The effect of violent media on children and society

[CrossLOPER]

I can understand though. If I had children, I would think violence is maybe unpleasant, but sex scenes are more 'wrong'.

Which is more acceptable: Rape, or consensual sex between two adults in a healthy relationship?

[Rhyfelwyr]

I didn't read the article, the violence they are talking about is rape?

OK just read it, and its not. And children should not watch either of your two examples, at all. Obviously one is in reality a totally different matter from the other, but they both get the same absolute NO for children.

"Parents and their open-mouthed children found themselves watching a scene in which a bloodied Bond, stripped naked and tied to a chair, is tortured by having his genitals beaten with a length of rope. A friend of mine was somewhat dismayed afterwards to witness his two young boys, aged nine and seven, diligently re-enacting the torture scene with an outsize teddy bear strapped to a chair and a flail constructed from a knotted dressing-gown cord."

Admittedly, that is slightly odd.

But what would you rather your 12 year old chlid watched, if you had two choices:

A. a standard James Bond sex scene
B. a fight scene from Kill Bill

Choice A might be legal, but if I was a parent I would think I prefer option B.

[CrossLOPER]

But what would you rather your 12 year old chlid watched, if you had two choices:

A. a standard James Bond sex scene
B. a fight scene from Kill Bill

Choice A might be legal, but if I was a parent I would think I prefer option B.

OK, let's see...

Option A usually consists much kissing, fondling, and about five seconds of half-bare ass. Oh, and grunting.

Option B consists of gross use of amputations, unbelievable blood spatter, and ladies picking each other's eyes out all while letting loose a tirade of foul language. Granted that one of the sex scenes in Goldeneye had a lady appear to want to claw out her partner's eyes during an orgasmic frenzy, but that's not the same thing. At all.

Yeah, I think option A is better. Why you would want your child to watch a happy wanton bloodbath like Kill Bill rather than a rather restrained action movie like James Bond is absolutely beyond me. Please explain.

[Kralizec]

I think it's because most parents figure that their kids are more likely to start experimenting with sex rather than murdering their classmates.

Or maybe not, and it's just a question of priorities.

[Tribesman]

Ms. McCartney begins her piece by asking herself whether she'd relent to offspring-pleading and take a 10-year old to see The Dark Knight. If she did, she'd not be providing the PG (Parental Guidance) recommended, and she'd have to lie about her 10-year old being 13+. Thus, IMO, her child-rearing license should be suspended or revoked.

you got that a bit wrong , if she took her child to the cinema that is allowed , if she sent the child to the cinema without her then the child would have to say they are 13 .

[KukriKhan]

you got that a bit wrong , if she took her child to the cinema that is allowed , if she sent the child to the cinema without her then the child would have to say they are 13 .

Yeah, OK. I pushed it a bit, trying to cast a tiny aspersion on that media-industry member's decrying the very media that feeds her. I thought I smelt hypocrisy, so took a cheap shot. My bad.

[BigTex]

A friend of mine was somewhat dismayed afterwards to witness his two young boys, aged nine and seven, diligently re-enacting the torture scene with an outsize teddy bear strapped to a chair and a flail constructed from a knotted dressing-gown cord."

It may seem like a horrible thing to say, but that is the funniest thing I've heard in a few days, wish there where some pictures.

I hardly see these films as any worse then the 80's slasher flicks. So the whole apoclyptic writing about how these "new films are destroying the youth's" falls on deaf ears for me. I find that fake machoism may be on the rise, but true violence is down. You have a whole culture now based on the idea of pretending to be hard, and tough (machoism with talk only, might call it feminized machoism..) is what is in. Hip Hop culture/songs encourages far worse things then overly macabre films.

The Dark Knight is a good movie and stays very true to the comics it is based off of. The dark knight comic books have been around for over a decade and they are far more graphic then the movie. Lots of talk and hype over something thats been here for quite awhile, could be called it fear mongering..

[Rhyfelwyr]

Because children shouldn't even have any idea what sex is, they are not meant to.

