Does Televison, Video Games Affect Teen Violence

Many movies, television shows, songs, and video games are filled with violence: murder scenes, nonstop profanity, rape, and torture scenarios. By placing scenes like these in the movies for the children and teenagers to see, the media is causing them to become more violent than they already are. What has our society come to these days? Everywhere we look, violence is present; in the streets, schools, and even at home. Teen violence may be linked to media violence. There are a number of different ways that people can be influenced by media violence. Who will be effected, by what material, and in what way is difficult to determine. Media violence does not only include television and movies, but local news as well. Exposure to violence can cause aggressive behaviour since it affects them mentally leading to imitation of violent behaviour, it primes violent related ideas in the future, and further distorts one’s perception of reality.  Many people allow the media to influence their lives.

In today’s generation teens spend a lot of time watching TV and movies. These shows present the kids with a distorted version of reality, for instance, they might think that a punch doesn’t hurt much. Children further believe that violence is acceptable and is an appropriate social behavior. Over exposure to violence desensitizes them and they don’t take violent things seriously in real life. For example, mass murders and wars happening around the world don’t concern the youth today as much as they do. Children are exposed to bad guy and good guy scenarios, where superman beats the bad guy up and everybody cheers him up. Children will behave in a violent way whe  n they are given an opportunity to.

When teens watch non-stop violence, it can affect them at a mental level. Some teens have never seen a gun, but they still know how to use it, they know that you first have to load then gun, then pull the trigger and then shoot. How? Because your mind cannot delete what it has seen. Violence always affects you subconsciously, because children were never given private lessons on how to use weapons, neither were they surrounded by any of such events, it since they saw this on TV, they have this knowledge. Movies can influence the audience more than anything else because they’re watching it happen and some viewers may get ideas on, how to do something and solve that problem. All these violent acts that teens watch these days always stay in the head, and these ideas wait to get activated and influence how we act.

Children are like sponges, always absorbing their environment. Movies that have a lot of action, killing, and fighting, people that watched the movie would try to re-enact the stunts they did in the movies. Even though they were produced and performed by professional actors or stuntman only for entertainment. Music that involves drugs, murder, and violence, also has an influence on things like this. Teens in today’s society also try to be cool by doing these things because people their age are doing them and think they're cool by doing them. Today’s music especially rap, uses a lot of coarse language most of the time, this type of language obviously doesn’t calm the person down but, makes them more aggressive kids and they even mention thoughts of violent actions. A lot of rap stories contain stories of domestic abuse and violence against individuals. Some rap songs lyrics have a dark side to them mentioning disrespect for women and rivalries between two rappers and on how they will kill them. Music can have a great impact on teens, they should be careful on what they watch and listen to.