| I. Growing
up in a Mean World
II. Crime and Violence
in Canada
III. Media Coverage of
Crime: Moral Panic?
VI. Scientist negating
media effects and media research
V.Psychological and Medical
Research
a) Imitation
and Copycat
b) Scripts
c) Desensitization
d) Identification/
justification
e) Mean world
VI. Violence as risk
factor, not causal factor
VII. Precautionary Principle
VIII. Understanding Media
Risks
IX. Bullying and Aggression
in Canada
Growing up in a Mean World
Many people believe that children’s lives have become
more brutal and violent in the post war period, with frequent
crime, fighting, harassment bullying and even shootings becoming
ever more frequent at home, in the streets and at school.
Studies show that crime rates in the USA did rise after the
war peaked during the 1990’s and are declining somewhat.
Violent youth crime rates tend to follow a similar trajectory
in the USA. (Violent
crime chart)
In the wake of Bowling for Columbine another common belief
is that America also became a more murderous place, especially
for teens during the 1990’s. Statistics reveal that
although incidences of schoolyard slayings grew fewer, after
they peaked in 1992, they also grew more deadly with more
multiple killings. (school
killings chart)
Criminologists also point out the actual youth murder rate
peaked during the early 1990’s and has declined since
to its lowest level since 1970—especially for young
victims. (Bureau of Justice
Statistics)
Criminologists agree that many factors influence the commission
and enforcement of crime and aggression in America. Some argue
that the overall decline in child slayings might be explained
by the baby boom bulge growing to contented middle age. Others
have suggested that the stringent policing of youth and zero
tolerance policies of schools have helped to dampen gang related
aggression. But what often goes unnoticed is the persistence
of lesser acts of aggression and fighting often at schools.
Declining teen slayings represent only about 1 % of all murders
of American children, and provide an very distal gauge of
the persistent acts of intimidation, bullying and fighting
reported by 33% of teens at school. There is fairly consistent
evidence that various kinds of assault have not diminished.
In a recent American study, 30% of students between grades
6-10 reported moderate or frequent involvement in bullying
and fighting: 13% reported bullying others, 11% reported being
victims of bullying, and 6% were both bullies and victims
(Nansel et al., 2001).
Crime and Violence in Canada
Canadian general crime statistics show a remarkably similar
trend during the last half-century. (crime
rates chart)
Youth crimes follow this pattern except that property crime
rates increased most dramatically right up until the 1990’s.
(crime rates chart 2)
Although overall youth crime rates are declining somewhat
during the 1990’s violent crime which accounts for 21%
of the youth charges continues to increase. Homicide rates,
however, peak in 1995 and decline somewhat thereafter. (homicide
rates chart)
Although youth homicides are dramatic events they are relatively
rare (2%). Yet violent crime continues to be a problem in
Canada accounting for 21% of youth charges. (youth
rates chart)
Not surprisingly, schoolyard aggression and harassment are
not just American problems either. Pepler and Craig (1999)
reported that 6% of children had bullied others in a six-week
period, and that 15% were victimized. In a recent Ontario
study 12% of students reported assaulting someone during the
last year and 10% reported carrying a weapon to school, while
25% reported being bullied at school and 32% reported bullying
others (OSDUS 2001). (mental
health chart)
The evidence from the Canadian study indicate that bullying
and fighting begin as early as grade one, and increase until
grade 9 or 10, and declines slightly towards graduation. Bullying
and fighting are also associated with other anti-social behaviours.
Data indicates that by grade 4, bullying was becoming a significant
behavioural issue in B.C. Schools too: 15% of them report
that they had been “bullied, teased or picked on’
frequently and regularly. 14% of grade 4’s also report
that they feel unsafe at school. (http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/specialed/bullying.pdf)
Media Coverage of Crime: Moral Panic?
Many sociologists believe that media coverage has helped to
intensify the public’s anxieties about youth crime during
the late 1990’s. George Gerbner’s cultivation
research has demonstrated that the media’s biased coverage
of crime can explain some of the disparities between the public’s
perceptions and the statistical account of crime and violence
in society. Americans’ belief that they live in a ‘mean
world’ is related to the real and fantasized media violence
they see on the screen. His surveys show that the heaviest
viewers of violence on both news and fiction programming come
to accept violence as commonplace and in some cases inevitable,
but overestimate the actual risks of crime in their daily
lives.
Research has shown that youth violence and crime feature
prominently in U.S. media in ways that don’t exactly
mirror reality (Sorenson, S. B., Peterson Manz, J. G., Berk,
R. A. (1998). Comparing the degree to which newspaper stories
about homicide correspond to actual patterns of homicide victimization
these researchers found that “although homicide constitutes
the least common form of crime, it receives the largest share
of television and newspaper coverage of crime” (p. 1510).
