Protecting Children from Media

Abstract

The ignition of video games and the game industry within the last ten years or more, has people inquiring about the various issues pertaining to games being released, such the violent contents in the games. According to Kooijmans (2004) "In the late 1990's a large number of high-school shootings were blamed on violent video games, the most devastating being the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999"(Para 3).

Protecting Children from Media

Video games or violence has a preference in age, race or cultural. The violence does not discriminate pertaining to gender, age or race. According to Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts (2010) "Some of the biggest racerelated differences emerge for television time: Black youth spend nearly six hours daily watching TV and Hispanics spend 5:21, compared to 3:36 for Whites" (p. 5). A lot of folks assume that children are vulnerable to the consequences of video games that contain violence. There may be numerous probable causes for this to be true, which may consist of (1) the video games may present a less than real-life experience that can correlate violence, therefore the child may learn aggressive behaviors from the video game. (2) Young children may not have the understanding of detecting reality from fantasy, wherein the violence will appear to be acceptable behavior (Dowd 2006).

During the duration of research it has been stated that studies have shown the media and video game have an effect in people's lives. The behaviors that children and adults may consider suitable may come from lessons that were learned for the TV or video games. For instance, a young man watches TV shows or plays a video game where the characters are violent to women, then he may believe that is acceptable behavior and therefore abuse women. I remember when my son was young; there were games like Pac-man and centipede. However when he was a young teen, the game mortal compact came out and I was concerned with the violence and aggressive behavior within the game. Therefore son was supervised and observed for changes in behavior. Dowd (2006) stated, "If one adopts the view that media violence exposure is a risk factor for aggression, it provides a much clearer understanding of the research. For example, the lack of evidence for youth vulnerability suggests that violent video game exposure is a risk factor for everyone who plays, regardless of age, sex, or other factors" (p. 234).

The husband and I have argued that replicated violence in a child's life may prepare him or her for real life situations by numbing him or her to the emotions of violence and fear, by showing the child violence throughout the childhood. My husband also argued that playing a video game that contains violent tendency would have no effect on the child. So an experiment was done with our 14 year old son, who was always easy going and sensitive. We bought him the game Grand theft auto, and left him play the game for two weeks under observation. At the end of the two weeks, my son went from handling stress in a calm manner to throwing objects and hitting the wall when he became stressed about something. Wherein, aggressive behavior was learned for the video game. Social development is made up of two interconnected features which are learning and application. The development of detection enhances human consciousness and the development of application enhances social organization.

The dangers of exposure to media violence may consist of exhibition, reinforcement of one's violent tendencies and desensitization to real life effects of violence with augmented pro-violence viewpoints, and adjustments in cognitive processing. Cognitive desensitization is apparent when the conviction is that violence is infrequent and is improbable to believe that violence is ordinary and foreseeable. Cognitive and emotional desensitization to violence reduce the probability that violent behavior may be suppressed or condemned. According to Dowd (2006), "violence is simply physical aggression at the high end of a severity dimension" (p. 226). Children or people who play video games participates in the action of the video game, wherein they become part of the game and in order to defeat the game , players will identify and choose the violent strategies. Therefore violence is repeated