But any normal child will know people kill people all the time. Most violent films tend to have a good guy, there's nothing wrong with killing the baddies. Sadistic torture scenes (eg Casino Royale) are a different matter. OK they are trying to get information out of him, but it might be less obvious to children.

[Viking]

Because children shouldn't even have any idea what sex is, they are not meant to.

But any normal child will know people kill people all the time. Most violent films tend to have a good guy, there's nothing wrong with killing the baddies. Sadistic torture scenes (eg Casino Royale) are a different matter. OK they are trying to get information out of him, but it might be less obvious to children.

The term 'child' is relative, but if you define child in this context as someone 12-17 y.o. then they are as they are created indeed supposed to have an idea of what it is.

'Bad guy' is also an extremely relative term in reality, while in the movies it's typically not.

I think it's because most parents figure that their kids are more likely to start experimenting with sex rather than murdering their classmates.

Makes sense.

[Lord Winter]

I think justified romancized violence (derictly shown or inderictly shown), is much more harmful then a darker, sinister more realistic veiw of violence. If violence is romantizid and justified like it is in the more "tamer" versions of spider man, Robin Hood and King Aurther. It in a sense romantizies and justifies it, giving a greater support of violence as proper response.

Also I never saw the Joker as a Sadist to be emulated but more as a symbol for the corrupting power of fear.

[ajaxfetish]

Because children shouldn't even have any idea what sex is, they are not meant to.

I honestly think this sentiment is the most dangerous I've seen in this thread. The desire to protect children is good, but can be taken much too far. Whether a child knows what sex is, it still exists, and sooner or later they'll be faced with it. Would you rather they learn about it at home and in a controlled manner, or from someone in someplace you don't even know about? Children don't need a detailed or graphic picture of sex, and should probably learn about it gradually, but they definitely should have an idea what sex is.

edit: I remember my Grandma telling a story about a girl she knew whose mother warned her not to let any boys kiss her, because that's how you get pregnant. She was later very confused when she found herself knocked up as she'd been extremely scrupulous not to let herself be kissed. Misinformation for the purpose of protection can backfire. I think honesty to be a much safer policy.

On the larger issue, I tend to take a view similar to Rhythmic's

I always see this as a flawed argument. There's plenty of violent media available through the news, which isn't age rated. Granted it isn't graphic, usually, but it is still available and often depicts more violent acts. Does that make us all bloodthirsty? Also lets not forget that throughout human history there have been worse acts and people have been subject to them, children being no exception. I'll always be a skeptic of this line of thought, because it's such a post-hoc fallacy.

I can't really connect with the whole idea of our society getting 'desensitized' to violence. What society has ever been further removed from it? We act as though violence is abnormal, when for most of our history, and for most of the world beyond our neat and manicured suburbs it's a daily fact of life. People in Iraq and Uganda are desensitized to violence. People in some of our inner cities are desensitized to violence. People in revolutionary France, or Thirty Years War Germany, or the Rome of the Colisseum, were desensitized to violence. We are about as sensitized to violence as I can imagine a society being, and I'm not convinced that's healthy.

I think the presence of violence in our media is less important than its character. As the Dark Knight was the showcase that started the discussion, I'd have to say that its brand of violence, disturbing as it is, doesn't greatly concern me, because it portrays violence in a manner that is sickening. Many violent movies are much easier to swallow precisely because they glamourize violence: the bad guys take the brunt of it, none of the important people really suffer, just villains or extras, and violence easily solves the story's problems. Most of the times violence in movies doesn't make us question violence. It's movies like Dark Knight, where the violence isn't fun to watch, that treat it most honestly, and make it less appealing.

Instead of worrying whether violence in media is ruining our society, and considering granting authority to censors instead of the principle of freedom of expression, let's worry about whether we are responding appropriately to the violence we see.

Ajax

[Rhyfelwyr]

Well my 10 year old brother wants me to take him to see this Batman film tomorrow, and I will if I can be bothered, not sure since I tend to vegetate on my mid-week day off.

