By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter
Violence is a major public health concern. Studies show that media violence plays an important role in continuing the cycle of aggression and violence in children.
A CLEAR LINK between violence in the media and aggressive behaviour in children has been made by more than 1,000 studies since 1955. Yet, the debate rages on about whether the media are stimulating aggressive behaviour in children or merely reflecting the reality in the society.
A key study, often cited in discussions on the topic, is one by U.S. psychologist, Dr. Leonard D. Eron, who followed a cohort of children for 22 years. He found that those children who watched more television at eight years old were more likely, at age 30, to be more harsh when they punish their children; to have committed more serious crimes and to be more aggressive drinkers.
A cohort of Jamaican babies, born in 1986, is also being followed in a similar type of study by Dr. Maureen Saams-Vaughan, paediatrician and lecturer in child health and development at the University of the West Indies.
At 11 years old, this group of children and their caregivers were asked to indicate the television programmes they watched regularly and the time spent watching television. The caregivers were also asked to rate their children's behaviour. Dr. Saams-Vaughan and her research team found that:
children were watching, on average 15 hours of television per week and some children were watching well over 20 hours per week; this is a bit less than in the United States where children watch television for about three hours each day compared to about 2.5 hours here.
there were differences between girls and boys in their viewing patterns.
girls were watching mostly soap operas and the American talk shows.
boys were watching mostly action shows and sports.
about 90 per cent of the children were watching cartoons, 80 per cent were watching comedies and about 50 per cent were watching the evening news.
"There were separate effects how much television you were watching and what you were watching. Children who were watching more than 20 hours of television per week had a decrease in their school scores as you increase the number of television hours, their school performance decreased. We checked them by giving them standard tests. Those who read more books had better scores," Dr. Saams-Vaughan noted.
She also found that the children who were watching excessive amounts of television also had a lot of social problems in their interactions with other children.
"The television shows that were the real problems were the action shows, soap operas and the talk shows. Children who were watching the news and documentaries and quiz programmes had fewer behavioural problems. Action shows are very strong in terms of aggression; in the soap operas, we again see the aggression. Talk shows are very strong on aggression," Dr. Saams-Vaughan said.
Children who were watching excessive amounts of television, she said, were more likely to commit violent acts.
"Studies show that they go home and punch their teddy bears, they engage in copy cat behaviour and when they are older they engage in copy cat criminal behaviour. If you continue to feed them violence they become numb to what they are seeing. Have you ever seen these children on television standing over the dead bodies? Their faces are blank and they are not horrified. They have become desensitised and they have lost their empathy," Dr. Saams-Vaughan explained.
She noted that television watching cuts across all the social classes since almost all the children in the study had a television set and watched television regularly. Another 50 per cent of them were watching cable television.
"I didn't look directly at cable ... (but) this time I am looking at video games, computer games and how many hours children are spending on those," Dr. Saams-Vaughan said.
However, she said that there are some children who don't become aggressive when exposed to media violence, they instead engage in internalising behaviour and become extremely fearful.
