Effects of Media violence is a growing concern. It is in our everyday lives and is almost unavoidable. The problem is that children are watching it whether or not we want them to. Violence shows up on almost everything they watch, including cartoons.
This is why media violence is leading to aggression and increased violent activities in children. Some are trying to fight this problem. Others are ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Still others don’t seem to care, and its a shame because media violence does affect children. In Alabama, a nine-year-old boy received a bad report card from his teacher.
He suggested sending the teacher poisoned candy as revenge as he had seen on television the night before. In California, a seven-year-old boy sprinkled ground-up glass into the lamb stew the family was to eat for dinner. When asked why he did it he replied that he wanted to see if the results would be the same in real life as they were on television (Howe 72). These are certainly startling examples of how television can affect the child. It must be pointed out that all of these situations were directly caused by children watching violent television. There are many reasons why media violence is such a big problem in the lives of our youth.
The first being that the average American child will witness over 200, 000 acts of violence on TV, including 18, 000 murders before the age of eighteen. (babybag. com) One of the reasons that the number of violent acts that children see on TV is so high because they see it in their cartoons. The level of violence during Saturday mornings is higher than the level of violence during prime time.
There are 3 to 5 violent acts per hour during prime time, versus 20 to 25 violent acts per hour on Saturday mornings. (babybag. com) Another reason media violence is such a problem is that 99% of homes in America have a TV, and 54% of children have a TV in their bedroom. (babybag. com) The reason these statistics are so important are because children spend more time learning about life through the media than in any other manner. Another reason why media violence causes violence in children maybe due to big cities.
“Aggressive behavior was more acceptable in the city, where a child’s popularity rating with classmates was not changed by his or her aggression.” (Huesmann 166). In the bigger cities, crime and violence is inevitable, expected and, therefore, is acceptable. Not only does television violence affect children’s youth, but it can also affect his or her adulthood. Some psychologists and psychiatrists feel that continued exposure to such violence might unnaturally speed up the impact of the adult world on the child.
This can force the child into a kind of premature maturity. As the child matures into an adult, he can become bewildered, have a greater distrust towards others, a superficial approach to adult problems, and even an unwillingness to become an adult (Carter 14). There are many different effects of media violence on children. Children under the age of 10 have committed over 1, 000 acts of aggravated assault and 81 cases of rape. (aap. org) Children 12 and under have committed murder, robbery, larceny-theft, and rape.
Where do they get the idea to do this? They get this from what they see on TV. Now this no doubt the fault of the child for committing the crime, but the fact that they were committed by children, shows some fault to the media. It’s hard to believe that by simply watching TV kids get the desire to commit these crimes. But there is indeed evidence of specific reenactments of actions in movies.
Evidence .”.. comes in the configuration of corpses, mutilated by disturbed teenagers to resemble victims in slasher movies.” (Carter 163). In the past thirty years media violence has increased and so has violence among young adults. One of the many reasons for this is that media violence affects children by making them less sensitive to violence and to the victims of violence.
Media violence often fails to show the consequences of violence especially in cartoons As a result children learn that there are few if any repercussions for committing violent acts. Media violence is especially damaging to young children (age 8 and under) because they cannot easily tell the difference between real life and fantasy. Why do children like the violence that they see on television? “Since media violence is much more vicious than that which children normally experience, real-life aggression appears bland by comparison” (Dorr 127). The violence on television is able to be more exciting and enthralling than the violence that is normally viewed on the streets. Instead of just seeing a police officer handing a ticket to a speeding violator, he can beat the offender bloody on television. However, children don’t always realize this is not the way thing are handled in real life.
They come to expect it, and when they don’t see it the world becomes bland and in need of violence. The children then can create the violence that their mind craves. The television violence can cause actual violence in a number of ways. As explained above, after viewing television violence the world becomes bland in comparison. The child needs to create violence to keep himself satisfied (Dorr 127). Also the children find the violent characters on television fun to imitate.
“Children do imitate the behavior of models such as those portrayed in television, movies, etc. They do so because the ideas that are shown to them on television are more attractive to the viewer than those the viewer can think up himself” (Brown 98). In other research among US children it was discovered that aggression, academic problems, unpopularity with peers and violence feed off each other. This promotes violent behavior in the children (Huesmann 166). The child watches violence which causes aggression. The combination of aggression and continued television viewing lead to poor academic standings as well as unpopularity.
These can cause more aggression and a vicious cycle begins to spin. In another piece if research children who watch a lot of violent television were compared to children who don’t. The results were that the children who watched more violent television were more likely to agree that “it’s okay to hit someone if you ” re mad at them for a good reason.” The other group learned that problems can be solved passively, through discussion and authority (Cheney 46). Perhaps the most important way to prevent children from watching television violence is to stop it where it starts. The parents should step in and turn the set off when a violent program comes on.
The parents are the child’s role models from which they learn. If they can learn at an early age that violence on television is bad, then they can turn the set off for themselves when they are older. Education should start at home. Fixing the problems of children and television violence isn’t easy.
There are many factors that have to be considered and people to be convinced. This problem will, no doubt, never go away and continue to get worse as the years go by. However, there are measures that can be taken to prevent the children from ever being exposed to such things. After all, what’s the world going to be like when the people who are now children are running the world?.