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Violent video games cause juvenile crime
Violence on TV contributes to violent behaviour in children
Violence on TV contributes to violent behaviour in children
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Recommended: Violent video games cause juvenile crime
Case Martin
Essay 6 Video games have taken the blame for influencing people to act violently, supposedly recreating acts in video games in real life. Since the late seventies video games have been said to cause violence. In 1979 the game Death Race sparked the first controversy of violence in video games. Soon after the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999 the controversy sparked once again. Many people linked the act of the two shooters playing of the violent games Wolfenstein 3D and Doom (both massively popular games of their time). After the massacre, over 170 newspaper articles focused on the idea that video games were to blame tragedy. These articled not only linked the video games to the act, but directly blamed them for
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16, 2007, a highly anti-game protester Jack Thompson linked the shooting to the PC game Counter-Strike. This trend continues later as Mitt Romney as well as Doctor Phil supported Thompson that video games were to blame. It was later revealed that the shooter did not play video games, and these allegations were entirely wrong. This is clear evidence that the idea of video games causing violence is a present idea in our society, especially among high school and college aged individuals committing acts of violence. Video games are often thought to cause these acts of violence when underage or young people are involved because those age groups are seen as a time of development, when individuals still have the ability to be influenced, especially by media. Interesting enough even with all the allegations of video games being linked to acts of violence among children and young adults, “since 1995 Juvenile murders has gone down over 71% and the arrest rate for juvenile crime has dropped 49%.” ("Juvenile Arrest Rate Trends") The idea that video games cause violence should be brought into question because there is enough evidence against it to raise a …show more content…
Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://ithp.org/articles/areviolentvideogamesbad.html>.
"In New Study, Video Games Not Tied to Violence in High-Risk Youth." Psych Central.com. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/08/27/in-new-study-video-games-not-tied-to- violence-in-high-risk-youth/58934.html>.
"Video Gamers’ Aggression Linked to Frustration, Not Violent Content." NewsCenter. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/frustration-in-mastering-video-games-linked-to-aggression/>.
"Juvenile Arrest Rate Trends." Juvenile Arrest Rate Trends. Web. 28 Mar.
Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza, Steven Phillip Kazmierczak, and Seung-Hui Cho all have a few things in common, they are all school shooters that have killed and injured a combined total of 149 human beings and are or were believed to be avid violent video game players, who also committed suicide immediately after carrying out their attacks. To the public, school shooters seem to share a direct connection to playing violent video games and that playing them leads to violent behavior. Violent videogames have become a highlight in the media and national debate for this very reason but, there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of a causative connection between participants of violent videogames manifesting violent behaviors. The media provides biased information that misleads citizens into believing that said link is well established and accepted. I argue that parents should make responsible and well informed decisions in regards to their child’s videogame activities in spite of the lack of scientific research.
The article “Do Video Games Kill” written by Karen Sternheimer addresses the widespread question; are video games the cause for “young killers”? (220) Sternheimer believes concern for the influence of video games may have on youth is spiraling out of control. She puts most of the blame for this out of control concern on the media. She also writes some about the politicians and the Juvenile Justice System. Sternheimer suggests that there are other factors to blame for violent behavior: poverty, the neighborhood, unemployment, family violence, divorced parents and mental illness (218). While it may be that juvenile crimes have declined, and personal backgrounds effect actions, it cannot be proven that video game violence has no to little effect on
People have always been looking for a reason why horrible things happen. The media is quick to blame video games as the target and cause of many shootings that have occurred, ever since the Columbine and Quake. People have been blaming video games for violence for years now, ever since violent video games have been made. News reports blame video games more and more for each shooting, telling the public how this person played video games for x amount of hours a day, and that video games caused him or her to shoot people, and how video games encourage and reward violence. Anti-video game lobbyists have been campaigning to have violence removed from video games, citing resources that they themselves have created as reasons for such, poorly done studies where they confirm that kids are more aggressive through how much hot sauce they put on someone’s fries.
Ferguson, C. J. (2008, Jan-Jun). The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Casual Relationship or Moral Panic? Journal of Investigative Psycology & Offender Profiling, 5(1/2), 25-37.
Violence in video games supposedly causing violence and criminal acts in real life has been argued for many years and a solution has been proposed. Since many people believe that violence or a criminal act in real life is more likely to occur at the hands of someone who has played a violent video game as a child, an age limit on certain kinds of violence in games has been proposed. I believe that if parents regulate their children and make sure that their child is not being negatively affected then no problems would arise from this.
Scott, D. The Effect of Video Games on Feelings of Aggression. The Journal of Psychology. March 1995 v129 n2 p121-132.
Lately there have been increasing amounts of people that say that violent video games are causing a number violent actions. To some extent this is true, but there are also studies that say games help people release their aggression in an appropriate way. I would tend to agree with the later.
then video games could be responsible for much of the bad news we hear on television.
Although violent video games are thought to encourage real world violence, they actually help to prevent it. I am focusing on violent video games and how they affect juveniles because I feel that this issue needs to be looked at in the criminal justice community. It is an unnecessary distraction to blame the actions of a disturbed youth on a form of entertainment that has been used by millions of people without incident. A review article published in The Psychiatric Quarterly found that many studies which claim to indicate an increase in aggression due to video games are, in fact, biased! Once the bias is taken into account, the studies no longer find any correlation between youths who play violent video games and youths who demonstrate aggression and violent behavior.
Scott, Derek. “The Effect of Video Games on Feelings of Aggression.” The Journal of Psychology 129.2
Jaslow, Ryan. "Violent Video Games Make Kids Aggressive, Study Suggests." CBSNews.com. N.p., 1 June 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.s."
While many different case studies have been done all over the world, scientists have yet to prove that there is a direct correlation between violent video games and child aggression. Since the start of this quarter, this has been an issue that I have been doing extensive research on. Despite looking into several scholarly sources, I was surprised to see that many of my findings were pretty consistent with one another. For the mort part, what I found through my research was a bunch of statistics from case studies and the interpretation of those statistics from renowned scientists. In many cases, statistics and studies showed slight indications that violent video games have an effect on c...
With the development of technology, violent video games invaded every house, and now it played by every teenage in every family, whether on mobile phones, computers or gaming devices. Some people do not believe that those violent video games effect on the children, while others believe that the government should prevent the selling of these games. However, violent video games made a negative influence on everyone, on children brain like thinking skills, which made their behavior aggressive, on their physiological energy and feeling leading to segregation and violence between siblings in the same family, also on the parenting role of the parents, who are do not know anymore what they should do with their children.
Throughout history many things in general have been improved upon. Four major improvement areas are: warfare, medicine, education of society, and technology. All of these improvements have brought with them positive effects. Warfare has allowed oppressed people to rule themselves; medicine has saved countless lives with vaccines and treatment programs; education of societies has allowed people to make their dreams come true; and, advancements in technology have made the previous three possible. With these positive effects also come negative effects, which are seen on a grand scale. Advancement in warfare has caused numerous deaths, medicine has advanced to the point where ethical questions arise because of cloning and stem cell research, the education of society in addition with the advancement in technology have allowed these negative advancements to be achieved.
Willoughby, T., Adachi, P. C., & Good, M. (2012). A longitudinal study of the association between violent video game play and aggression among adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 48(4), 1044-1057. doi:10.1037/a0026046