Unesco Violence Study

The connection between actual violent threat, media violence, family environment, and aggressive behavior has been investigated in numerous empirical studies. However, the impact of cultural differences and different regional and media environments on the relationship between aggressive content and aggressive attitudes and actions has rarely been studied. To gain insight in this area, UNESCO commissioned a global study in the late 1990s covering representative samples of children from 23 different countries. The results of the study demonstrated the direct interplay between cultural influences, the characteristics of media content and infrastructure, actual violence experience, and dispositions such as gender and thrillseeking tendencies in creating and increasing aggressive attitudes and behavior. Cultural values and their broad acceptance, therefore, can be regarded as a major moderator for the impact of media violence.

Developed and supervised by Groebel (1999), the study used a standardized questionnaire with identical items on violent experience, media use, family and peer environment, worldviews, fear, and aggressive tendencies. The questions were distributed by the study's logistical partner, the World Scout Movement, among groups of average children; 5,500 12-year-olds from six geocultural regions around the globe—Africa, Arab States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Canada—replied. The study included children from rural and metropolitan areas, high and low aggression neighborhoods, and high and low media infrastructure. The countries included were Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Egypt, Fiji, Germany, India, Japan, Mauritius, the Netherlands, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, South Africa, Spain, Tadjikistan, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, and Ukraine.

The results demonstrate that the combination of factors—real violence in the child's neighborhood (e.g., as a result of war, experiences in refugee camps, and gang fights, such as those in the Rio de Janeiro favelas), a high level of media violence (on TV, Internet, in electronic games), difficult family conditions (lack of affection, aggressive experience, physical punishment), and low levels of overall social norms—is much more likely to create aggression among children than any individual factor or partial combination of these factors. Media violence, in particular, has a strong impact only when there is a lack of immediately felt social control. This may explain why a country like Japan, where there is a high level of extremely violent media content in cartoons, animated films, movies, Internet sites, and games, has a comparatively low level of active child aggression against others. Despite the media violence in Japan, strong internalized values of a collective society apply. Where the influence of such values is much lower, violence levels go up when media violence and real aggressive experience come together, as has occurred in Brazil and South Africa. Further findings show that boys, in particular, are fascinated by aggressive heroes across cultures. Some of these, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, have become global icons. Studies at the end of the 20th century showed that 88% of the world's children knew this character. Children from environments with a high level of aggression were twice as likely to admire [Page 840]Schwarzenegger as children from less violent environments. Overall, one third of the boys name an action hero as their primary role model whereas girls more often choose pop stars and musicians. Favorite heroes also vary by region: Action heroes are most popular in Asia (one third of participants) and least popular in Africa (one sixth of participants), where pop stars and musicians are the favorites.

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