What these men do to your children

Press, 22 August 1978, Page 17

What these men do to your children

By

ELAINE POTTER,

“Sunday Times,” London

For American television, the film “Born Innocent” was strong stuff. A teenage girl, held in a reformatory, was brutally raped with a broomhandle by her fellow inmates. N.B.C. one of the three big .American networks, could have expected protests.

What they could not have anticipated was an SUM action for damages which has opened in California. Mrs V. Niemi’s nine-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by four older girls in an attack which seemed similar to the N.B.C. film. She has now gone to court to claim that the film caused the attack.

Copycat crime — its history even includes killers who imitated “The Brothers Karamazov” —

rouses strong emotions. A standard introductory textbook in psychology concludes that: “What the effects are of intense exposure to violence. . . remains, despite considerable research, a highly debatable question. It is all make-believe and some data suggest that it may even have a cathartic effect, permitting the harm less draining off of unexpressed anger.” It is hard — if not im-

possible — to prove that the filmed portrayal of violence caused an individual to be violent — even in an apparent “copycat killing.” But there is now a body of experimental evidence which on close scrutiny establishes some basic points. For of approximately 250 experiments so far conducted to test the effects of television violence on behaviour:

200 show violence having a harmful effect; 50 were borderline; and Only a handful suggest that TV violence can have any helpful effect. The debate continues in the face of this kind of evidence because many of the experiments are not of very good quality. There are fundamental problems in researching the question. It is difficult to establish from field work that it is television rather than any other experience which causes any given type of behaviour. Appropriate controls for the experiment are hard to find. But even laboratory ex» periments suffer because they are so far removed from real life. Later this month a new book “Sex Violence and the Media,” will review

the research — and punch holes in substantial numbers of the experiments. Still, the view of one of the authors, D. K. Nias of the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry, is that the overwhelming message of the experiments is that violence on screen increases aggressive behaviour. “The experiments have such different flaws and different methods,” Dr Nias says, “that they still look like evidence that TV violence has a bad effect.” Some of the better evidence draws on three theories about the way in which television violence might affect behaviour. It could be — 1. By imitation or mod-

elling behaviour on what has been seen; 2. By desensitisation, or making people more tolerant of violence than they might have been; 3. By disinhibition, a mechanism whereby people no longer feel constrained by guilt or embarrassment. Male hospital attendants were shown the knife fight scene from the James Dean film “Rebel Without a Cause.” Aggression was assessed before and after, and compared with a group who saw an innocuous education film. The group who saw the violent film did punish errors more severely. In one of the early imi-

tation experiments 72 nursery school children aged about 4 watched an adult either attacking or just playing with a doll. The children, matched for previous aggression, were assigned to one of three groups: they either watched an attack on the doll: or they saw the adult play with the doll; or they had no doll at all.

At this point, a frustrating experience was introduced. The children started playing with very attractive toys but were then stopped. The chances of aggression occuring were increased. Each child was then placed in a room with an assortment of ordinary toys including a mallet and the doll. As

expected those who had witnessed the violent attack on the doll were markedly more aggressive than the other two groups. Another experiment with 20 nursery school children aged 4 to 6 years involved their watching a five-minute cartoon, either violent or neutral. Those who had seen the violent cartoon were more likely to cnoose an aggressive toy when later given the chance to operate "action” toys.

In one of the better desensitisation experiments, 44 children aged 8 to 10 years who had watched a scene from Hopalong Cassidy were compared with a control group who had not seen the film. Each child was asked to keep an eye on a couple of younger children who were playing in another room, and to summon the experimenter if there was any trouble.

After playing peacefully, the two children started to abuse each other verbally and then to fight during the course of which the

TV camera was knocked over and contact was eventually lost. The measure of the children’s aggression was the time taken before they sought help from the experimenter. Half the controls acted before physical fighting began, whereas only 17 per cent of the film group did so. But even if everybody were to agree that television violence can have harmful effects on viewers’ behaviour, it would be difficult to formulate policies to deal with the problem. Many key pieces of information remain unknown or ill understood. We do not know what aspects of violent scenes produce strong effects, or whether violence in cartoons is less harmful than real-life drama or “justified” aggression. Worse, surprisingly little is known about the different personality types. Psychology cannot say what the risk is — or who is most at risk.