TV Violence: Myths And Reality

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-07 22:18

It is difficult to completely isolate a child from the outside world. And you shouldn't do this if it is planned that the child will live in this very world. Around us is love, and violence, and joy and sorrow. How to dose these events? How to assess the level of violence that the child sees?

Probably, since the perestroika times, when a stream of action films and horror films poured into Russia, discussions about how this affects the psyche of a child have not ceased. For a long time, our country was largely shielded from any extreme on the screen. If anyone was killed in the film, then he fell very beautifully to the ground, threw out his arms, and the worst thing that the director could afford was a speck of blood at the site of the bullet hit. Well, maybe even a thin, short stream of blood. And then, suddenly - mountains of corpses, blood streams, internal organs outward. What can we say, a spectacle out of habit is not for the faint of heart. And even more so for children.

But it was the Russians who had such a sharp media transition. In the West, the problem of films and cartoons containing scenes of violence has been around for a long time. Screen violence was part of pop culture. Yes, many said that it badly affects the psyche, especially the child. After all, how can a healthy person withstand the contemplation of 62 murders while watching Rimbaud-2? Adults can still abstract from this, and children immediately start playing Rambo. The conclusion immediately suggests itself that the child, if not after the film, then after some time will begin to kill.

My childhood was spent in Soviet times, when all violence was reduced to the very specks and streams. Peers all summer rushed around the house with planks torn from wooden packing boxes - automatic machines. They shot at each other, and even tortured "fascists" or "partisans", but they did not kill anyone in their entire subsequent life. Now the boys also run and play war. True, now instead of boards they have plastic machine guns and pistols, and besides "bang-bang" they also imitate karate strikes. At first glance, there is essentially little difference.

One of the fundamental and most impressive works on the influence of images of violence on TV screens is Bandura's experiment with a Bobo doll (analogue of a tumbler). Its essence was as follows. Were taken two groups of children, one of which adults demonstrated aggressive behavior towards toys, the second - non-aggressive. Then the children were transferred to another room, where there was a big bobo-tumbler. The kids who observed the aggressive behavior of adults began to beat and kick the doll, while those who did not see the aggression at the previous stage behaved correctly with Bobo. On the basis of the experiment, Bandura concluded that children adopt the aggressive model of behavior of adults and continue to use it even when no one demonstrates aggression to them.

The conclusion of the work is quite logical and correct, although later it was criticized. But Bandura's experiment was immediately transferred to violence from TV screens: if a child watches a large number of programs with violence, he will sooner or later begin to behave aggressively.

Since Bandura's research, there have been many additional studies that have already focused on TV viewing. And the rule seemed to be confirmed as well. If children watched films and TV shows with an abundance of violence, then they also behaved more aggressively. As a result, several laws were passed in the United States to protect children from aggressive information and visual images of violence.

However, despite the abundance of evidence of the negative impact of television aggression on children, there are many criticisms.

Violence breeds violence

Psychologist Jonathan Friedman, University of Toronto, televised and aggressive children. So he found that many of the correlations (between TV violence and violent behavior) were not true. In other words, not necessarily what the dependence shows on the graph will depend on one another. For example, if the air temperature drops in autumn and the birds fly south, this does not mean that the birds fly away causing the air temperature to drop. Moreover, conclusions about the negative effect of TV are made on the basis of experiments carried out in laboratory conditions, and therefore not natural for the examined children, conditions and long-term results of experimental exposure are not considered.

However, Surgeon General, an information site for the US Department of Health, published in 2001 that media violence can only have a short-term effect on children's behavior. Moreover, quite a number of articles mention that initially aggressive children are more likely to choose programs with the presence of violence. This factor very often gives a bias towards the harmfulness of TV.