In another recent study, Maguire, B., Weatherby, G. A., &
Mathers, R. A. (2002) suggest that “that news coverage
of crime tends to be driven by the tenet, ‘If it bleeds,
it leads’ and that media coverage of news is characterized
by a ‘herd mentality.’ Close examination of the
TV coverage of youth violence in America, also indicates sensationalistic
news values rather than balanced accounts of crime. For example,
Dorfman, L., Woodruff, K., Chavez, V., & Wallack, L. (1997)
undertook a content analysis of 214 hours of local television
news from California. They found that for 1721 stories that
violence dominated local television news coverage of youth,
that over half of the stories on youth involved violence,
while more than two thirds of the violence stories concerned
youth. The episodic coverage of violence was five times more
frequent than thematic coverage, which means that references
to any links to broader social factors, or causes including
media, are rare. And only one story had an explicit public
health frame. As they explain:
“Local television news rarely includes contributing
factors in stories on violence. In 84% of the stories examined,
the context in which violence occurred was ignored or de-emphasised.
… Even when stories about violence were contextualized,
it was mostly from the perspective of ‘news you can
use’ – actions people can take to protect themselves
– rather than underlying risk factors or precursors
to violence. At best this could be considered secondary prevention.
Examples of primary violence prevention were rare” (p.
1314).
Failing to put youth crime in context, news about youth in
crisis is ever-present in our media. Sorenson et. al. therefore
go on to suggest that these biased “accounts of crime
can affect the public’s ratings of the importance of
salience of issues, define a social problem, shape public
estimates of violence within society, and affect the public’s
views on criminal justice sentencing. They can also influence
the public’s fears about personal safety, satisfaction
with law enforcement, and trust of others”. As Maguire,
B., Weatherby, G. A., & Mathers, R. A. (2002) go on to
note:
“Are there negative consequences to the network coverage
of school shootings? There may be. First is the possibility
of copycat crimes (see, Wittekind, Weaver, & Petee, 2000).
Second, the focus on school violence distracts attention from
a far greater threat to children: domestic violence. Third,
unwarranted fear in the schools produces a less than ideal
learning environment. Finally, national media attention has,
in part, contributed to a vast proliferation of new school
security measures. Additionally, many schools have implemented
a ‘zero tolerance’ plan that sometimes results
in extreme measures. If school districts have ‘over-reacted,’
perhaps it is partly because of media attention to tragic
but uncommon school shooting cases” (p. 470)
So it is hardly surprising that given dramatic news stories
that the public debates about youth violence and what causes
it continues to be pressing. Yet the profile of such brutal
events often distracts our attention from the persistent relationship
found between media and fighting bullying and intimidation,
which the persist in schools. In reaction to the media coverage,
policies such as zero tolerance for weapons and drugs have
been adopted by many US schools as parents look for easy solutions
to the difficult task of raising their children in an increasingly
mean and brutal world represented in our media.
Media and Youth Aggression
The controversy about too much violent entertainment has
a long history spanning half a century (Murray 1995). Ever
since the Hays code was written in 1930 for the fledging film
industry, the battle between the public and the cultural industries
over children’s exposure to sexual and violent content
in the entertainment industry has grown ever more vociferous.
Especially after the wide spread introduction of television
-- the most powerful medium ever invented -- Studies confirm
that violence in media is not abating (http://www.ccsp.ucsb.edu/execsum.pdf).
Yet the politics of children’s culture has grown into
high profile battleground with repeated inquiries followed
by sluggish policy making and endless calls for more scientific
evidence. It is hardly surprising that this high profile controversy
has produced conflicting scientific opinions concerning the
effects of media violence on youth (Goldstein, 1998; Freedman,
2002).
There are scientific arguments on both sides but journalists,
favouring the bloody events have provided a rather biased
account of the scientific arguments (Bushman and Anderson
2001).
Scientist negating media effects and media research:
On one side stand the industry, which maintains that media
violence is not a problem and there is no reason to restrict
or regulate the media, they argue:
- Violence, war and crime have existed long before media
were invented and won’t disappear even if you sanitize
children’s mass culture.
- The psychologists who study media effects are misleading
the public about evidence of effects: they claim that correlations
are not causes, and that the effects hypothesis has not been
validated with studies.
