Violence On Television

How the times have changed. It seems wherever you look there is violence. It makes you think, what has this world come too? Violence has become a common trend throughout the world. Violence can be found in our schools, our workplace, and mostly, on our television. It is the television, and the children who watch, mimic, and learn from it that are often attracted to its portrayal of violence as an acceptable thing in society which often occurs in destructive results. Those who don't blame the television say that some it is not the television's images that alter these children's minds but how they are brought up and what they are surrounded by and taught.

Television violence is defined as:

"Television violence usually refers to all the violence appearing on TV screens. It includes material broadcasts over the air, distributed by Cable and satellite systems, and available on videocassettes and disks (Josephson, 2)."

The common understanding or definition of television violence is not easy. In order to understand it, the limits of it must be determined. Should it include animated acts or only realistic portrayals? Should it contain both verbal and physical violence and whether it is directed at people animals, or objects? When this is determined, then one can decide whether it is the motive of a children's or adult's actions.

There has been much research that has showed that television is a huge part of

children's lives and that it has contributed to their violent behavior in their lives.

"In 1969 the U.S. Surgeon General was given the task of exploring evidence of a link between television and subsequent aggression. The research that was a product of this inquiry attempted to find a "scientific" answer to the issue of whether television violence causes aggressive behavior, in much the way an earlier investigation had examined the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. The conclusions of the report were equivocal and while some saw this as a reflecting vested interests in the membership of the committee, research over the following 20 years has not silenced the debate (Tulloch,1)."

The research proves time and time again that aggression and television viewing do go hand in hand. There is still no final verdict over whether it is obvious that it does, but it still lingers in the minds of some.

The truth about television violence and children has been shown. Some are trying to fight this problem. Others are ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Still others don't even seem care. However, the facts are undeniable. The studies have been carried out and all the results point to one conclusion: Television violence causes children to be violent and the effects can be life-long. The information can't be ignored. Violent television viewing does affect children. The effects have been seen in a number of cases. In New York, a 16-year-old boy broke into a cellar. When the police caught him and asked him why he was wearing gloves he replied that he had learned to do so to not leave fingerprints and that he discovered this on television. In Alabama, a nine-year-old boy received a bad report card from his teacher. He suggested sending the teacher poisoned candy as revenge as he had seen on television the night before. In California, a seven-year-old boy sprinkled ground-up glass into the lamb stew the family was to eat for dinner. When asked why he did it he replied that he wanted to see if the results would be the same in real life as they were on television (Howe, 72). These are certainly startling examples of how television can affect a child. It must be pointed out that all of these situations were directly caused by children watching violent television.

Not only does television violence affect the child's youth, but it can also affect his or her adulthood. Some psychologists and psychiatrists feel that continued exposure to such violence might unnaturally speed up the impact of the adult world on the child. This can force the child into a kind of premature maturity. As the child matures into an adult, he can become bewildered, have a greater distrust towards others, a superficial approach to adult problems, and even an unwillingness to become an adult (Carter, 14). Not only does this hurt the child it hurts society as a whole. Adults would become more hostile, they would then bring their children up to be the same way as them. This would not only make the adults more hostile but the children and this would impact society double what it had already been impacting. This violent behavior would act as if it were a virus it would spread throughout the United States and then the world. People's overall IQs would drop and this would spread also. Although this seems a bit radical anything is possible in this day and age.

Television violence can destroy a young child's mind. The effects of this violence can be long-lasting, if not never-ending. For some, television at its worst, is an assault on a child's mind, an non-stop influence at upsets moral balance and makes a child more susceptible to aggressive behavior as it warps his or her view of the real world. Other see television as an unhealthy intrusion into a child's learning process, substituting easy pictures for the discipline of reading and concentrating and transforming the young viewer into a hypnotized drone. As you can see, television violence can disrupt a child's learning and thinking ability which will cause life long problems. If a child cannot do well in school, his or her whole future is at stake.

"Psychological research has shown three major effects of seeing violence on television:

Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others

Children may be more fearful of the world around them

Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others.

Children who watch a lot of TV are less aroused by violent scenes than are those who only watch a little; in other words, they're less bothered by violence in general, and less likely to see anything wrong with it. One example: in several studies, those who watched a violent program instead of a nonviolent one were slower to intervene or to call for help when, a little later, they saw younger children fighting or playing destructively (Singer, 1)."

The overall effect of television on a child's brain is more then one can believe. The only way this can be monitored is if the parents of the children watch and decide