I’d suggest that violent crime is the sort of complex social problem which requires at least a book length treatment, drawing on various and disparate fields of expertise. The startling conclusion of these sorts of studies has been that our society has become increasingly intolerant of interpersonal violence over the years. Greta suggested that we should “[t]hink of what we could do if we did take part in a years-long or decades-long effort to radically change the culture’s attitudes about sexual consent,” and I completely agree, but would add that we should consider the possibility that this process is already underway, and not just in Canada.
