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CHILD HEALTH How Media Violence Touches ChildrenThe televised images of hijacked planes making their deadly arcs on Sept. 11 gave parents a special worry: how would their children react to the sight of the planes plowing, over and over, into the twin towers? Some may have breathed a sigh of relief to hear recent reports that many kids were less upset than had been expected. Not Michael Rich.
Violent images in the media could be leading to an increasing tolerance for real-life violence, according to Kimberly Thompson and Michael Rich, organizers of an Oct. 5 HSPH symposium on media violence. Photos by Graham Ramsay "This really worries me," said Rich, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital. A moviemaker turned pediatrician, Rich is one of a quorum of researchers at HSPH and HMS who have been studying the effects of the media on the mental and physical health of children and adolescents. He believes that exposure to violent images in the media--television, movies, video games, and music videos--has led to an increasing tolerance for violence by this country's youth. "I think the reason kids aren't bothered that much by the recent images is they're desensitized," he said. "We don't know how this is going to play itself out. Will it show itself in hopelessness and depression years later?" So potentially dangerous is the exposure to violence--and also to sex, tobacco, and alcohol use--in the media that the American Academy of Pediatrics has commissioned Rich and others to write six position statements on various aspects of the problem. The latest, on media violence, will appear in the November Pediatrics. Rich was also co-organizer with Kimberly Thompson of a symposium held at HSPH on Oct. 5 to discuss the perils, and also the promise, that the media hold for young people. Among the questions addressed by participants were: what is the real nature of the threat--how much violence is actually portrayed in TV, movies, video games, and music videos? What can we do about it--is it possible to turn the media to good purposes? The questions are not new and yet the general public, including parents, have been reluctant to pay attention to the warnings of researchers like Thompson and Rich. Children and adolescents are consuming more television than ever before. The average 8- to 18-year-old spends nearly seven hours each day involved with some form of media. Kids are also more violent than ever before. At the turn of the last century, children and adolescents were most likely to die of environmental causes, especially infectious diseases. In the year 2000, violence--suicide, homicide, accidents, and assaults--was the leading cause of death among young people. Part of the problem is that while many acknowledge the rise in violence, they have a hard time making a substantive link to the media. Even after the shootings at Columbine High School, many were reluctant to accept that the young killers' incessant playing of violent video games such as Doom--which they reprogrammed to resemble the layout of their high school--actually contributed to their ability to carry out their homicidal spree. Yet as Rich pointed out at the symposium, the link between media violence and violent behavior has been explored in more than 3,500 studies, and all but 18 showed a positive correlation. In fact, the average strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior has been shown to be greater than that between condom nonuse and sexually-acquired HIV infection, environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer, calcium intake and bone mass, or lead ingestion and lower IQ. Getting Really ScaryAs for how the media may affect kids, desensitization is only part of the answer. Children can confuse the violence they see on television and in the movies with reality, "which can lead to the mean scary world syndrome," said Thompson, HSPH assistant professor of risk analysis and decision science. Fear of being a victim is one reason young people give for carrying weapons. In addition to mistaking the violence they see on the screen for the real thing, kids are treating the often glamorized perpetrators of that violence as role models.Thompson believes that public perception of the risk of exposing kids to media violence is "way out of whack" with reality. "For most parents, media just come in right under their radar screen," she said. "The movies 3-year-olds are sitting in front of for hours a day actually have a lot of violence." Risky ExposureWorking with HSPH graduate student Fumie Yokota, she set out to measure just how much violence very young children are being exposed to. Analyzing G-rated animated feature films from 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to 1999's The King and I, the pair found that the amount of screen time devoted to violent depictions nearly doubled. More troubling, the violence was often perpetrated by the cartoon hero--the good guy--to resolve a conflict or achieve a goal.Video games were Thompson's next target. Studying 55 games rated "E" for everyone, she and HSPH graduate student Kevin Haninger found that 64 percent contained acts of violence, sport play excluded. Though the total amount of game time devoted to violent play varied greatly between these games--from 1.5 to 91.2 percent--not one contained a message against violence. In many cases, players were rewarded for using violence or required to injure a character. The researchers, whose findings were reported in the August Journal of the American Medical Association, also found that while many of the video games provided warnings about their violence, others did not. That is a message Thompson wants parents to hear. "A lot depends on parents making good choices," she said. "Our work is about raising awareness." Rich agrees. He reports in an article in the October Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Reviews that TV, music videos, and movies are filled with covert advertisements for products and procedures that are harmful to young people's health. Following the notion that "if it bleeds, it leads"--that sex and violence sell--these products are often associated with violent images, which are portrayed as "cool." It doesn't have to be that way. Rich--who made movies, one with the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, before becoming a pediatrician--believes that the media could be used to deter violence. "I very much think that violence needs to be a part of drama, but it needs to be placed in context," he said. "One could never argue that Macbeth, which is an extremely violent play, is the same as an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. I would suggest that the difference is that in Macbeth, you see the pain and suffering. You see violence as something that is a bad thing that happens in humans' lives and that hurts not only the victim but the perpetrator." The media could also be used to combat violence by putting them under the control of young people. One way to do this is through media literacy programs that educate kids about how the media exert their harmful influence--and how to avoid it. Such programs have already been launched in Boston and other cities. Kids Behind the CameraAnother way is literally to put the media into the hands of children. For the past seven years, Rich has been giving young asthma patients camcorders and asking them to take them home and record their day-to-day activities, essentially creating video diaries. In addition to providing Rich with useful data about their home settings, he found that the project significantly improved the quality of life of his patients. Patients reported that they paid more attention to their medical condition. And they had more self-control. One young patient reported that it "gave me confidence that I could take control of my life story and that helped me realize that I could take control of my life."Rich hopes to expand the project into "areas that are more social, but can have outcomes that are medical, like violence and poverty," he said. He believes that not just at-risk kids but the larger society could benefit from such a project. "If we can put the information stream into the hands of kids, remarkable things may happen, because we're going to see the world in a very different way. Hearts and minds can be changed by the media in good ways as well as bad." --Misia Landau |
