The Effects of the Media on Criminal Behaviour

The Effects of the Media

on Criminal Behaviour

The Hypodermic Syringe Model

This theory is a passive audience model, and states that the media almost ‘injects’ the audience with the contents of the media, which are opinions, or a message and then the audience accepts the attitudes, opinions and beliefs. In some cases, the audience responds to the message in terms of their behaviour, they may end up repeating violent behaviour that they have seen in the piece of media. If this behaviour is deemed as criminal, and members of society are repeating it, then ultimately, a criminal or violent society may be created. This means that it is individually deterministic and that we are almost being ‘brainwashed’ into acting in the way of the message. The audience has no active part in interpreting the message, and the theory suggests that the mass audience are like ‘sheep’. We are easily led and not self-aware. However, if the message becomes corrupted, i.e. through perhaps, culture bias, then the message may be interpreted in a different way to which the sender has encoded it. E.g. If the message is about two white male criminals, then it may be internalised by white males, but not by Jamaican males, meaning that the behaviour would be repeated in certain members of society.

This model was a response to the German fascists and capitalist societies, explaining how propaganda works.

The Two-Step Flow Theory

This theory states that a message is not simply interpreted by an individual; it is interpreted in a social setting. The first step is that the mass audience receives the message. The second step is that each individual shares their interpretation of the message with others and alter their interpretations to coincide with others in a social setting. This is why it is called the two-step flow theory. Katz and Lazarsfeld who developed this theory stated that there is not a direct impact on the audience but the influence of friends and family, or ‘opinion leaders’ plays a key part in the impact that the media does have. This means that if the message is not shared in a social setting, then there may be no impact at all, and the message is forgotten about. However, if people whom we deem to have admirable qualities and whose onions we respect discuss their own ideas and experiences about a message in the media, then we discuss it also, and our own interpretations change. This is when action over the message may be taken. If the opinion leaders happen to have criminalistic interpretations of the message, you are likely to change your own interpretations slightly to allow for criminalistic ideas, and group behaviour may change as the ideas of a group change. This could explain gang behaviour and how it may start, and highlights how people with power and influence can almost force their opinions on others.

However, this means that people are easily influenced by others and conditioned by their environment, without being able to rise above it and change their own behaviour and ideas. This theory, therefore, is also deterministic.

Uses and Gratifications Model

This theory is an active audience model, and is about how or why people use the media. Different people can use each media product, in different ways or for different reasons, to gain different personal gratifications. It is based on the idea that two people can be accessing the same media product, but using it for two very different reasons, therefore each media product does not have just one meaning. ‘Reality is socially constructed’.

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McQuail suggested that there are four main types of use. The first is Diversion. This use is for entertainment reasons, i.e. television etc. The second is Personal Relationships where the audience gains companionship with the characters, or through discussion with others about television. The third is Personal Identity, where the user accesses the mass media in order to identify with certain characters, i.e. they have qualities in which you deem yourself to have or are going through experiences of which you have already experienced. Lastly, is where the audience accesses the media in order to become informed. This includes watching the news and documentaries, or reading the paper etc. This is called Surveillance. However, even though this theory states that we freely choose to access different media products, we cannot always choose whether or not to receive some media types. For example, while we may be using the Internet for diversion, we are constantly swamped with pop-up ads or Spam e-mail. We cannot always choose not to receive these types of products, so we are receiving their messages anyway.

Not all of the mass audience will have access to all types of media product and therefore, do not always have the full range of choice. This can depend on the means you need to access the product, or on how much money you have, and so therefore the theory is elitist. Only the affluent have full choice of the media that they access, and the less well off may end up wanting to access a media product for a certain type of use, but as they cannot they end up using a media product for a use which they did not intend, meaning they had no choice. Also, if for example, people accessing the media for diversion find that there is not a text in which they are interested, then the reason they accessed the product for becomes useless. They may feel that the media is excluding them.

