Violent Entertainment and the Socialization of Aggression

Background:

The controversy about too much violent entertainment in children’s media has a long history spanning half a century (Murray 1995 etc.) In this respect, violent entertainment is a lifestyle risk controversy, which like so many others, seems to be the result of conflicts between consumers’ rights and community values and safety. Ever since the Hays code was written in 1930 for the fledging film industry, the battle between the public and the cultural industries over children’s exposure to sexual and violent content in the entertainment industry has grown ever more vociferous. Especially after television, the most powerful medium ever invented, the politics of children’s culture has been characterized by high profile media panics followed by sluggish policy making and endless calls for more scientific evidence.

It also seems fair to say that in spite of the academic debates there has been persistent public concern about the escalation of violence in entertainment, and that periodically, in the wake of spectacular school yard killings like Littleton and Taber, we go through periods of great public panic attacks. Surveys show that Canadian parents continue to be anxious about the prominence of scenes of graphic violence in children’s media, which studies confirm have certainly not abated <Coles>. To the contrary is the spreading of violent content to video games and the Internet. Perhaps this is why the public generally agrees with the statement that violent entertainment contributes to aggression in society, and in Canada overwhelming supports regulation of violence in all media (Media Watch 2001).

With the recent high profile news coverage of schools shootings, it is not surprising that many parents feel disturbed by and anxious about crime and aggression at schools <media watch>. Policies such as zero tolerance for weapons and drugs have been adopted by many US schools as parents adjust to the prospect of raising their children in an increasingly mean and brutal world <gerbner’s definition and theory>. But actual youth crime rates do not support the idea that we are raising a generation of killer kids on the playground. Attention to such homicides is perhaps unhelpful, for they account for only 1% of child murders in the USA, and mask the real problems of fighting bullying and intimidation the persist in schools <bullying dossier> . So are we

Missing the mark!
• School shootings are only 1% of all child killings
• 1700 children die in car accidents per year.
• 10% still bring weapons to school
• Although declining 17% of children still report getting in fights at school = 6 million assaults per year on school grounds

Thinking beyond the media panic:

Scientists supporting media effects:

It is hardly surprising that this high profile controversy has produced conflicted opinions on what the science says about the effects of media violence <Bushman and Anderson media study>.

Scientist negating media effects and media research:

On one side stand the industry sponsored scientists who maintain that media violence is not a problem and there is no reason to restrict or regulate the media <Grossman,Freedman>

- Violence, war and crime have existed long before media were invented and won’t disappear even if you sanitize children’s mass culture.

- The psychologists who study media effects are misleading the public about evidence of effects: they claim that correlations are not causes, and that the effects hypothesis has not been validated with studies.

- The panic over children’s culture arises not from any ‘real’ condition in children’s lives but because a small group of moralizing adults over-react to generational change

- So get over it old fashioned moralizers! Sex and violence are so much a part of our social world, that young people need to be exposed to it and learn to cope rather than be protected from it.

Psychological and Medical Research:

On the other side are the vast majority of psychological and medical professionals who upon successive reviews of the literature have proclaimed that heavy exposure to media violence does constitute a risk to children’s health and safety. Evidence from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey in the USA gathered from over 13,000 high school students found that youths who watch more than 4 hours per day of television are 7% more likely to get in fights at during the year than those who watch less than 1 hour per day.

<YSRB chart from PP>

The research reviews identify five major mechanisms to explain the relationship between media

-Imitation and Copycat; <Bandura, 1977, 1986> Developmental theories have noted that children will learn by means of imitation and reinforcement. The role models that children will imitate will be those individuals who are continually rewarded for their behaviours. Content analysis of TV shows by The National Television Violence Study (1996) showed that 75% of violent acts go unpunished. Therefore heavy viewers of television will continually be exposed to unpunished and often rewarded act of violence. Studies of children's behaviour have indicated that their learned behaviours seem to rely on the direct reinforcement a child receives (Bandura, 1965). Other studies have suggested that the imitation of a model is dependent on the attractive characteristics of that character. 1996-1998 national Television Studies have continually indicated that 40% of violent acts seen on TV were perpetrated by characters who possess attractive role model characteristics.

-Scripts; <Huesmann, 1988, 1998>. Observed learning theory suggests that children learn how to deal with everyday problems in a variety of ways. These methods of scripts have been examined in relation to a child's media use and studies have suggested that problem-solving scripts may be imitated or unconsciously used in a child's play and life skills. Therefore heavy views of violence may continually perceive the TV way of dealing with problems as the ideal way of dealing with similar problems in their lives.

-Desensitization; Theorist have suggested that the more we view and experience violence the more we accept it as a way of life and a way of dealing with issues. Psychologists have suggested that children who are heavy viewers of violent media will not view violence in a negative respect and will become used to it and won't be as cautious about using aggression in dealing with issues (Dominick & Greenberg, 1972). Both theoretical and experimental studies have indicated the existence of children's desensitization to violence. Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973 studied boys reception to new images of violence and found that prior viewing of violent images were the variable that determined how physically aroused the boys got while watching new images. It was suggested that the natural arousal reaction of viewers of violent images did not seem to exist with heavy viewers of violent images thus they had become desensitized to such images.