Children learn what they need to about sex in school. The reality is younger teenagers tend to get pregnant half the time because they are nowhere near sober enough to tell what they are doing and won't remember what either their parents or their classes taught them.

[Adrian II]

I can't really connect with the whole idea of our society getting 'desensitized' to violence. What society has ever been further removed from it?

Excellent point. I think this is the whole issue in a nutshell. I don't agree with Banquo's Ghost that 'there is clearly an increase in violence among young people' and that the entertainment industry somehow foments this. On the contrary, it is the dearth of the actual experience of violence that sets off the suburban imagination and demands more and more fulfillment by proxy, even fulfillment in the shape of real wars in far-away countries of which the images and stories reach us in mediated form, tailor-made for public consumption like the now infamous (because staged) tearing down of Saddam's statue in Baghdad.

We are about as sensitized to violence as I can imagine a society being, and I'm not convinced that's healthy.

Another good point. We absorb violence merely in controlled doses, be it in our tv series or in our dojo's, on sports fields or in pubs, in video games or in newsreels. This leaves us frightened and wide open to manipulation. We have already succumbed to the notion that there is such a thing as 'controlled' or 'surgical' warfare, which is apparently fine as long as it hits others in far-away countries and not ourselves. Yet when massive violence hits us and we are confronted with its uncontrollable, open-ended nature (another 9/11 could happen every day) we panic in ways never seen before in the history of mankind and accept all sorts of restrictions on our liberties. That worries me far more than kids being confronted with gruesome scenes.

As regards the latter issue, I recently found food for thought in two books by an Austrian supersleuth, Thomas Müller. He has a great reputation for fact-based (as opposed to instinct-based) crime scene analysis and for his insights in the psychological aspects of crime. His conclusion from hundreds of case studies and interviews with perpetrators is that truly violent crime arises from a child's frustration in early youth, coupled with the inability to control the source of frustration, discuss it with others and get help from older people. This failure to act or communicate leads the child to develop violent fantasies, to take refuge in revenge fantasies. In later years these are coupled with hormonal development, charging the violent fantasies with precisely that sexual energy which in normal humans is directed toward regular sexual activity. Killing, rape and torture become libidinal goals, occupying the place of normal sexual gratification. The result can be found in endless rows of files in police departments across the world.

Müller thinks that depictions of violence in the media may contribute to the developemtn of such fantasies, but only in the sense that they give potential criminals ideas (copy-cat behaviour is apparently rampant among serial killers and rapists) which they would have gotten elsewhere anyway. They always did, long before splatter movies, violent comics or video games hit the shelves.

[Meneldil]

Because children shouldn't even have any idea what sex is, they are not meant to.

What's that wonderful fairy world you live in ?

I know I was obsessed with girls - and so were all my friends - when I was 6 or 7. Granted, I didn't really know how things "worked", but I probably wouldn't have minded knowing it.
Where do you think the whole "playing the doctor" thingy comes from ?

That whole 'children do not and should not know about sex' attitude is pure hypocrisy, as Rousseau shown us a while ago.

[LittleGrizzly]

I would say from at least 12 onwards i pretty much knew what sex was and not long after knew people my own age who had had sex

[Kralizec]

What's that wonderful fairy world you live in ?

I know I was obsessed with girls - and so were all my friends - when I was 6 or 7. Granted, I didn't really know how things "worked", but I probably wouldn't have minded knowing it.
Where do you think the whole "playing the doctor" thingy comes from ?

That whole 'children do not and should not know about sex' attitude is pure hypocrisy, as Rousseau shown us a while ago.

I agree that kids should have some idea of what sex is from early on, but not because Rousseau's saying it. Have you ever heard of that little incident with Voltaire?

[CrossLOPER]

I think it's because most parents figure that their kids are more likely to start experimenting with sex rather than murdering their classmates.

Or maybe not, and it's just a question of priorities.

OK, I still have not been given an explanation on why a child should know what the effect of a pickaxe to the head is, but not "hugging".