*claps hands* Buckle the fuck up kids I just went through 30 years of crime statistics.
Did you know that crime rates declined after the internet got popular? Yeah, we had a yearly decrease between 1993-2010. In 2011 rates started get higher.
From 2012 to 2015, the rates of reported from fluctuated but stayed lower than the rates from 2003.
Rates jumped significantly from 2014 to 2015 - 2015 was the year Trump announced he was running for president which might have a correlation to the numbers.
In 2016 rates started declining again.
In 2017 the rates were higher than 2016 but lower or comparable to 2015.
In 2018 rates got higher. Again, I'm personally thinking this was related to Trump as president because that's the major significant change.
Now this is about REPORTED crime. But the point of the statistics is to use a large enough sample to be able to figure out overall statistics.
So where, I ask, is the significant increase in crime rate caused by problematic fictional content?
The internet got big in the 90s. If fiction has that much of an impact on people being victimized, we should have seen a significant increase, right? Except. The crime rates go DOWN.
Now, I'm not an expert, but a a guess, I'd say it's because the internet allows you to connect with people who have gone through or understand what you're going through, and provided resources for people in bad situations that allowed them to get help.
What it did NOT do is suddenly have victim rates skyrocket because "predators have more tools for grooming" or however antis phrase it.
[Note: I went through the statistics year by year so if you want to see if I'm telling the truth you are gonna have to do the same. Have fun.]
ETA: I somehow mixed up 2001 and 2011 for 9/11. I've removed that.