- The panic over children’s culture arises not from
any ‘real’ condition in children’s lives
but because a small group of moralizing adults over-react
to generational change
- So get over it old fashioned moralizers! Sex and violence
are so much a part of our social world, that young people
need to be exposed to it and learn to cope rather than be
protected from it.
Psychological and Medical Research:
On the other side are the vast majority of psychological
and medical professionals who upon successive reviews of the
literature have proclaimed that heavy exposure to media violence
does constitute a risk to children’s health and safety.
For example, the US Surgeon General’s Report, Youth
Violence, 2000 suggest that; (US. Surgeon General, 2001).
• “a small but statistically significant impact
on aggression over many years”
• “the science shows that media violence and
this is primarily TV, can in fact in the short term increase
aggressive behavior”
So too the American Academy of Pediatrics view media as constituting
a learning environment in which children learn anti-social
attitudes stating that children: <AAP>
• Learn their attitudes about violence at a very young
age and these attitudes tend to last.
• Although TV violence has been studied the most, researchers
are finding that violence in other media such as computers
and video games impacts children and teens in many of the
same harmful ways.
• From media violence children learn to behave aggressively
toward others. They are taught to use violence instead of
self-control to take care of problems or conflicts.
• Violence in the "media world" may make
children more accepting of real-world violence and less caring
toward others. Children who see a lot of violence from movies,
TV shows, or video games may become more fearful and look
at the real world as a mean and scary place.
Psychological researchers present evidence that five major
mechanisms help to explain the relationship between media
violence and aggressive behaviour in the long term:
-Imitation and Copycat;
(Bandura, 1977, 1986) Developmental theories have noted that
children will learn by means of imitation and reinforcement.
The role models that children will imitate will be those individuals
who are continually rewarded for their behaviours. Content
analysis of TV shows by The National Television Violence Study
(1996) showed that 75% of violent acts go unpunished. Therefore
heavy viewers of television will continually be exposed to
unpunished and often rewarded act of violence. Studies of
children's behaviour have indicated that their learned behaviours
seem to rely on the direct reinforcement a child receives
(Bandura, 1965). Other studies have suggested that the imitation
of a model is dependent on the attractive characteristics
of that character. 1996-1998 national Television Studies have
continually indicated that 40% of violent acts seen on TV
were perpetrated by characters who possess attractive role
model characteristics.
-Scripts; (Huesmann,
1988, 1998) Observational learning theory suggests that children
learn how to deal with everyday problems in a variety of ways.
Overtime patterns become represented as scripts, which are
applied and enacted in children's play and life. Therefore
heavy viewers of violence may incorporate TV constructs into
the development of their social scripts, which they enact
and consolidate in their playful interactions.
-Desensitization;
Theorist have suggested that the more we view and experience
violence the more we accept it as a way of life and a way
of dealing with issues. Psychologists have suggested that
children who are heavy viewers of violent media will not view
violence in a negative respect and will become used to it
and won't be as cautious about using aggression in dealing
with issues (Dominick & Greenberg, 1972). Both theoretical
and experimental studies have indicated the existence of children's
desensitization to violence. Cline, Croft, & Courrier,
1973 studied boys reception to new images of violence and
found that prior viewing of violent images were the variable
that determined how physically aroused the boys got while
watching new images. It was suggested that the natural arousal
reaction of viewers of violent images did not seem to exist
with heavy viewers of violent images thus they had become
desensitized to such images. (Thomas and Drabman- new )
-Identification/ justification;
(Huesmann, 1982). It has been suggested that violent individuals
may enjoy violent media because it justifies their own actions
and behaviour as normal and acceptable. The notion that a
child who behaves aggressively should be remorseful is in
conjunction with the theory of desensitization. If a child
becomes desensitized to acts of aggression their remorse for
imitation and acting aggressively is also negated. Thus the
child will view their acts as the norm and they way to deal
with issues that arise. (Fernie, 1981; Huesmann & Eron,
1986).
-Mean world; (Gerbner
& Gross, 1976, 1981). While children view television they
may be cultivating a sense of risk associated with the real
world experiences. Studies have shown that heavy TV viewers
tend to be more anxious about becoming a victim of violence.
These heavy viewers perceive the world to be a dangerous and
scary place therefore developing a heightened sense of fear
as well as a heightened need to protect themselves, therefore
they may be more aggressive.
Violence as risk factor, not causal factor:
In the wake of spectacular schoolyard killings like Littleton
and Taber, many people suspected that video games were partially
responsible for some of the schoolyard killings (Grossman).
