The impact of media violence on children

In one form or another violence has been around since the beginning of time. But prior to the introduction of the radio in the 1920s, violence usually took place far from the home.

Since then, we have progressed to motion pictures, television, home video, video games and the Internet. With each new invention of a communication device, violence has become easier to access and bring violence into our daily lives.

I grew up watching cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Tom and Jerry were always at odds with each other by trying to smash each other with huge hammers or by blow each other up with bombs, which left their faces blackened and scorched or furless. Elmer Fudd was constantly hunting Bugs Bunny with a double-barrel shotgun, and the Road Runner was forever outsmarting Wile E. Coyote using his ACME explosives and inventions against him.

Yet not once did I ever get mad at someone and go on a killing rampage.

In high school, however, I remember running through the halls with friends and shooting each other with cap guns. Back then it was OK because real violence hadn't reached the schools. School was a place to go to learn English or math and to interact with others. As long as no one got hurt no one cared.

Even as a child I realized that if I were to drop an anvil on someone's head, they wouldn't be able to walk away with just a goose-egg the size of my arm. It was easy for me to understand that shooting a rocket the size of a small car at someone wouldn't just burn all their hair off or allow them to get up and walk away after.

So why is it that in today's world, some parents are reluctant to send their children to school because they fear someone may show up with a gun and just "go postal"?

The term, "going postal" on someone should be your first clue. We often use the term in a joking manner. A friend jumps out of a closet and scares us. We laughingly threaten to "go postal" on them, inferring violence in retaliation for the scare we received.

"Going postal" on someone refers to an incident in 1986 when Patrick Sherrill, a United States Post Office employee, shot and killed 14 fellow employees and injured another half dozen before killing himself. To me, that event should have galvanized the public to be more aware of the feelings of the people around us. Instead, it has been turned into a battle cry for children while playing video games.

Since that incident, there have been several other postal employee killing-sprees. Enough so that the video game production company Ripcord created a video game called "Postal" in 1997. It was so popular that they produced a sequel in 2003, and Uwe Boll liked it so much that he bought the rights for the series and made a movie of the same title.

What does this say about us as a society when we can take the mass-murder of innocents and turn it into a popular video game? It tells me that we have become desensitized to violence and we had better get our bearings back before it is too late.

Today, you can turn on the TV to nearly any public channel and find a violent scene within minutes. You can walk into Walmart and see hundreds of video games where the object is to kill other people or aliens.

When a child asks their parent to buy them a video game, very few parents actually take the time to even read the back of the package let alone do research on what the game is about, the rating, or if there is violence, nudity or foul language that their young child will be exposed to. Their first question is usually, "How much is it?"

When a parent walks into their child's bedroom, looks at the TV and sees body parts flying and blood splattering the screen, they may tell the child that they don't like seeing that much violence. The child will usually respond with, "Aww, dad, it's just a game. Lighten up."

The real eye-opener for me was when I used that exact phrase when I walked in and my son was playing a demo of the game Borderlands. When those words came out of my mouth, I realized how far I had fallen. I didn't say that I didn't want him playing a game with any violence; I said that I didn't like seeing that much violence.

There have been literally thousands of studies on the effect of media violence on children. Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted consensus that can tell us one way or the other if media violence causes children to be more aggressive, angry or violent.

Jonathan Freedman of the University of Toronto maintains that "the scientific evidence simply does not show that watching violence either produces violence in people or desensitizes them to it."

Yet, University of Michigan professor L. Rowell Huesmann argues that 50 years of evidence show "that exposure to media violence causes children to behave more aggressively and affects them as adults years later."

In today's world, we have become much more lax with our views of what is OK to watch and what is not, and we are teaching this lack of values to our children as well. My personal conclusion is that the slow, yet steady acceptance of media violence, nudity and profanity is causing the deterioration of the morals and standards of today's society as a whole.

Eric is the father of three and recently became a grandfather.

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