Moral Panics

A moral panic is termed as an ‘overreaction of the mass media, police and local community leaders to delinquent offences which are in fact relatively trivial, both in terms of the nature of the offence and the number of people involved’

A moral panic can be where the media argues increased levels of deviancy. It is accepted that the media is the primary form of communication in society and therefore makes it difficult for the public to assess the accuracy of media representation. The media exaggerates the deviant image, which fits with the public image of a deviant, attracting more attention than usual from the public; more attention from the media is given to their behaviour, highlighting deviancy in society. Stereotypical representation of the groups, which some deviant individuals belong to, is given by the media, and those with powerful influence exaggerate the activity and the need for action even more. This influences the public to feel that action must be taken. However, some moral panics may end quickly and soon be forgotten, but those here action begins to take place against the deviancy are more likely to last longer and have serious lasting implications, bringing about new campaigns or policies. For example, when Sarah Payne was sexually assaulted and murdered, her mother and the News of the World campaigned for all paedophiles to be named so that the public would know if they were living near one. They ended up naming and shaming them all, showing photos of each one, which resulted in the public taking action against these people, but there were many cases of mistaken identity, which resulted in the campaign quickly ending and being forgotten. However there were long lasting results of this moral panic as her mother has now set up a charity.

The coverage of an event far outweighs the importance of what has actually happened. A media campaign is built around public reaction. A moral panic would be where there is heightened concern, hostility towards the deviant, a general agreement between the public that a threat exists, and where it suddenly erupts.

Psychological theories on media and crime

Studies such as the Bobo Doll study by Bandura show that there is some link between media and crime. Groups of children were shown videos of an adult being violent towards a Bobo Doll, and when the children saw the adult being rewarded for their actions, the behaviour was repeated when provided with a Bobo Doll themselves. When they saw the adult being punished for being violent towards the doll, they did not repeat the behaviour. This shows that children can learn behaviour through watching media products. This study highlighted the role of reward and punishment, so, as long as criminal characters are seen to be punished, behaviour should not be repeated, meaning that this cannot explain a violent society. However, in some media products, where criminal characters become popular, likeable, or are seen to be rewarded for their criminal actions, then the mass audience may repeat criminal behaviour, in order to gain the same rewards.

Deindividuation, Disinhibition, and Desensitisation

Deindividuation is a psychological theory where someone loses his or her sense of individuality. This theory is used to explain group behaviour, where if people committing criminal acts surround you, you feel like you cannot be identified as an individual, therefore cannot be punished or ‘caught’, and you are therefore more likely to commit the same acts.

Disinhibition is where, in terms of aggression perhaps, people see so much of it they become accustomed to it, and it weakens those person’s inhibitions towards aggression. This means, because it is more acceptable to them, they are more likely to be aggressive themselves.

Desensitisation is where people see so much criminal behaviour or aggressive behaviour in the world or the media around them that they become less emotionally aroused when they see it. This means that crime becomes more emotionally acceptable, because it does not upset you.

The Jamie Bulger Case

In 1993, 10-year-olds Robert Thompson and John Venables lured and abducted 3-year-old Jamie Bulger from Bootle Strand Shopping Centre in Liverpool. They were caught on CCTV, taking him by the hand from outside a butchers shop. They led him to a canal where they attempted to throw him in, yet failed, resulting in dropping him on his head, where he sustained a cut. When passers by asked how the child had got a cut on his head and who they were, Thompson and Venables replied that they were Jamie’s brothers and that they were taking him home. They then led him to a railway track where they beat him with bricks, a battery, and an iron bar, and proceeded to lay him on the tracks where they covered his face in stones. There was also evidence that the child had been sexually assaulted as there were cuts and gashes in his anus, and his foreskin had been ripped.It was said that the two 10-year-olds had been influenced by the film, Child’s Play 3, and were trying to imitate a scene from the movie, where a victim is splashed with blue paint. Venables had viewed the film while visiting his dad, amongst other 18 rated movies.