The homicide rates do not support the idea that we are raising
a generation of killer kids in the virtual playgrounds. Most
researchers note that the extremely violent video games, like
Quake and Counter-strike, have not been around long enough
to know much about their long term consequences. That said
it is hard to conclude that nothing is learned while playing
violent games, especially given the fact that that the game
players are more deeply immersed in the action (Griffith,
Kline) What is learned however will depend on the children
and the social and psychological resources they bring to their
video game play. Moreover attention to homicides is not that
helpful in understanding trends in youth aggression: After
all homicides account for only 1% of child murders in the
USA.
However, like just about every mandated science debate –
from cigarettes and melatonin to PCB’s – there
are many reasons to see a few grains of truth in both sides
of this argument. It is true that violence has played a role
in children’s folkstories and folkplay; yet it is also
true that the cultural industries design the violence into
stories and games because it helps market them to kids. And
although everyone agrees that there is a significant correlation
– in the order of .10-.15 between heavy consumption
of violent media and aggressive and anti-social behavior,
it becomes impossible to say whether this relationship implies
that aggressive kids watch more violent programmes, or vice
versa. Certainly the early laboratory studies that tried to
assess whether media caused violent behaviour directly were
poorly designed. But that does not invalidate the many studies
that confirm that indirect effects of viewing violence on
children’s play, or their attitudes and feelings about
the world which are part of the socialization of aggression.
So faced with these opposing academic claims, what can we
say?
Perhaps the conclusion of the Canadian Government Standing
Committee on Communications and Culture, in their report Television
Violence: Fraying our Social Fabric. Ottawa 1993 says it best:
<Canadian government standing committee>
• “television violence is one of many risk factors
which may contribute to aggressive tendencies and antisocial
behaviour".
• We have clearly found that the violence portrayed
on television reflects and shapes unhealthy social attitudes.
• The committee has concluded that although the risk
may be small... It cannot be ignored”.
Precautionary Principle
But 10 years later, it is fair to say that nothing much has
happened as a result of 50 years of public concern. The V-chip
is a bust and attempts to regulate the video game industry
and internet have produced no result. Many people in Canada
despair that anything will ever be done to curtail media violence
when commercial interests who profit from the sales, are responsible
for their regulation. Most however can agree that given the
limits of psychological and medical scientific knowledge,
the precautionary principle should be applied: to err on the
side of safety, and undertake reasonable efforts to reduce
children’s exposure to violent entertainment.
Understanding Media Risks
Estimates are that over 6 million assaults per year happen
on school grounds in the USA.
The Youth Risk Behaviors Survey data from 2001 of 13,000 teens
indicated that not only are fights frequent among teens (25%
of girls and 42% of boys reporting fighting during the last
year), but those who view more than four hours of TV daily,
are 7% more likely to get in a fight during the year than
those who watch less than 1 hour. (YRBS
chart)
This implies that approximately 1.4 million schoolyard incidents
every year that is in part attributable to media violence.
Generally, the evidence from longitudinal studies have found
that those children who develop early preferences for violent
entertainment and identify with those characters, are more
likely to develop positive role models and become aggressive
later on in life depending of course on other factors (in
family, peer groups and community) which can accentuate or
mitigate the effects of media consumption. (Eron, Heusman).
As Garbarino notes, it all depends on the peer, family, and
community resources available to the individual.
A recent study published in Science for example Johnson et
al. (2002,) reported that whereas 45% of the boys who watched
television more than 3 hours per day at age 14, subsequently
committed aggressive acts involving others, only 8.9%, who
watched television less than an hour a day were aggressive
later in life and that this relationship existed even after
other factors that contribute to aggression such as neighbourhood,
family dysfunction and developmental issues are accounted
for. < Johnson et al. 2002, >
Bullying and Aggression in Canada
Incidents like the Renee Virk murder in Victoria have made
the Canadian public more aware of violent acts of peer aggression
too. Many view such incidents from the criminal justice point
of view, emphasizing the legal responsibility of schools as
part of the war on drugs, gangs and criminal recruitment.
There has been growing support for both stricter surveillance
and zero tolerance policies as ways of combating youth crime.