-Identification/ justification; <Huesmann, 1982>. It has been suggested that violent individuals may enjoy violent media because it justifies their own actions and behaviour as normal and acceptable. The notion that a child who behaves aggressively should be remorseful is in conjunction with the theory of desensitization. If a child becomes desensitized to acts of aggression their remorse for imitation and acting aggressively is also negated. Thus the child will view their acts as the norm and they way to deal with issues that arise. (Fernie, 1981; Huesmann & Eron, 1986).

-Mean world; <Gerbner & Gross, 1976, 1981>. While children view television they may be cultivating a sense of risk associated with the real world experiences. Studies have shown that heavy TV viewers tend to be more anxious about becoming a victim of violence. These heavy viewers perceive the world to be a dangerous and scary place therefore developing a heightened sense of fear as well as a heightened need to protect themselves, therefore they may be more aggressive.

Surgeon General’s Report:

From their reviews the Surgeon General’s Report, Youth Violence, 2000 suggest that; <surgeon general’s report>

• “a small but statistically significant impact on aggression over many years”

• “the science shows that media violence and this is primarily TV, can in fact in the short term increase aggressive behavior”

American Academy of Pediatrics:

Concerns about what children learn by spending so much time with media leads the American Assoc to further examine the impact of media on children’s lives. Pediatricians Voice of Medical Science has come to view media as constituting a learning environment in which children; <AAP>

• Learn their attitudes about violence at a very young age and these attitudes tend to last.

• Although TV violence has been studied the most, researchers are finding that violence in other media such as computers and video games impacts children and teens in many of the same harmful ways.

• From media violence children learn to behave aggressively toward others. They are taught to use violence instead of self-control to take care of problems or conflicts.

• Violence in the "media world" may make children more accepting of real-world violence and less caring toward others. Children who see a lot of violence from movies, TV shows, or video games may become more fearful and look at the real world as a mean and scary place.

Recent Studies:

However, like just about every mandated science debate – from cigarettes and melatonin to PCB’s – there are plenty of reasons to see a few grains of truth in both sides of this argument. It is true that violence has played a role in children’s folkstories and folkplay; yet it is also true that the cultural industries design the violence into stories and games because it helps market them to kids. And although everyone agrees that there is a significant correlation – in the order of .10-.15 between heavy consumption of violent media and aggressive and anti-social behavior, it becomes impossible to say whether this relationship implies that aggressive kids watch more violent programmes, or vice versa. Certainly the early laboratory studies that tried to assess whether media caused violent behaviour directly were poorly designed. But that does not invalidate the many studies that confirm that indirect effects of viewing violence on children’s play, or their attitudes and feelings about the world which are part of the socialization of aggression.

Longitudinal Studies:

Generally, the evidence from longitudinal studies have found that those children who develop early preferences for violent entertainment and identify with those characters, are more likely to develop positive role models and become aggressive later on in life depending of course on other factors (in family, peer groups and community) which can accentuate or mitigate the effects of media consumption. <Eron, Heusman >. As Garbarino notes, it all depends on the peer, family, and community resources available to the individual.
A recent study published in Science for example Johnson et al. (2002,) reported that whereas 45% of the boys who watched television more than 3 hours per day at age 14, subsequently committed aggressive acts involving others, only 8.9%, who watched television less than an hour a day were aggressive later in life and that this relationship existed even after other factors that contribute to aggression such as neighbourhood, family dysfunction and developmental issues are accounted for. < Johnson et al. 2002>

Violence as risk factor, not causal factor:

Many people have wondered about the relationship between school yard killings and video games. <Grossman etc.> Most researchers note that the extremely violent video games, like Quake < esrb rating and box shot> and Counter-strike < esrb rating and box shot> , have not been around long enough to know much about their long term consequences. But that said, we cannot conclude that there are no learning effects from playing violent games, especially given the fact that that the game players are more deeply immersed in the action <Griffith,Kline etc> What is learned however will depend on the children and the social and psychological resources they bring to their video game play.

So faced with these opposing academic claims, what can we say?

Perhaps the conclusion of the Canadian Government Standing Committee on Communications and Culture, in their report Television Violence: Fraying our Social Fabric. Ottawa 1993 says it best: <can gover standing comitee>

• “television violence is one of many risk factors which may contribute to aggressive tendencies and antisocial behaviour".

• We have clearly found that the violence portrayed on television reflects and shapes unhealthy social attitudes.

• The committee has concluded that although the risk may be small... It cannot be ignored”.

Regulations:

They go on to espouse the precautionary principle urging that it was prudent given the limits of psychological and medical scientific knowledge to err on the side of safety, and undertake reasonable efforts to reduce children’s exposure to violent entertainment. But 10 years later, it is fair to say that nothing much has happened as a result of 50 years of public concern. The V-chip is a bust and attempts to regulate the video game industry and internet have produced no result. Many people in Canada despair that anything will ever be done to curtail media violence when commercial interests who profit from the sales, are responsible for their regulation. < regulations or v-chip articles or websites>

North Vancouver Pilot Project:

This is why the District School Board and Parents Advisory Council, and RCMP in North Vancouver have become partners in a politics of hope supporting a highly innovative community mobilization project that sets out to reduce children’s interest in and exposure to violent entertainment through a media risk reduction strategy. This strategy combines community health, media education and social marketing techniques to persuade children to reduce and re-pattern their consumption of violent media.