In a survey published earlier this year, seven of 10 parents said they would never let their children play with toy guns. Yet the average seventh grader spends at least four hours a week playing video games, and about half of those games have violent themes, like Nuclear Strike. Clearly, parents make a distinction between violence on a screen and that acted out with plastic M-16s. Should they?
Psychologists point to decades of research and more than a thousand studies that demonstrate a link between media violence and real aggression. Six formidable public-health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association (AMA), issued a joint statement of concern in 2000. According to one expert's estimate, aggressive acts provoked by entertainment media such as TV, movies, and music could account for 10 percent of the juvenile violence in society. And scientists say they have reason to believe that video games are the most provocative medium yet.
"With video games, you're not only passively receiving attitudes and behaviors, you're rehearsing them," says pediatrician Michael Rich, a former filmmaker and the current head of the Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard University.
But the case isn't quite closed. Last year, psychologist Jonathan Freedman of the University of Toronto published an outspoken indictment of some of the field's most influential studies. The "bulk of the research does not show that television or movie violence has any negative effects," he argues in Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression. In a 1999 editorial titled "Guns, Lies, and Videotape," the redoubtable British medical journal The Lancet admitted that "experts are divided on the subject," and that "both groups can support their views with a sizable amount of published work."
Those who grew up with the Three Stooges or Super Mario Brothers may have trouble seeing their youthful pastimes in a sinister light. But televised violence has been a topic of national consternation almost from the first broadcast. Congressional hearings on the subject date back to 1952; the first surgeon general's report addressing it was published in 1972. "We've been studying it at least since then, but the studies haven't given us definite answers," says Kimberly Thompson, director of the Kids Risk Project at the School of Public Health at Harvard. Thompson and others believe that the rise of TV viewing in American households may be at least partly responsible for the eightfold increase in violent crime in this country between 1960 and 1990. Today a typical kid spends two hours a day watching television, and children's programs average between 20 and 25 violent acts per hour— four times as many as adult programs. "The message that's going out to children is that violence is OK or it's funny or it's somehow heroic," says Jeffrey G. Johnson, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York.