Bandura’s research into the Social Learning Theory supports the view that maybe their criminal behaviour was actually down to the media. He exposed groups of young children to a violent video, where they would have seen an adult being extremely aggressive to a blow up Bobo Doll. One group saw the adult punished, one group saw the adult being rewarded, and the last group saw that there were no consequences for the adult’s behaviour. They were then taken into a separate room where amongst other toys there were hammers, mallets and a blow up Bobo doll. Those children who had seen the adult being rewarded were found to repeat the behaviour almost exactly. Those who had seen the adult punished did not. When the no-consequence control group saw the other children being rewarded for their behaviour, this group also repeated the behaviour they had seen on the video, proving that they had still learned it, even though they had not exhibited signs of having learned it earlier. This study proved that children, who are exposed to violent or criminal media products and have seen some reward gained out of the behaviour, would go out into society and repeat what they have seen. As Venables had said: he had seen the film, and wanted to re-create the scene.

However, the study has some problems in terms of validity. The children were made to walk to another room after watching the ‘media product’ to create frustration, so there is argument over whether their violent behaviour after was down to what they had seen on the video, or because frustration causes aggression, and that was why they were violent. Also, these children had learnt to be violent towards an inanimate object – would these children be so aggressive towards a real person? It is likely that they had developed an association between violence and the Bobo Doll and not people. It is also quite possible that these children had grown up in a violent household, and may be repeating the behaviour that they have seen at home and not from the media. What you see from close relatives and friends may be a much bigger influence on the media.

The Hypodermic Syringe Model may also account for what these two children did. If the theory is correct, then the children were injected with murderous ideas, and acted upon those. During the holocaust, people who were not Jews had certain anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at them. According to the hypodermic syringe model, these people were injected with anti-Semitic ideas and the message from this media was to act upon those ideas, and they did, killing many Jew’s. This would support the idea that the Bulger killers could not really help what they did.

In the 1990’s, many questions were raised over what were called "video nasties". The tabloids created a moral panic over the relationship between screen and real-life violence, and whether Child’s Play 3 did actually influence Thompson and Venables.

A survey sponsored by the Home Office in January 1998, could not establish a link between these sorts of videos and violent behaviour in youths.

Over a period of 2 years, 122 males ages between 15 and 21, including violent offenders, non-violent offenders and non-offenders, were assessed in terms of their reactions to violent videos. The survey, conducted by Birmingham University, found that a preference for on-screen violence was down to exposure to domestic violence and a tendency towards delinquency. The study suggests that becoming an offender is more likely to be from having a violent background. "This study suggests that the well-established link between poor social background and delinquent behaviour extends to the development of a preference for violent films."

However, they agree that "There is some evidence that young people do imitate films - the Black Museum at Scotland Yard has a copy made by a young offender of the deadly glove used by Freddie Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street - but there is no firm evidence of the extent of such copycat behaviour."

These sort of crimes cannot be blamed solely on the media, otherwise all children who watch violent media would go on to commit crime, however not all do. The St. Helena study shows that when Sky television was introduced to the island, there were no increased levels of violence amongst youths on the island, showing that maybe society plays a more important part, or what kind of household children are brought up in. In Robert Thompsons case, he was found to have had a difficult upbringing. His father had left for another woman while he was young and his mother had taken to alcohol. He was the fifth of six children and was bullied by his older brothers. He lived in a violent household where one of his brothers had asked to be placed into care after being threatened with a knife. However it cannot be said that his crime was down to lack of love as his neighbours say his mother was still very loving towards him, and in fact stopped drinking two years before the crime. It was said that Robert was not known for violence, although Venables was. He was known for skipping school and stabbing other children with pencils. His parent’s denied all the accusations by the media of him watching Child’s Play 3. Neither child lived in a rough area, and so perhaps both children were born with predispositions to violence, such as heightened testosterone levels, which have been accounted for aggression.

Conclusion

Not one audience theory on it’s own can provide enough evidence to prove that violence in the media could have caused Thompson and Venables to commit such a terrible crime. Perhaps a mixture of audience theories and several other environmental factors all play certain roles in the cause of someone becoming a criminal offender, and it is only when certain factors coincide that criminality is caused. Perhaps some people are born with predispositions such as higher levels of testosterone, or abnormalities in brain structure, but an environmental stimulus is needed to trigger it. This may have been the movie that they watched, or in Thompsons case, his upbringing, but it is unlikely that there will be enough strong proof to say which one was more influential.

References

http://www.lexusnexus.co.uk