Such approaches often fail to distinguish the different kinds
of behavioural problems that schools face defining bullying
as any incident of fighting, aggression or intimidation on
school grounds that is of sufficient intensity that it requires
reporting and management. School administrators, parents and
teachers in BC share an interest in the safety of children
at school. As a recent submission by the PAC stated: “when
those in leadership say we are going to focus on this, it
has the effect of beginning a cult “ The BC government
has launched its safe schools policy which calls for reporting
of “The Safe Schools Task Force recommends that all
school boards, in consultation with school planning councils,
be required to develop procedures for reporting and investigating
incidents of bullying and that those procedures be widely
circulated to parents and students throughout school districts"
(www.safeschooltaskforce.bc.ca)
Public interest in youth aggression extends beyond the maintenance
of public order. Researchers have shown that there is a link
between bullying behaviour and developmental risks to health
and well-being in children (see Due et al., 1999; Forero et
al., 1999; Laukkanen et al., 2002; Williams et al., 1996;
Wolke et al., 2002). Data from numerous studies support the
claim that children who are bullied are more likely to suffer
from psychosocial and physiological problems as well as absenteeism
and poor grades. They tend to lack confidence and self esteem,
and are less likely to report liking school. Victims also
report being lonely, feeling tensed/nervous, having difficulty
sleeping, are absent or truant more often and are more likely
to engage in other risky behaviours like substance abuse or
sexual activity than other students. Researchers have identified
bully-victims, that is children who both bully others and
are bullied themselves, as being particularly at risk for
negative effects of bullying (Kumpulainen et al., 1998; Kaltiala-Heino
et al., 2000). Further more, there is evidence to suggest
a “dose effect” relationship between frequency
and intensity of bullying and health problems -- that is,
the more a child is bullied, the more health problems he or
she is likely to experience.
Smith and Levan (1995) used a pictorial questionnaire to study
understandings and experiences of bullying with children aged
six and seven (grade two). The authors found that these younger
students tended to be more inclusive in their definitions
of bullying; that is, children of this age were more likely
to identify an isolated act of playground aggression, such
as one child shoving another child out of frustration, as
an example of bullying behaviour. Such nuanced discrepancies
in definition may in turn lead to the over reporting of the
incidence of bullying in primary schools, which would give
researchers a distorted view of the situation.
The idea that bullying is a socially situated risk has led
some researchers to distinguish the different factors and
relations that underscore aggression at school. Nansel et
al. (2001) offer a more limited definition, pieced together
from their review of existing literature:
Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which (1) the
behavior is intended to harm or disturb, (2) the behavior
occurs repeatedly over time, and (3) there is an imbalance
of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a
less powerful one. This asymmetry of power may be physical
or psychological, and the aggressive behavior may be verbal
(eg, name-calling, threats), physical (eg, hitting), or psychological
(eg, rumors, shunning/exclusion). (p. 2094)
Using this definition, bullying is viewed as a unique type
of aggression on a spectrum of aggressive behaviour ranging
from gang violence, spontaneous fights and rough and tumble
play. Researchers like Pellegrini and Peter Smith believe
it is important to distinguish the circumstances surround
bullying conflicts from others such as break downs in rough
and tumble play where individuals get hurt when sports and
games wheel out of control. For example, two students of relatively
equal size and strength tussling on the school yard in an
isolated conflict over rule-breaking in a game is not the
same as a child being repeatedly ostracizes. Treating all
incidences of bullying in the same way may lead some young
people to feel that the rules are unfair.
Another important theme found in the literature addresses
the key roles that are filled in a bullying situation: bullies,
victims and bystanders (see Salmivalli 1999; Twemlow et al.,
1996). The bully is the individual initiating or carrying
out the bullying, while the victim is predictably the recipient
of the bully’s aggression. The term bystander, however,
proves a bit misleading. It suggests passivity and noninvolvement,
or detachment from the situation. Some researchers have used
this bystander group as a control group when evaluating the
effectiveness of bullying intervention strategies -- they
measure variables in children who are “involved”
in bullying behaviour and compare values with those who are
“uninvolved.” However, challenging this perception
that bystanders stand outside the bullying situation is key
for successful interventions, in that it is this peer group
that ultimately provides an “audience” for the
bully (O'Connell, Pepler & Craig 1999). In this way, the
bystander’s passive response to the bullying displays
that they witness is a major contributor to the “success”
of the bully’s aggressive action. Theoretical explanations
for bystander behaviour include the diffusion of responsibility
hypothesis and the social contagion theory. Given that bullying
behaviour has been found to persist over time (Sourander et
al., 2000), we believe that if interventions to mitigate aggressive
behaviour in children are to be effective, most research believe
that interventions must begin as early as grade two or three.
A review of programmes currently being tried identifies three
general strategies for dealing with youth aggression and bullying
in the schools:
1) The Zero-Tolerance Approach: emphasizes monitoring reporting
and surveillance of all violent and bullying acts as the means
of controlling youth crime generally.
2) The Safe Schools Approach: emphasizes the multiple environmental
factors that have been shown to be related to safe schools.
3) The Bully Education Approaches: specific programmes that
teach children skills and knowledge related to understanding
and mediating social conflict
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