Violence And Television Essay Research Paper Television — страница 2

streets. Instead of just seeing a police officer handing a ticket to a speeding violator, he can beat the offender bloody on television. However, children don’t always realize this is not the way things are handled in real life. They come to expect it, and when they don’t see it the world becomes bland and in need of violence. The children then can create the violence that their mind craves. The television violence can cause actual violence in a number of ways. As explained above, after viewing television violence the world becomes bland in comparison. The child needs to create violence to keep himself satisfied (Dorr 127). Also the children find the violent characters on television fun to imitate. “Children do imitate the behavior of models such as those portrayed in

television, movies, etc. They do so because the ideas that are shown to them on television are more attractive to the viewer than those the viewer can think up himself” (Brown 98). This has been widely seen lately with the advent of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Young children cannot seem to get enough of these fictional characters and will portray them often. The main plot of the Power Rangers is that an evil witch creates monsters and the Power Rangers punch and kick the monster with an arey of moves. Finally the Power Rangers use their much stronger robots to defeat the monster and save the earth from distruction. Most of the show centers around action and adventure, but at the end of the show there is kind of a ?moral of the day?. This segment only lasts about a

minute, and children often don?t watch this because the ?exciting? part is over. Another reason why television violence causes violence in children is apparent in the big cities. “Aggressive behavior was more acceptable in the city, where a child’s popularity rating with classmates was not hampered by his or her aggression” (Huesmann 166). In the bigger cities, crime and violence is inevitable, expected and, therefore, is left unchecked and out of line. Much research into the topic of children and television violence has been conducted. All of the results seem to point in the same direction. There are undeniable correlations between violent television and aggression. This result was obtained in a survey of London schoolchildren in 1975. Greensberg found a significant

relationship between violence viewing and aggression (Dorr 160), In Israel 74 children from farms were tested as well as 112 schoolchildren from the city of Tel Aviv. The researchers found that the city children watched far more television than their farmland counterparts. However, both groups of children were just as likely to choose a violent program to watch when watching television. The city children had a greater tendency to regard violent television programs as accurate reflections of real life than the farm children. Likewise, the city boys identified most with characters from violent programs than did those living on the farms (Huesmann 166). The government also did research in this area. They conducted an experiment where children were left alone in a room with a monitor

playing a videotape of other children at play. Soon, things got “out of hand” and progressive mayhem began to take place. Children who had just seen commercial violence accepted much higher levels of aggression than other children. The results were published in a report. “A Surgeon General’s report found some Preliminary indications of a casual relationship between television viewing and aggressive behavior in children’” (Langone 50). In other research among U.S. children it was discovered that aggression, academic problems, unpopularity with peers and violence feed off each other. This promotes violent behavior in the children (Huesmann 166). The child watches violence, which causes aggression. The combination of aggression and continued television viewing lead to

poor academic standings as well as unpopularity. These can cause more aggression and a vicious cycle begins to spin. In yet another piece if research children who watch a lot of violent television were compared to children who don’t. The results were that the children who watched more violent television were more likely to agree that “it’s okay to hit someone if you’re mad at them for a good reason.” The other group learned that problems can be solved passively, through discussion and authority (Cheyney 46). The most important aspect of violence in television is preventing it. There are many ways in which it can be prevented, but not often are many carried out. These solutions are easy to implement, but are often overlooked because of commercial purposes. One such