The scene: a dank underground cavern filled with hi-tech equipment that beeps and flashes in the background, its floor covered with an illuminated grid that hums with electricity. Our hero Alex, a muscular youth, enters accompanied by a man in a suit and dark glasses. They are discussing Alex's destiny: to fight evil with his psychic ability to foresee the future mathematically. The man ushers Alex to the grid and asks him to predict where the next light on the floor will appear and to step on it; our hero desperately tries to keep up as the lights flash faster and faster but is continually shocked, electrical current buzzing painfully through him as he fails. Imploringly he queries the man, "But I thought you were my friend?" The man replies stoically, "Sometimes friends must cause other friends pain."
It may sound like a scene from a new R-rated science fiction thriller, but in fact it is a segment from a Saturday morning cartoon aimed at children, which aired recently on one of the major television networks. From sources, some surprising, some not so unexpected, children--much like us all--are inundated by violent images every day. From the hand-to-hand combat of a weekend cartoon series to the intensive coverage of school shootings on the news, we invariably open our homes to violent media content for the purpose of entertaining and informing ourselves. That kids bear the brunt of this exposure really comes as little surprise when one considers the sheer amount of time they spend consuming media outside of school. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study, Kids & Media @ The New Millennium, the typical child aged 2 to 18 in this country spends an average of more than 38 hours a week--nearly five-and-a-half hours a day--using media. "Watching TV, playing video games, listening to music, and surfing the Internet have become a full-time job for the typical American child," says Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "This study really underscores the importance of paying attention to the messages and the information kids are getting from the media, both good and bad."
Given human nature and the society in which we live, it should also not come as much of a shock that these messages and information are infused to some extent with violent imagery. For one, violence is engrained in our national mythology; we have a culture that values individuality and independence, symbolized by the rugged frontiersman with the rifle on his hip or the stolid hero armed with his fists or a gun fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. "It's not just Hollywood, it's people," notes Jay Winsten, director of the Center for Health Communication at the School, who works extensively with the entertainment industry. "There is something fearful and appalling about violence, but we're drawn to it just the same. And we live in a violent society of which Hollywood is a part--it's a product of this society." Moreover, violence and conflict are often integral components of drama, simple and practical tools in storytelling. "The challenge for Hollywood," says Winsten, "is to resist the impulse to exploit violence for commercial gain in ways that can have damaging, corrosive effects on society." It is estimated that by the time the average American child reaches the age of 18, he or she has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence and about 20,000 homicides on television alone.
An
Age-Old Controversy
But
if kids are using media to an unprecedented degree and it seems virtually
inevitable that they will encounter depictions of violence in the process,
what, if any, effect is this situation having on their psychological growth
and development? The question is not a new one. Concerns about the consequences
of media violence have existed since the advent of the television. In
fact, Congressional hearings held during the early 1950s focused on questions
raised by the violent aspects of the thenÐbrand new medium of TV and set
the stage for federal investigations and independent landmark reports
on media violence that have continued to the present. Many public health
experts and advocates concerned with media's effects cite the sheer number
of studies that demonstrate, in varying degrees and in assorted populations,
the adverse influence violence in the media has on behavior. Since the
early 1950s, over 3500 research investigations have examined the relationship
between media exposure and violent behavior, and all but 18 have found
a positive correlation between the two.
In our quest to find answers in the aftermath of violent behavior, human nature also leads us to rely on anecdotal evidence. As award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee said in the television special Kids and Guns, aired just after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., "Call me silly, but we don't need 3000 studies to tell us TV is too violent." Even President Clinton--after this incident, which left 12 students and one teacher dead at the hands of teenagers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris--brought media violence to the forefront of the political agenda once again, demanding a formal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission to determine whether the entertainment industry intentionally markets violence to children. Prior to the shootings, Klebold and Harris were said to have immersed themselves in violent media, from watching gory films to playing corpse-riddled interactive video games, and even "starred" in their own homemade video to document their killing spree.
