—1982: The National Institute of Mental Health issued an extensive report stating that there is clear consensus on the strong link between TV violence and aggressive behavior.
—1984: The U.S. attorney general’s Task Force on Family Violence stated that the evidence is overwhelming that TV violence contributes to real violence.
—1984: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Task Force on Children and Television cautioned physicians and parents that TV violence promotes aggression.
—1985: The American Psychological Association’s Commission on Youth and Violence cited research showing a clear link between TV violence and real violence.
—1989: The National PTA again called for the TV industry to reduce the amount of violence in programs.
—1990: Congress passed the Television Violence Act, giving the three major networks an antitrust exemption so they could formulate a joint policy to reduce violence on TV.
—1992: The Journal of the American Medical Association published research concluding that “the introduction of television in the US in the 1950’s caused a subsequent [15 years later] doubling of the homicide rate,” and “if, hypothetically, TV technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the US, 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.”
—1992: An American Psychological Association report concluded that forty years of research on the link between TV violence and real-life violence had been ignored. They went on to state that the “scientific debate is over” and called for federal policy to protect society.
—1995: The American Academy of Pediatrics (a group that, by the way, is strongly in favor of significantly increasing gun control laws) stated that, “[a]lthough media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society, it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor.”
—1998: UNESCO reviewed studies of media violence from twenty-five countries and documented an international concern that a “global aggressive culture” is being formed by violent television and movies, particularly violent American TV shows and movies being exported around the world.
The entertainment industry, along with people who prefer to blame guns for everything, like Stephen King and Maureen Dowd, wants to ignore this incredible body of scientific research. Through their lobbyists, they’ve spent vast sums of money on disinformation campaigns, and vicious, mocking rebuttals and attacks on every one of these scientific statements and the researchers behind them.
I know what it feels like to be attacked and smeared for standing up for what you believe in. But, for better or worse, giving my opinion is my chosen profession. That’s not the case for these researchers and scientists. Most of them are not prepared for the onslaught to their reputations and careers that occurs when they put out studies that reveal the truth about entertainment violence. In many cases they eventually succumb to the pressure and move on to other, less controversial projects.
Stimulus/Response
The video game generation gave us Sandy Hook in elementary school, Jonesboro in middle school, Columbine in high school, and Virginia Tech in college. And, considering how rudimentary these video games are compared with what’s to come, it will only get worse.
Those who’ve grown up being exposed to violence since the day they were born will eventually perpetrate massacres at our hospitals, our day-care centers, our Little League games, our churches, our school sporting events, and our school buses. There is no sacred place.
How do I know this? Because there’s no other choice; this is the way we are raising them.
A study conducted by members of the Task Force on Television and Society appointed by the American Psychological Association revealed that the typical American youth had witnessed an average of 200,000 acts of violence on television by age eighteen. That’s 200,000 acts of violence just on television. That doesn’t include movies, video games, or the Internet. And that study was conducted in 1992, twenty years ago—does anyone really believe that entertainment has gotten less violent?
The other issue is how much time our kids spend watching this stuff. According to a study to be published in Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, “It is estimated that children in the general population consume on average roughly 3 hours of electronic media, such as video games every day . . . . The estimate of daily electronic media consumption among youth in the psychiatric population is 6 hours per day.”
As parents, we often try to make ourselves feel better by saying that children know the difference between real-world violence and what they see on TV. We try to convince ourselves that our child is too mature or too intelligent to be affected by it. But no matter how we try to justify it, it simply isn’t true. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “At young ages (before age 8), children cannot uniformly discriminate between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy/entertainment.’ They quickly learn that violence is an acceptable solution to resolving even complex problems, particularly if the aggressor is the hero.”
Entertainment violence clearly teaches children the wrong life lessons, but it goes well beyond that: it actually affects the way their brains function. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, participants played either a violent or nonviolent video game and were then shown violent and nonviolent photos while their brain activity was measured. Next, each participant played against an opponent in a game to measure their reaction time. They were told that whoever was slower in this game would receive an uncomfortable blast of white noise in their headphones. Each player was able to select the volume and length of the noise their opponent would receive. (In reality the “opponent” was only a computer, but participants did not know that.) The idea, of course, was to determine if those who’d played the violent games would be more aggressive with how much sound they blasted at their opponent.
The results were pretty remarkable:
These data provide the first experimental evidence linking violence desensitization with increased aggression, and show that a neural marker of this process can at least partially account for the causal link between violent game exposure and aggression.
[F]or individuals whose prior exposure to video game violence was low, playing a violent video game caused a reduction in the brain’s response to depictions of real-life violence, and this reduction, in turn, predicted an increase in aggression.
The good news is that we may be able to flush out the hormones that rush to children’s brains while they are watching violent entertainment. Experts say that, while we need a lot more research, current data indicates that we can “detox” a child in a couple of days just by turning off the TV and video games.
But not all consequences can be so easily remedied; some have much more long-lasting effects. A study conducted by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine monitored the brain function of young men before and after playing violent video games. “For the first time,” Dr. Yang Wang, an assistant research professor in the IU Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, wrote, “we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home.”
The regions of the brain that were found to be affected, Dr. Wang continued, “are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.” Unlike some hormones that can be flushed out of the brain in a day or two, “These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning. These effects may translate into behavioral changes over longer periods of game play.”
The Truth about (No) Consequences
I understand if all of these studies bore you; they kind of bore me, too. But since the doubters always demand evidence, it’s hard to win this argument without having those kinds of facts on your side. But, looking past all of the research, common sense alone tells us that the kind of violence our children are witnessing is often far more brutal than what most of
us grew up with. Pong was the kind of game we remember from the 1970s. In the 1980s the most violent of the bestselling games was probably Duck Hunt—a game with crude graphics and a dog that laughed at you when you missed.
But today? Shooting games are no longer about hunting ducks; they’re about hunting humans.
Consider Colonel Grossman’s description of how the popular game Duke Nukem is played:
[T]he shooter, who is controlled by the player and looks somewhat like the Terminator, moves through pornography shops, where he finds posters of scantily clad women he can use for target practice. In advanced levels, bonus points are awarded for the murder of female prostitutes, women who are usually naked. Duke often encounters defenseless, bound women, some of whom are even conveniently tied to columns and plead, “Kill me, kill me.”
Manhunt, which has been a target of groups who’ve tried to get some games banned (and actually was banned in Australia), is especially gruesome. Josh Wanamaker, who writes for a website about video games, describes it like this:
Players sneak ar