Violence, Extent of and Responses to

Extent of Media Violence

By age 18, an American child will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence, according to 1998 figures of the American Psychiatric Association. Media scholar L. Rowell Huesmann told a Senate committee in 1999 that the average seventh grader plays electronic games at least 4 hours per week, and 50% of those games are violent.

A 2006 study by the Parents Television Council, a media watchdog group in the United States, concluded that there is more violence on children's entertainment programming than on adult-oriented television. The council's study reviewed programming shown during 3 weeks from the summer of 2005. Based on a content analysis of 440 hours of entertainment programming for children ages 5 to 10 on eight networks: ABC, Fox, NBC, WB, ABC Family, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon, the study found 3,488 instances of violence, an average of 7.9 each hour. The extent of violence was higher than in 2002, when a similar study found 4.7 violent incidents per hour in prime-time shows on six broadcast networks.

The National Television Violence Study, in a 1996 report, identified violence in 66% of children's programming. Nearly 75% of the shows with violent content demonstrated unpunished violence, and victims were not shown experiencing pain in 58% of the violent acts. The study found that 46% of all television violence took place in cartoons for children. Children's programs portrayed violence as funny 67% of the time, and only 5% depicted the long-term consequences of violence. Parental warnings and violence advisories made the programs more of a magnet than they might otherwise have been. Parental Discretion Advised and PG-13 and R ratings significantly increased boys' interest in the shows, although they made girls less interested in watching.

The digital media—games on video, computer, and the Web—today represent the single biggest influence on children and adolescents. Interactive video games, which are based on intense violence, are emerging as the entertainment of choice for America's young people. American children with home video games play with them for an average of 90 minutes a day.

A 1993 study asked 357 seventh and eighth graders to select their preferences among five categories of video games. About 2% of the children chose educational games, whereas 32% selected fantasy violence, and 17% opted for human violence. Similar trends are found in the increasing usage of games played on the personal computer. Nearly 68.2% of the homes with children in 1999 had a personal computer, and 41% of them accessed the Internet. By the early nineties, video game revenues in the United States exceeded $10 billion, nearly double the amount Americans spend on movies.

...