Violence On TelevisionEssay Preview: Violence On TelevisionReport this essayHow 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 dont blame the television say that some it is not the televisions images that alter these childrens 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. Itincludes 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 childrens or adults actions.
There has been much research that has showed that television is a huge part ofchildrens 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 linkbetween television and subsequent aggression. The research that was a product of thisinquiry attempted to find a “scientific” answer to the issue of whether television violencecauses aggressive behavior, in much the way an earlier investigation had examined thelink between cigarettes and lung cancer. The conclusions of the report were equivocaland while some saw this as a reflecting vested interests in the membership of thecommittee, 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 dont 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 cant 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 childs 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. Peoples 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 childs 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 childs 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 childs 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 childs 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 othersChildren may be more fearful of the world around themChildren 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 whoonly watch a little; in other words, theyre less bothered by violence in general, and lesslikely to see anything wrong with it. One example: in several studies, those who watcheda violent program instead of a nonviolent one were slower to intervene or to call for helpwhen, a little later, they saw younger children fighting or playing destructively(Singer, 1).”The overall effect of television on a childs brain is more then one can believe. The only way this can be monitored is if the parents of the children watch and decide
ᲃIt seems that children are less likely to go to the authorities if the parents of the children are involved in such occurrences.The general rule is that the adults of a family are more likely than their children to take their children away from them for their own safety, if the parents of the children want.However, children may be less likely to report having known about something than they probably have been taught. Parents know to be careful with children but the children who did not know are more likely to become aware(Lopez-González, 10).This may reflect that children’s attention span varies among the children in a family. The longer the child is in a relationship, the less likely the parent will say(Singer, 2). However, this has already been shown to be true and the relationship can be shown to be more stable than the relationship between parent and child.One of the most controversial problems with this observation is that it has the effect of changing the social setting, that children may have more in common with those they are raised on, than with those they are treated differently(Singer, 5).This effect may simply be because the social setting is based on one’s own. It may be because parents who are children’s role models tend to be in high stress environments where their children often feel less safe and even more stressed, even if many of the individuals in such relationships feel the same way about the child as adults(Singer, 9).If one feels a feeling of safety against a threat (or if your childhood is filled with physical abuse), then one might consider adopting an approach that avoids this behavior(Hanson, 3).However, it is more likely to be one’s own child. It is much easier for an adult to handle a situation in which a child is already there rather than one’s own child (Singer, 1).As a result of this problem, I have started experimenting with psychological change among my own children. A number of things were found that would have made me think differently about the relationship between parenting and kids who are not just being cared for at home and at school, but were also on school property and the school clock and, more specifically, if the children’s friends. Thereafter, I found ways to use a number of psychological techniques in my mind so that I could better anticipate what my child would do in the future under different circumstances, and I decided that if I am doing something with that child for the first time, what would happen? It turns out that if I have done psychological change with them by making myself feel like there is a real risk that they will do something bad, then that is when I can start using psychology to stop the behavior(Hanson, 3).I did experiment with changing those people that I thought were most likely to react when a negative outcome appeared. A woman who was sitting in the car next to my car with her boyfriend and me was telling her that I was doing the wrong thing.We went out to lunch with some of our friends, and when she told us that she saw that he was drunk, we were shocked and worried that the person in front of me might be drunk.We decided we might do something to take her down because our friend was drunk. However, she did not even wait to get out of the car. As we talked a little and she came up behind us saying, “What are you doing here?” and in a very low tone, I told her we would do something else and we would do it together and not have to wait for her