But while most public health experts would agree that violent media have a negative impact on children's behavior and attitudes, few would implicate media as the sole cause of aggressive behavior. "My general impression is that there are an awful lot of people in Hollywood with a strong social conscience who care and want to be helpful," remarks Winsten. "But I think that they also get angry when they're viewed as the single primary cause of many different ills in this society." Placing the blame for violent behavior on just one factor also flies in the face of a public health approach to the prevention of social problems, according to Sissela Bok, distinguished visiting fellow at the School's Center for Population and Development Studies, whose work focuses on practical, moral issues including societal violence. Bok, author of Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, says that one of the few positive things to come out of the tragic collection of recent school shootings was the public's increased acceptance of media violence as a public health issue. "At first I was glad because I thought the debate was quite subtle, that people were able to entertain the idea that there could be a variety of contributing factors," recalls Bok. "But then I would see, so often, that the debate would collapse again into: Well, is it the media? Is it the guns? Is it the families?"
Most likely the answer is not quite so simple; otherwise, as many critics of the concern over media violence attest, why would any child turn out--as most do--nonviolent? But media violence has been shown to have other adverse consequences besides instigating aggressive behavior, consequences that may be more pervasive and more subtle than those normally ascribed to what children watch. Media expert George Gerbner, a pioneer in studying the risks of exposure to television violence, describes an effect he calls "mean world syndrome." He and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found that heavy television viewers (more than three hours a day) are more likely to feel at high risk of victimization from violence, feel their neighborhoods to be unsafe, and regard the world as "mean and gloomy." In addition to feelings of fear, there is also the question of desensitization, where repeated exposure to violence gradually inures the viewer to the distress and anxiety normally associated with it. While some measure of desensitization may be an indispensable psychological method to deal with a world filled with murder and pain, some experts worry that desensitization to media violence may reduce empathy for real-life suffering and diminish the willingness to help others in need. "People can end up with a very strange combination of increased fear about themselves and decreased concern about what happens to all those others," notes Bok. "And that could be one reason why in America we seem to tolerate such levels of inequality and suffering among children. Again it could be just one of the reasons, not the reason, but they are adding to the insensitivity to what happens to others in our society, and it's something we should care about as citizens, parents, and grandparents."
Ah,
Brave New World
For
better or worse, as our society evolves, the ways in which we are entertained
or informed generally undergo a parallel evolution. We can say that exposure
to violent media has been a cultural norm since it came into being, but
with the rapid pace of progress, both sociologically and technologically,
is it naive to think that the media, its content, and ultimately our responses
to it have remained unchanged? An interesting illustration of this question
reveals itself in the recent work of Assistant Professor Kimberly
Thompson, S.D.'95, director of the Kids Risk Project (www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu),
and doctoral student Fumie Yokota, researchers at the School's Harvard
Center for Risk Analysis. Completing a quantitative analysis of the violent
content found in G-rated animated feature films released over the last
half century--films that today's adult generation watched in the theaters
as kids and their children now avidly consume on video cassette--they
found that G doesn't necessarily mean violence-free. Using a broad definition
of violence from "light" to "sinister," every one
of the movies they reviewed had at least one act of violence, and the
average film, at 81 minutes long, contained 9.5 minutes of violence, or
approximately 12 percent of the film's length.
While Thompson and Yokota did find that the amount of violence in this popular form of children's entertainment had almost doubled in the last five decades, perhaps more disquieting to the researchers were how children watch these films nowadays and the nature of the violence portrayed in them. "They say, 'We all grew up with these things, what's the big deal?'," says Thompson. "Well, yeah, I grew up with them too, but when I went to see a movie, my family went--it was a family experience. My parents took us to the theatre, they sat with us during the movie, we talked about the movie on the way there, we talked about the movie on the way home. We were lucky to see it more than once. Times have changed." For many a frazzled modern parent, video cassettes have become babysitters, and family viewing has largely become a thing of the past. Fifty-three percent of children aged 2 to 18 have televisions in their own bedrooms, which pediatricians say encourages solitary viewing and less discussion about the kinds of violence kids might see. The nature of violence in the media also seems to be changing. In Thompson and Yokota's study, most of the violence they encountered was used in the plot for resolving conflict, sending a troubling message to kids that violence is the solution, a way to handle problems. They also found that it was not the light "slapstick" type of violence that appeared more frequently in these movies over the years but violent acts with intent to injure.