Violence on Tv

Violence on TV

Violence is described in Webster’s dictionary as physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing. Violence on TV has been steadily increasing for the past few years. It’s not very often that you will find a TV show in prime time that doesn’t involve some type of violence. According to Hollywood sex and violence sells. The problem with this is that violent programs on television lead to aggressive behavior by children and teenagers who watch those programs.

As adults we think that watching TV won’t effect us since we are older, but for younger children when they see someone die or get beat up they think it is cool. Children are very easy to mold into what you want, how many times have you noticed a younger brother or sister imitate their older sibling. TV can have the same effect, for example a 10 year old boys favorite show was WWF wrestling and one day after watching he tried one of the moves on his little sister and killed her. Violence on TV is at an all time high and we need to do something about it to protect the innocence on incoming generations.

Since we live in a violent society, we're constantly hearing arguments that seeing TV violence, particularly as kids, desensitizes us so we accept real violence to the point that it even triggers real violence. Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:

• become "immune" to the horror of violence

• gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems

• imitate the violence they observe on television; and

• identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers

This is true to an extent; not all children are effected by all the violence on TV but a large percent are. There were twice as many violent scenes in entertainment shows in 2001 as there were four years earlier, according to the Broadcasting Standards Commission. More violence is shown before 9:00 than when most younger children are asleep. There was an average of 5.2 violent scenes per hour on American TV in 2001, compared with 4.1 in 1998, the report said. During Prime time shows, the average amount of violent scenes went up from 1.9 to 3.7 per hour in 2000. This is a huge increase and something needs to be done about it. Television show producers need to understand that children are to easily influenced by the images they see. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressiveness. Sometimes, watching a single violent program can increase aggressiveness.

The show on television that has produced the most violent acts is wrestling. There have been countless accounts of kids hurting each other after watching wrestling. Professional wrestling has even influence entire underground scene of backyard wrestling. For example a study was done by sitting two kids in a room for an hour, and after watching the kids had an increased aggression towards each other