"You keep out of this," Bugs says, "He doesn’t have to shoot you now."
"He does so have to shoot me now!" says Daffy. Full of wrath, he storms up to Elmer Fudd and shrieks, "And I demand that you shoot me now!" This is an example of the violence on television that even the young are exposed to, guns and killing is made light of. As we are all well aware, as the target age increases, so does the violence and graphic nature of the material.
If one were to ask a child what their favourite television show is, very often the child would respond with a television show that contains a lot of violence. For example, professional wrestlers and "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” seem to have become role models worthy of imitation by children. One simply has to walk through a primary school playground during break-time, to see these children portraying their favourite violent characters. This aggressive behaviour is further demonstrated in classrooms and in the home. Play fighting is really a demonstration of aggressive behaviour, because of watching violence on television.
Many studies done, suggest that violence on television does influence the behaviour of children. When viewed individually, these studies might seem insignificant, but together they form a powerful giant that indicates aggressive behaviour is a result of violence on television.
Children are sponges during their beginning years, and soak up their surroundings. A study done by Albert Bandura in 1963, demonstrates how easily viewing aggression can influence a child. He and his colleagues observed preschoolers in a contrived situation, which included aggressive behaviour. His study consisted of four groups of children and a Bobo doll, a toy clown (he was American). A control group set up for this experiment, contained children who had not witnessed any events involving Bobo. The other three groups had witnessed Bobo being verbally and/or physically abused by different figures. These figures included a live model, a filmed model, and a female dressed in a cat costume. All the children had been irritated, by taking away their toys. This made the children more prone to use aggressive behaviour. The children were then put in a playroom with the Bobo doll. Out of the four groups that were involved, three exemplified aggressive behaviour toward the Bobo doll. The exception was the control group that had not witnessed any violence. This experiment supports the theory that after observing violent behaviour, children are more likely to imitate the aggressive acts of the characters involved.
In addition, a study conducted, demonstrated how children become desensitized to violence. Divided into two groups were forty-four boys and girls, in third and fourth years of primary school. One group saw a violent western film, the other group did not see any movie. Afterwards, the children were asked to "baby-sit" two younger children by watching them on television. The two children on the television became progressively violent toward each other, and this is where the experiment began to get interesting. Researchers found that the children who had seen the western movie waited longer to get an adult to help the two violent children, than the children who had not seen a movie did. This suggests that the children who had been predisposed to violent behaviour, accepted the behaviour they witnessed between the two children they were baby-sitting, as more "normal."
in explaining this process of desensitisation the analogy of a hot bath can be used. If you tried to jump into the hot water all at once, it would be unbearable and you would get out quickly. Rather we expose ourselves to the heat slowly, dipping only our toe in, until we have slowly submerged our entire body. We become desensitized to the hot water, by slowly exposing ourselves to the water a little bit, slowly, over a long period. Thus if we were overwhelmed with horrifying images and violence in the media, without previous exposure, the effects would be devastating, rather we are exposed to violence in small doses, eventually building up an amount of mental immunity.
This type of desensitization is exemplified in society today. Every night on the news, we are plagued with horrible pictures and stories of violence and terror, but we rarely become shocked by any of it. This could very well be because exposure to so much violence on television in the past, especially during childhood, has caused us to be immune. Children who witness violence in this way or through the media in the form of entertainment, such as wrestling, may then come away from the experience thinking that violence is acceptable, and they may be more likely to re-enact televised situations in the future.
Similarly, whilst much of the influencing occurs with respect to children, it must be remembered that we were all children once, and the children of today will all be adults eventually, and though our opinions change as we grow, the aggression and insensitivity that is ingrained changes little, in the case of men aggressive tendencies increase as age does. Thus the effect televised violence has on us in infancy will stay with us into adulthood.
However, now that we’ve well and truly pointed the finger at TV for being the aggressive influence into our lives, someone must come to its rescue.
Television is not the sole factor in causing aggression; there are many factors. A violent home, that includes two parents fighting twenty-four hours a day, can influence a child's behaviour, many of the more high profile murderers had troubled childhoods in dysfunctional families, for example David Berkowitz aka "Son of Sam", from the 70’s, was a 24-year old former Army soldier, auxiliary policeman, and postal employee in New York City who killed 6 people, mostly in cars parked in lover's lanes. He communicated with the newspapers, in particular, one Jimmie Breslin, who wrote regular columns about him and to whom he communicated directly. It was this case that resulted in use of the term "serial killer" since previously, only the word "stranger killings" was used. Prior to the killings, he had set 1,488 fires, and always wanted to be a fireman. He was adopted and had family problems where he longed to find his birth mother. He had a venereal disease (gonorrhea) he picked up from a prostitute in Korea during his Army career, and he hated men and women who weren't as lonely and inadequate as he was. He enjoyed torturing small animals as a child. Evidently his actions stemmed from deep seated psychological problems, rather than overexposure to Ovaltine adverts.
