Media Violence and the Violent Male Adolescent
My research led me to form some new hypotheses on the correlation of violence in the media, namely television, movies, and video games, to the rise in violent behavior in adolescents. For this essay, I will focus on male adolescents. I will use multiple lenses for my research to (1) establish the increase in violent acts by adolescents in the past two decades; (2) use proven research to show the impact of media violence on the individual; and (3) to illustrate my "recipe for disaster," four correlations that contribute to the effects of media violence on male adolescents.
Rise in Youth Violence
According to the United States Department of Justice ("DOJ"), (1999) in a committee report, "The number of juvenile violent crime arrests in 1997 exceeded the 1988 level by 49%. Of that number, 2,500 were arrested for murder and 121,000 for other violent crimes. Eighteen percent of high school students now carry a knife, razor, firearm, or other weapon on a regular basis, and 9% of them take a weapon to school."
The Committee report noted that a principal cause for the increase was media violence.
" Eighty-seven percent of American households have more than one television, and 88.7% of homes with children have home video game equipment, a personal computer, or both. An average teenager listens to 10,500 hours of rock music during the years between the 7th and 12th grades. By age 18 an American child will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence. Television alone is responsible for 10% of youth violence. A preference for heavy metal music may be a significant marker for alienation, substance abuse, psychiatric disorders, suicide ris...
... middle of paper ...
...f, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, "Children, Violence, and The Media,' (online document) A Report for Parents and Policy Makers. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Utah, Chairman, 1999, Sept. 14, Available (http://www.senate.gov/~judiciary/mediavio.htm)
Mediascope Press, "How Violence Manipulates Viewers." Issue Briefs. Studio City, Calif.: 1997 Available: (http://www.mediascope.org/pubs/ibriefs/hvmv.htm)
Putnam, Robert, "Bowling Alone" America's Declining Social Capital, Journal of Democracy; 1995, Jan., (pp. 65-68)
Strasburger, Victor C. M.D. Chief, Division of Adolescent Medicine, "How much influence do the media have?" Adolescent Medicine; State of the Art Reviews--Vol. 4, No. 3, October 1993 Philadelphia, Hanley & Belfus, Inc. Available online:
http://www.cyfc.umn.edu/Documents/C/B/CB1030.html
played a kind of a passive role, he always wanted to be in the middle
The Crucible by Arthur Miller The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century, yet is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it, the early 1950s, as it is description of Puritan society. At that particular time in the 1950s, when Arthur Miller wrote the play the American Senator McCarthy who chaired the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’ was very conscious of communism and feared its influence in America. It stopped authors’ writings being published in fear of them being socialist sympathisers. Miller was fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials and that human beings were capable of such madness. In the 1950s the audience would have seen the play as a parallel between the McCarthy trials and the Salem Trials.
Many years ago, the culture and atmosphere was amazingly different. The expectations of people and communities are extremely high. During the Puritan times, many laws and regulations existed pertaining to government, religion, and witchcraft. In the play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, the one word that best describes the Puritan beliefs and the community structure is strict.
The crucible, written by Arthur Miller, is about the Salem witch trials and how people react to hysteria created from the fear of witches. In the play, after hysteria breaks out, the Salem government starts persecute and hang people it believes are witches. This prompts people to start to accusing people of witchcraft. Some people who accuse others of committing witchcraft are Abigail Williams and Thomas Putnam. They do not accuse people of witchcraft to stop witchcraft, but for personal gain or to hurt others. Thomas Putnam, one of the many characters who takes advantage of the witch trials, is able to use the fear of witches to bend the court to his will. Hysteria causes people to believe claims that are clearly false. This allows Putnam to persecute his enemies. He and many other are able to get away with this because hysteria driven persecutions are not run like regular courts and the fact that witchcraft is an invisible crime allows evidence to be made up. The theme of The Crucible is when any persecution is driven by fear and people can and will manipulate the system so they can gain and hurt another.
Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Social Capital, Simon and Schuster, New York.
