Early Age Violence, and Where It Comes From

Early Age Violence, and Where it Comes From

In Dudley Erskine Devlin's “Children and Violence in America,” he proposed the idea that violence in children and teenagers today isn't caused by television programs and movies, but rather the liberal media such as newspapers and nightly news shows. He states that the liberal media is “trying to scare the daylights out of the public in order to sell newspapers and raise their Nielsen Ratings.” While Devlin brings up a good point, one could argue that the exact opposite is true; that children are more violent today because they see television shows and movies with an immense amount of concentrated violence, and think they accurately depict how society should behave.

“Teenagers see over 200,000 violent acts on television before they're eighteen,” states Devlin. He is not only talking about the programs we watch, but also the news stories. Devlin believes that the numbers are high mainly because the news exaggerates their stories in order to scare us, and ultimately make us want to watch more. While this may be true to some extent, the numbers are mainly so high because the programs we watch give us a thrill more than anything; making us more interested and the ratings increase. For instance, in real life, a mile-wide asteroid has never fallen from the sky and hit New York City. However, with digital effects, people can now watch and feel that which makes us afraid with the knowledge that it's all fake.

As posted on movies.yahoo.com, the number one movie of all time was the historical fiction classic, Titanic. Audiences around the world raved about the movie and how it was an “amazing experience”. However, not one person described the violence that it entailed, such as: people falling and hitting the water at terminal velocity, hitting metal poles hard enough to break every bone, drowning to death in freezing water, or seeing the people on the boat before it sank fighting to get into a life boat. The adults that saw the movie knew that the violence, in the movie at least, wasn't real, and that it was put in there for entertainment and accuracy of historical events. Children, however, see the footage and think differently of what happened. They see the violence and think that on a boat, if things do go wrong, you're supposed to fight to get to the life boat. Eventually this can be turned into an objective-based game where kids from the neighborhood come and fight each other to get from one place to another. In extreme cases, they could harm themselves with large sticks, swing metal objects, or even throw large rocks towards one another. These acts could lead to another hospital visit for the family and another domestic disturbance report to be filed at the local police station.

In our homes, many different types of violence are seen on television. A show called “COPS” has been a hit sensation for years. It's a program showing the actual video evidence of criminal behavior in our society that was recorded by police video equipment. In the episodes, we see real life shoot-outs, fast and usually deadly car chases, and even fist fights between officers and criminals.