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.

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.


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.

Youth crimes follow this pattern except that property crime rates increased most dramatically right up until the 1990’s.

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.

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.

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).

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. (

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). [i] 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)[ii] 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) [iii]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 ( 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”.