Torr, James D. Introduction. Violence in the Media. Ed. James D. Torr. San Diego: Greenhaven. 2001. 13-15.
Malcolm, T. Teen Violence: Does Violent Media Make Violent Kids? National Catholic Reporter. May 28, 1999 v35 i30 p14.
Strasburger, V., & Donnerstein, E. (1999). Children, Adolescents, and the Media: Issues and Solutions. Pediatrics, 103(1), 129-139.
Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “Media Violence Causes Youth Violence.” Mass Media. Ed. William Dudley. Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson Gale, 2005. 121-130.
Teperman, Jean. "Toxic Lessons What Do Children Learn from Media Violence?" Children's Advocate newsmagazine. Online. www.4chilren.org/news/1-97toxl.htm. Accessed October 23, 2001.
Summary #1 Television violence, and media violence in general, has been a controversial topic for several years. The argument is whether young children are brainwashed into committing violent real-world crimes because of violent and pugnacious behavior exposed in mass media. In his article “No Real Evidence for TV Violence Causing Real Violence”, Jonathan Freedman, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of “Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression: Assessing the Scientific Evidence”, discusses how television violence, claimed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), does not cause real-world aggression among adolescents. The FCC determined to restrict violent television programming to late night hours only because their “scientific research” proves of increasing aggression among young viewers (Freedman Par. 2).
A widely accepted cause of the murders committed by children is violence in the media. The parents of three students killed at a high school in Padukah, Kentucky filed a $130 million lawsuit against the entertainment industry because they believe that violence in the media inspired the boy, Michael Carneal, who killed their children ("Media"). To some extent, these parents are correct in their assumption. On average, children watch television 16 to 17 hours per week, beginning as early as age 2 (Strasburger 129). Furthermore, when video games are added, some teenagers may spend as many as 35 to 55 hours per week in front of the television set (Straburger 129). Within these many hours of television viewing, there are many violent scenes. The National Television Viole...
Today’s youth is heavily influenced by the media. Video games, television, and movies make up a large part of the lives of children in America. These easily accessible forms of entertainment are lightly regulated by parents and the government; children and adolescents are exposed to extremely violent media everyday. “By the time the average American child reaches seventh grade, he or she will have witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television. Some people say so much violence on television makes American society- including its children- more violent” (“Causes of School Violence” 1). Among the violent media, video games are the current trend. Although video games are rated by ESRB (the entertainment sof...
Television violence is also a cause of both violent and aggressive behavior in teenage boys. According to the evidence in a study done by Turner, Hesse, and Peterson-Lewis, it was concluded that watching television violence had a long-term increase in aggression in boys (Hough 1). In addition to this study, Dr. William A. Belson evaluated fifteen hundred boys, aged thirteen to sixteen years, and he determined that boys with heavy television exposure are more likely to commit violent acts than other boys (Langone 51). In Belson’s study, he discovered that the effect of each violent act on television was collective, and over time, Belson discovered that the boys engaged in many aggressive acts, including painting graffiti, breaking windows, aggressive play, swearing, and threatening other boys with violence (Kinnear 26).
The first effect of mass media on teenagers is violence. Aggressive behavior is the first example of violence in the media. Aldridge argues that, teens who watch violent movies may behave in an aggressive way towards others for example bullying and fighting in school. This is important because there are high risks of teenage developing into aggressive behavior that may last into adulthood if they are not being supervised on what they see on TV (2010). Fearful of the world may also occur for those who watch violence television programs. According to children and television violence, teens that are being over exposed to violent on television may worry about becoming a target of violence. The relevance of this idea is that teenagers will more likely grow up thinking that the world is a scary place and that something bad will happen to them (2008). Imitative behavior is another major effect of seeing violence in the media. According to Weldon, two teens from Johnstown, Colorado, killed a 7 year old girl by beating her to death. The teens claimed that they were imitating moves from a video game called “Mortal Combat.” This is an example case which shows that violence in the video game may lead to an imitating behavior (2007).