Children play suicide bombing games and showing it on YouTube. For me, it was too realistic, I thought the children were actually dead by the end of the clip, yet they seemed to have enjoyed the game and had me along with many other viewers surprised, terrified and disturbed. The images and actions are strongly influential and people like me who thought it was real at first, might have taken it seriously. It was definitely a shock to watch that kind of “suicidal game”; making fun out of it is simply unimaginable to me. Nevertheless, youngsters who have not developed a proper “judgment system” might follow the “wrong paths”. Any imitations or attempts to imitate such “game” may lead to some serious fatal disasters. In this case, I think not only the children and their parents but also YouTube should be responsible for the consequences of any “bad imitations” of the video clip. So I also regard that as a kind of indirect violence potentially.
Intention
An important factor we’ve mentioned and kept emphasizing during the activity on whether something or someone is considered violent is the intention of the person. For example, some believe that if a person swears to others on a daily basis is considered violent. However if he/she is not under control due to some biological reason, then I will not take it as a violent act. On the other hand, if it is under complete control and no extreme emotional pressure, then the person is violent. Here, there is a matter of whether the person intends to swear. The intention of swearing may cause trouble, whereas swearing under medical conditions without intention is understandable to me. Another case would be a situation of some people “plotting to place a nuclear bomb in a public area” and “threatening to place a nuclear bomb in a public area”. The former does not involve any physical actions; it is the “plotting” of placing a nuclear bomb in a public area which causes potential threat only if it is actually being placed there. There is no information whether the plotters intend to activate it, leave it, or perhaps deactivate it. Therefore, I don’t regard “plotting” as violence. However, the latter “threatens” the residents around the area. The action not only causes huge panic but is also potentially dangerous. The consequences of the bomb once activated could be catastrophic. And people tend to think this way: if someone threatens to place a bomb in an open public area, they are intending to blow it up. There may be a large possibility of blowing it up but there is no concrete fact that the people will do so, depending on whether it is truly their intention. But the problems are that intentions can change, and hardly anyone knows one’s true intentions. I believe this is also why “violence” is very hard to define.
Biasness
I remember a picture of a man seemingly shouting at a woman painfully, the woman looks like she is tearing and her body gestures seems to be implying refusal to the man’s actions, both of them look as if they’re in extreme pain. It is only a picture, displaying a snapshot of a situation with so many unknowns. Simply by judging the picture, a large number of classmates think it is violence, as there is physical contact and seems rather intense, while few thinks that there might a good reason behind such act, or it is hard to judge from a picture with no details or information on the background of the picture. For each picture, there could be thousands of different interpretations and understandings. Some may think it’s violent, some may not, but either way, it is only a judgment by the face of the picture but not the whole situation. I can understand why some people including me sometimes, associate pictures of intense physical contact with violence. It can be seen in newspapers. The pictures of the strikes in China and Japan fighting over the DiaoYu Island/Senkaku Island vary in different newspapers: the Canadian Press displayed a picture indicating “rational Japanese strikers protesting calmly on the streets”, while the “irrational Chinese strikers scatter all over the place and wreck Japanese stores”. Pictures can be extremely biased, depending on different stances of the publishers. But what’s more important is that our interpretations from the pictures are different due to different culture backgrounds, education levels, belief systems or moral values, stances, etc. It is true that what seems “violent” to me may not be regarded violent to others.
Conclusively, due to the above “realizations”, I have made the following amendments to my definition of violence: Violence is an actual action or influential action of causing physical/psychological damage or further destruction to someone, something, or oneself, either directly or indirectly, but this definition may vary from one another depending on different individual interpretations.
