Effects of Violent Media on the Youth

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It is that time of year again. With the Holidays closing in on the horizon, parents are scrambling to buy their children that perfect present. With that in mind, many parents will buy their little boys and girls the latest addition to the Microsoft Xbox family, the Xbox One, which is perhaps the hottest gift this season. Everybody wants it. But most of the Xbox games like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo are extremely violent, depicting war, blood, and gore very nonchalantly. The television channel FX constantly shows movies such as the latest Batman trilogy which includes violent depictions of beatings, graphic shootings, dozens of explosions, neck snapping and back breaking, along with chokings, hand to hand combats, and dead bodies. These portrayals are detailed, but little blood is shown. While violence is not a new thing to the world, it is a problem that is skyrocketing in correlation to modern society and violent movies, video games, and media. With school shootings like Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, many psychologists have asked the question ‘is elevated violence rates in media and the greater access to firearms and explosives one of the reasons why these tragedies happened?’ But, most importantly, how does this violence whether in media or the real world affect the children involved? Is the violence in media correlated to etiology of violent behavior in the child’s later life? In this paper, I will review the impact media violence has on child and adolescent development.
While there are countless arguments on how video games and television create aggression in children, James E. Gardner (1991) suggested that video games can help therapists working with children. He suggests that the video games in ...

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...ild adjustment. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 33(4), 291-297 doi: 10.1097/DBP/0b013e31824eaab3.
Funk, J. B., Baldacci, H. B., Pasold, T., & Baumgardney, J. (2004). Violence in real-life, video games, television, movies, and the internet: is there desensitization? Journal of Adolescence, 23-39.
Gardner, J. E. (1991). Can the Mario Bros. help? Nintendo games as an adjunct in psychotherapy with children. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 28(4), 667-670 doi:10.1037/0033-3204.28.4.667.
Griffiths, M. (1999). Violent vido games and aggression. A review of the liteature. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 4(2) , 203-212. doi:10.1016/S1359-1789(97)00055-4.
Stipp, H., & Milavsky, R. J. (1988). U.S. Television programming's effects on aggressiv behavior of children and adolescents. Current Psychology, 7(1), 76-92. doi: 10.1007/BF02686665.

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