It’s not video games and porn that’s causing knife crime

Diane Abbott knows what’s behind the spate of fatal stabbings plaguing the capital. The shadow Home Secretary told an interviewer that video games and hardcore pornography may be a contributing factor because they ‘desensitise’ the young to violence. Abbott opined to The House magazine: ‘You’ve got your smartphone, you can see stuff you could have never have seen at that age. Normally, you would have had to have gone into a news agency and they would have said, “I’m not selling you that, you’re only eight, go away”. There is an argument that exposure to hardcore pornography is connected with violence. I wouldn’t say that’s the main thing. That’s a thread and it’s something that’s there.’

It’s really not. It might sound true. It might feel true. It certainly fits neatly with the current hysteria over ‘toxic masculinity’ (read: being heterosexual while male). But the evidence just isn’t there. You might remember evidence as the basis of policies pursued by progressives, apart from when it’s not, in which case merely to request it becomes an act of contrarian gammonry.