Well, everyone, probably, can turn to their own experience. How often did you watch violent films as a child? How often do you now use physical violence in your daily life? It turns out that the influences of the mass media are not so unambiguous. What's the secret? Apparently, the very fact of observing aggressive behavior from the screen is not enough. Forensic psychologist Helen Smith, author of the book, draws attention to the fact that more often children become aggressive and resort to violence if they themselves are the object of domestic violence. And TV in this regard does not play such a big role. In this case, children do copy aggressive adults, but those with whom they live, and not those who are shown on TV.

Parents, first of all, themselves, need to decide on the desired safe level of aggression and violence that the child can observe in his life. It should be noted right away that children perceive aggression and violence in the environment differently from adults. Especially with regard to books, cartoons and films, where "make-believe". For children, death and illness have a very different meaning. Adults, on the other hand, are much more sensitive and anxious to everything connected with these events. The description “flies up to a spider, takes out a saber, and he cuts off his head at full gallop” for both children and adults is not colored by the experience of death, blood and violence. This is a small transitional moment from the appearance of the mosquito hero to "you are a pretty girl, now I want to marry." In addition, in fairy tales, death and violence are more a metaphor than a specific event. For this reason, little is written about violence as such, only as a fact (he pulled out a sword and killed Koshchei the Immortal)

And there may also be various works where violence is the main or connecting theme. For example, in stories about war, it is quite normal to say that the soldiers kill the enemy, and the enemy shoots at the soldiers, wounds them and kills them.

The right side of good and evil

It is worthwhile to think carefully about allowing the child to watch the program if there are more scenes of violence and anatomical details than is necessary to understand the main idea of the film. For example, if the director fails to convey to the viewer the idea that the hero is a cruel person, without dismembering ten bodies. Or to show that the soldier died in battle, the filmmakers spread the intestines of the killed in a fan in front of the viewer.

1. Shows and films that children watch must be appropriate for their age. Many parents strive to seat the child on more adult and complex topics "for development." But children can understand the informational part, and they are far from always able to cope with the emotional component. Parents often refer to the fact that if a child, for example, is not told everything about the war, down to the smallest details, then this means a lie. Alas, now many adults cannot answer the question about the horrors of war "why?". This is even more difficult for a child to understand. Moreover, an adult may refuse to watch what is unpleasant and scary for him. Parents of children in such cases rarely ask or do it formally.
2. Universal advice - less TV, more communication with other people. In this case, even if a child sees something inappropriate on TV screens, in practice, communicating with friends, he can easily find that television recipes do not work. If you hit someone, then the person will be hurt, he will be upset, he will no longer be friends. In other words, sufficient communication enables the child to correct his behavior.
3. Usually, parents are already quite negative about advertising. First of all, because with its help the thought is pushed into the child's head that if you buy product A, then happiness will fall on you. In addition, advertisements can show episodes of violence that easily enter the child's inner world along with images of the advertised product (Shanan, Hermans, Aluman (2003))
4. Many parents advocate an increase in the number of educational and pro-social (aimed at building social skills) programs. The child both has fun and develops intellectually. This year, the benefits of such transmissions were also confirmed in relation to the correction of aggressive behavior in children. In cases where.

And, of course, the most important thing is a trusting relationship with parents and sufficient time together. Good family relationships are the main factor preventing the development of aggressive behavior among children and the influence of the content of television programs on the child's psyche.

The child and adolescent psychiatrist, believes that the main problem is not the television itself and the programs. The problem is that children are often left alone with their difficulties and troubles in front of the TV. They do not receive support and help from their parents when they need them. For this reason, they may well take television scripts to solve their own problems. Among other things, by itself, and. Both can lead to aggression directed against oneself and others.

But it is difficult to completely isolate a child from the outside world. And you shouldn't do this if it is planned that the child will live in this very world. Around us is love, and violence, and joy and sorrow. How to dose these events? How to assess the level of violence that the child sees? After all, for example, the bun was eaten completely impudently and treacherously by a fox who seemed to want to listen to his song. In almost any fairy tale, good fights against evil, and evil often fatally dies. Evil, of course, is not a pity, but this is violence!