FOR a long time it was said the ‘‘jury was out’’ on the impact of media violence. Not any more. A special commission set up by the International Society for Research on Aggression comprising 12 international authors and endorsed by 250 of the world’s leading researchers has concluded that exposure to a range of violent media can act as triggers for aggressive thoughts and feelings, influencing behaviour. To put it simply, exposing kids to images of killing, maiming, dismembering, and sexual assault over and over again has real consequences.
You can’t expose kids to these things in the name of entertainment and expect them to be unaffected.
Australian academic Dr Wayne Warburton is one of the authors of the report, published in the journal Aggressive Behaviour. He’s also the editor (along with Danya Braunstein) of a new book Growing up Fast and Furious: Reviewing the impacts of violent and sexualised media on children.
‘‘We have failed to grasp the danger to society posed by the explosion of violent and sexualised media,’’ Dr Warburton says.
‘‘While scientific literature demonstrating and explaining the harmful effects has skyrocketed, public opinion has not followed.’’
Exposure to violent media contributes to an increase in beliefs normalising aggressive behaviour, that you can solve conflict with aggression, desensitisation to violence and a greater willingness to tolerate more in society. As well, children see that aggression isn’t punished — it’s often rewarded by points, money, status, elevation to higher game levels. This can encourage imitation. Dr Warburton points out that in violent video games, the player strongly identifies with and usually take the role of the aggressor, who is usually portrayed as heroic.
An 18-year-old in Thailand stabbed a taxi driver to death trying to ‘‘find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game’’. In 2003 two brothers, 16 and 14, killed a man and wounded a woman shooting at cars in Tennessee. They said they were acting out Grand Theft Auto III.
Anders Behring Breivik prepped himself for his killing spree by playing Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft. They helped him with ‘‘target practice,’’ he said.
Violent gaming provides ‘‘immersive environments’’ used by US military forces for training, where acts of violence are carried out in the first person to desensitise soldiers to real-life combat. Of course, it’s not just games. The young see violence glorified and even eroticised in advertising and music. Many rap lyrics and videos depict women as subservient and enjoying aggression.
Adolescent males with high levels of music video exposure are more accepting of rape.
Researchers looked at the effect of removing MTV from a maximum security forensic hospital. The aggression levels of 222 patients dropped by almost half.
Kids are seeing more violent pornography than ever, including sadism, rape and torture porn.
With all this exposure to pornography, violence and crime content, are we surprised by newly released Australian Bureau of Statistics figures that show sexual assaults and related offences committed by school-aged children have almost quadrupled in four years? They leapt from 450 to 1709.
Dr Warburton says exposure to anti-social, violent, frightening and age-inappropriate media can have a range of negative effects on young people.
A recent Australian study of 925 adolescents found that high video game use was associated with poor global health, depression and anxiety.
‘‘Violent and frightening media have been linked with anxiety, fears, sleep disturbances, PTSD, long-term phobias and avoidant behaviours, and occasionally with effects so strong they have resulted in hospitalisation,’’ Dr Warburton says.
Ninety-eight per cent of US paediatricians believe excessive exposure to violent media has a negative effect on childhood aggression.
John Murray, research fellow at the Department of Psychology, Washington College, and a researcher on children’s social development for almost 40 years, says violent media poses a ‘‘clear threat to the social and intellectual development of children and youth.’’ The research is solid. The profits that motivate vested interests to deny it are significant. But just because people want to make money out of violent and sexually degrading media products doesn’t mean we have to let them.
As published in Sunday Herald Sun Nov 4, 2012
9 Responses
This research makes sense to me. If young people (or any people, really) are exposed to graphic violence then it makes sense that it will become part of their consciousness. Many disturbing images will stay in our memory always.
Thank you for bringing this research to my attention. I keep hoping something will break now that the first generation of boys fed a diet of violent porn since early childhood have become men, but the piles of bodies have gotten so high that I sometimes lose scale of what it might take to shake people aware.
In todays AdelaideNow online there was an article today on violent video games causing increased aggression in children. It surprised me to see around 95% of respondents to the article were defending violent games and that the research MUST be flawed. It seems so obvious to me that excessive exposure to pretty much anything will desensitise. The realism of imagery in movies these days is so accurate that I wonder how much our brains can really decifer??? For example, if you see a movie depicting someone being mutilated, at some level your brain must BELIEVE that it has seen it. After all, isn’t seeing believing?
It makes perfect sense. The primary way children learn is through imitation. It’s how they learn to eat, talk, walk, socialise, etc.
*Everything* they see around them contributes to how the learn and grow. If what they are seeing as a stream of violent, criminal, and sexualised images/scenes, then of course they’re going to respond by copying.
As a year 11 students I can definitely vouch for the truth in this. I can see it around me at school all the time, although fortunately with some exceptions.
“Dr Warburton points out that in violent video games..” Presumably Dr. Warburton means video games containing depictions of violence. Videogames are not actually violent.
Very true and smart observation Peregrine. Combined with an increasing amount of dysfunctional families with models no positive role models to guide them, children don’t seem to know any better.
According to their website, the International Society for Research for Aggression is a self-formed organisation with a special interest it seems in talking up negative aspects of our society generally. I note that the current President ‘s professional involvements appear to have been almost entirely with disadvantaged children. Is that typical of the membership, I wonder? Has the ISRA research been based only on observations of children in disadvantaged circumstances? Has there been any attention given in the research to the effects of media depicting acts of violence on children growing up in households where a peaceful milieu is the norm? I don’t know. If such was the case, the research wouldn’t necessarily be “flawed” of course, but , for me at least, given my own observations of my own children, it would make a generalisation of the ISRA findings to all children everywhere unacceptable.
“International Society for Research on Aggression” that should be.
While it is clear that media violence is causing a passive acceptance of violence. The cherry picking of individual violent acts connected to violent computer games in this article is intellectually dishonest.
Millions of people play violent computer games every day, yet violent ‘copycat’ crimes remain rare.
The fact that 99% of gamers are not inspired to act out game violence in real life, is compelling evidence that media violence is not a direct cause of real violence.