Similarly if a child is constantly abused and exposed to scenes of aggression between adults that are his/her role models, and then he/she may also exhibit aggressive behaviour. Children can witness violence in many places besides television. A child can witness an argument between two people in a public place, and then re-enact the scene at home. Even in a simple supermarket parking lot, violence is evident. Two adults fighting over a parking place could be violent towards one another. Yet the question presents itself, what made them violent initially, what gave them an aggressive predisposition?
It is also inherently human to be aggressive aggression has been one of man’s political tools since he evolved, and even before, thus it cannot be argued that television’s influence has done much to change that. Indeed the violence we are shown stems often from that deep-seated, primeval aggression, inbuilt into human nature. We are an aggressive species, most mammals are, this is generally accepted, however I digress, though it has been shown that people can be affected by televised violence it may be the case that specific groups are affected. To clarify this, most of the tests and research was done on western, predominantly American, groups of children and adults. Western culture, for the most part, is relatively sheltered from violence, in comparison to some Middle and Far Eastern cultures. Drunken pub brawls are considered to be quite violent in the west, where the more developed and civilised nature of many countries and states has lead to the eradication of violence from many aspects of civilian society. Whereas in the Middle East, in the states of Palestine and Israel, or Lebanon, violence is far more prevalent in civilian society. Thus getting back to my point, perhaps if more tests were done regarding Middle Eastern children and adults, showing them the same images and western ideas of violence, would the results be the same, and thus is the influence of televised violence only specific to particular groups and not mankind as a whole? Well, it is not known, however, an insight can be gained when comparing television broadcasts from the two areas; violence screened on Western news networks such as BBC News or CNN is tame when compared to the uncensored, graphic nature of news on Eastern networks such as Al Jazeera, though muslim censorship affects a number of more mundane broadcasts, such as those of a religious or political nature, the predominance of news is rather unbridled in its nature.
Supporting this is the argument people have seen so much, that they don’t really think about the actual act occurring on screen, similar to the situation in the Middle East. Hanno Hardt, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in America said, “It’s lost its shock value. Maybe 20 to 30 years ago we would have been shocked. Now, a generation later, we know that this is a violent society. And when we read about violence, it only reinforces what we know.” People have become used to seeing violence on television, but this has become somewhat surreal to them. They don’t think of it as reality until it happens to them. “When violence happens to people or their family, they become eyewitnesses to this violence. They have personal experiences – compassion sensitivity, fear. People haven’t lost that.”
One study done by Feshbach and R.D.Singer in 1971, suggested that watching television actually decreases the amount of aggression in the viewer. The experiment supposedly proved that the violence on television allows the viewer to relate with the characters involved in the violent act. In doing so, the viewer is able to release all aggressive thoughts and feelings through that relation, causing them to be less aggressive than they would have been without watching the violent television. This conclusion is called the “catharsis hypothesis”. Aristotle was a big supporter of “catharsis.” He believed that the audience became psychologically involved with the story on stage, even though they knew it was 100% fiction. He felt when aggression climaxed with the actors, there was a “catharsis” in the audience, which was pleasurable to experience and left the audience “cleansed, uplifted, and less likely to act violently among themselves.”
Sigmund Freud also felt as Aristotle did by saying, “Unless people were allowed to express themselves aggressively, the aggressive energy would be dammed up, pressure would build, and the aggressive energy would seek an outlet, either exploding into acts of extreme violence or manifesting itself as symptoms of mental illness …. But there is no direct evidence for this conclusion.”
Thus it can be seen that a multitude of reasons exist supporting and opposing the argument, though as with many social problems, determining a general answer to the question is very difficult, and often futile, because, as can be seen from some of the evidence given, it is rather a large collection of individual cases that seem to support both sides of the argument than a clear general trend. Some people may be more susceptible, others not so. Only the ones we hear about, the ones that make the headlines, are the extreme cases. It would seem that people have been made more aggressive by the violence on TV, although that violence was already there, even if only visible to a relative few, yet when it is beamed to many, some are shocked and seek to label television and media networks in general as a bad influence on society, completely glossing over all their many saving graces.
