Television gets closer look as a factor in real violence

OVERVIEW

Dr. Leonard D. Eron, a Yale University psychology professor, has studied the causes of aggression among children for many years. Interested in how children were treated at home, he interviewed parents in 1960.

When he went back to this longitudinal study in 1970, he found the best predictor of aggression among boys, now in their teens, to have nothing to do with how they were treated by their parents, but how much television they had watched ten years earlier. In 1980, he revisited the same group and found the correlation still held. "Those who watched television were more aggressive and more likely to commit crimes."

From the 1960s to the present, violence has increased both in the popular arts and among young people. The opinion now prevails in society and Congress today: violent entertainment not only reflects, but influences, real violence in our society.

Some reject this conventional wisdom. Television executives and artists who produce violent media maintain it is not what is on the screen or in lyrics but society at large that bears the responsibility for excessive violence.

Jonathan L. Freedman is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of several articles challenging the prevailing notion. "Aggressive kids tend to watch more television, that’s true. But the question is whether one causes the other."

Dr. Eron, now at the University of Michigan, stands by this thesis and cites his study of subjects in their thirties: "I found that the violent programming they had watched was related to the seriousness of the crimes they committed, how aggressive they were with their spouses, and even to how aggressive their own kids were."

There is caution, if not disagreement, even from practitioners who work with violent youth. Stephanie Arno is a New York City probation officer working with young offenders: "The idea that television violence plus youth equals youth violence, that’s something made up by social scientists. These kids live with violence day in and day out."

Others are more concerned about the indirect effects of television violence. They see its "violent images giving children an exaggerated sense of life’s dangers—what one researcher calls the ‘mean world syndrome.’ "

Phil Yerrington, a police officer in Davenport, Iowa, comments, "Television does not promote violence, but it makes it less scary." Experts worry about the desensitizing effect of violent media images. Research has shown how both men and women can begin to treat rape more casually after being exposed to slasher and violent pornographic films.

According to Dr. George Gerbner, professor of communications at Annenberg School of Communication (University of Pennsylvania), the networks average 25 acts of violence an hour (on Saturday mornings when children do most of their watching) for the past 15 years. Before that, in the 1970s, it more like a dozen acts of violence an hour.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs recently found 2,605 acts of violence between 6:00 a.m. and midnight. The heaviest concentration of violence was in early morning and afternoon when children are most likely to be watching.

Three 16-year-olds interviewed in Brooklyn, New York downplayed the influence of violent media and criticized it for not being realistic.

Many youth counselors, however, say they recognize the influence of media violence in the conduct and role play of teenagers with whom they work. Sheila Alson is coordinator of a "Resolving Conflicts Creatively" program in New York City schools: "They see a show and they come in the next day and role play. When the story’s a violent story, those are the roles they’re playing out. Then the play fight that they’re doing turns into a real fight."

Brooklyn police officer Victor Reyes sees television giving young people the message that "if somebody talks down to you and you don’t do anything, you’re a chump."

Most youth workers will not accept a theory that places most of the blame for violence on the media. Chief prosecutor for Family Courts, New York City, Peter Reinharz, puts it this way:

I have a tremendous problem understanding what all the hype is about. It’s making another set of excuses for kids who are uncontrollably violent. If you’re telling me some people can’t tell the difference between television and reality, that may be true, but this is someone who’s in need of more than censorship.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. How much thought have you given as to whether art primarily reflects or influences society? What is your opinion on this now?
2. In your opinion, is the rise in media violence and violent crimes of youth in the 1980s coincidental? How do you explain it?
3. What can research show and what are its limitations?
4. What is the reason that there is so much violence on television just when children are watching?
5. What are your recommendations for decreasing violence among young people?

IMPLICATIONS

1. A country that does not respond to violence in the youth culture is not only a culture that does not care about young people in the poorer classes. It is a society that does not care about itself.
2. No one system nor single discipline can understand and adequately respond to such problems as that of violence among youth in our society. Such issues must be approached as public health issues.
3. Our society needs a new understanding of the common good if effective discussion of this issue is to take place.

Dean Borgman cCYS