Youth and Media Violence

The topic of media violence having an influence on the attitudes and behavior of the youth has been a topic of debate for the past decade. Critics say that violence on television, movies, and video games, desensitizes children to the actual effects that violence has on society and themselves. The problem is that children tend to act on the behavior which is seen on the television shows they watch and video games that they play each day. They shoot someone on a video game and can’t distinguish that it is morally wrong to kill someone but with the daily influence it doesn’t affect them and they will grow up and be a violent person. This subject heavily debated because of the profound impact that the violence could have on the future of society.

Proliferation of televisions exploded into 90% of homes by 1960 and by 1996 had reached 99% of American Homes (Beresin, 1999). As you can see by the statistics that television is everywhere even more prevalent then telephones in homes. So it’s a large part of the American society and children’s lives. In fact, Children spend more time watch television than time spent in school (Beresin, 1999). The introduction of television violence has led many to theorize that chronic exposure to such acts will desensitize some children and cause them to develop more aggressive traits (Beresin, 1999). While the cause of violence is multifactor and include variables as individual biological vulnerability; psychiatric disorder; substance abuse; and social conditions such as

poverty, poor education, family psychopathology, and child mistreatment, the research literature is quite compelling in showing that among the most important variables is exposure of children to televised violence are at greater risk (Beresin, 1999). The “Notel” study a town that had not been exposed to television because of its remote location, and two other control communities that had access to televisions already. The researchers ended up finding no significant change in aggressive behavior in the control towns but a 160% increase in the Notel community after 2 years (Beresin, 1999). In another study homicide rates in Canada, America, and South Africa all increase at least 92% after the introduction of television (Beresin, 1999). It is well documented that very young children imitate the behavior of adults in their surrounding, this would also be true of what children view on television, but the child has no understanding as to whether what it is imitating is something that should or should not be imitated (Beresin, 1999).

As all the studies thus far have shown that children are influenced to mimic aggressive behavior that they view on television. I remember as a little kid I would watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I would idolize what they did and try to be like them. So much so I asked to get the weapons of all the Turtles so I could portray them. My cousin and I would act out to the best of our abilities what they did on TV. I would also watch football and get really hyped up and I would them go out side and tackle my next door neighbor but I would get in trouble because he would get hurt, but every time after I watched I would go out and do the same thing. Also as I got older up in to the teens I was really into WWF wrestling and so were all of my friends so we would stage are own wrestling and perform and the maneuvers the wrestles did including hitting each other with chairs. Then one of my friends broke his leg jumping off the roof of his house to perform and aerial move but in didn’t work. All this aggressive behavior stems from trying to emulate what we as young males see our heroes doing and wanting to be like our heroes.

Television programs display, on average 8-12 acts of violence per hour for children’s program the figure jumps to about 20 violent scenes per hour (Beresin, 1999). Japan is the only country where the average acts of violence and the same but violent behavior is very low (Beresin, 1999). So all the child violence can’t be blamed solely on television it is also the culture and parents that you are brought up with to teach you right from wrong. Studies do show that there is a correlation between violence on television and child