TV Violence Isn’t Child’s Play

The 8-year-old New York girl was used to getting her way with the TV remote control. But when she persuaded her parents to rent the video “Child’s Play 2,” an R-rated horror movie about a possessed doll named “Chucky” that maims and kills, for days afterward she pleaded at bedtime that her mother check under the bed and keep the lights on.

Her parents dismissed it as “normal fears,” no different than the willies they used to get watching werewolf and chain-saw flicks.

That was until they chanced upon their daughter measuring her grip around her little brother’s neck. “She wasn’t really trying to hurt him,” says the mother now, “but it did make me stop and think.”

“I guess you could say TV takes its toll on a lot of people,” she sighs.

Researchers say TV takes its toll, with the preponderance of evidence from more than 3,000 studies over two decades finding that violence portrayed on television influences the attitudes and behavior of children who watch it. U.S. Justice Department figures showing the youth arrest rate for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault increased by 16% between 1989 and 1990 have turned up the volume of that message recently.

In late February, the American Psychological Assn. released a task force report, five years in the making and heralded as the most comprehensive look ever at the role of television in society. Titled “Big World, Small Screen,” it estimated that the child who watches an average two to four hours of television daily will have witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of TV violence by the time he leaves elementary school. “Television can cause aggressive behavior and can cultivate values favoring the use of aggression,” it concluded. The task force called for a federal TV policy “protecting citizens and society from harmful effects.”

Last month psychologist Leonard Eron, a research professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, delivered a harder-hitting indictment of America’s favorite pastime at the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs hearing on violence and the media. “There can no longer be any doubt,” he said, “that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence in society.”

Not every child mesmerized by on-screen violence (about five violent acts per hour in prime time; 26.4 violent acts per hour on children’s programming, including cartoons) grows into a troubled adolescent or sociopathic criminal.

“It is the crucial question that has never been answered: Are some children more likely to be affected negatively by violence on television than others?” says Diana Zuckerman, a Washington psychologist and a member of the APA Task Force on Television and Society.

Zuckerman says she saw the negative conditioning of TV violence in a 1981 study in which she worked with third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. Without knowing what TV shows their students regularly watched, teachers at the school rated the children on a variety of measures--including aggressiveness and violence. Zuckerman and her colleagues meanwhile documented the kids’ viewing habits by hours and content.

“There was a definite relationship between what they watched and how they behaved,” says Zuckerman.

Among the questions asked of the students: Had they ever imitated the violence they saw on television? “Most of them said they did,” says Zuckerman.

But if all children are potentially at risk, some researchers fear most for those whose community and home environments already overdose them with violence. “Children in the inner city, children who live in the high-crime areas, kids who are on their way home from school who have to dodge bullets, these are the ones who are most affected,” says Eron, chairman of APA’s Commission on Violence and Youth.

“Watching TV violence for those kids validates that kind of behavior. They see it on television and think it’s happening all over and it’s normative. They don’t see any other alternatives. Kids who live in middle-class suburban areas are affected too. But (the violence) is not as central to their lives.”

The most risky age range for TV violence is from the youngest viewers up to ages 8 to 10, researchers believe. Until children reach the double digits, says Eron, “they find it very difficult to differentiate what’s real and what’s not real on TV. After age 10, they know pretty much what’s not real and it has less effect on them.”

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