Exposure to Media Violence: Controlling It a Losing Battle

Millions of younger adolescents watch movies with extreme violence—including scenes of beheadings, rape, and torture, according to first-time research gauging the extent of such viewing across the country.

The national sampling of young adolescents found that the rate of violent-movie viewing ranged from less than 2 percent for the least-watched film on a list of violent films to nearly 50 percent, representing those who said they saw the particularly violent film “Scary Movie.” A median of 12 percent of these youths had seen the “extremely violent” movies the researchers asked them about.

The study, “Exposure of U.S. Adolescents to Extremely Violent Movies,” was published in the August Pediatrics. It was based on telephone interviews of a random sampling of 6,522 10- to 14-year-olds who were asked about viewing any of what several sources rated as the 40 most violent popular movies released from 1998 to 2002.

The findings echo previous research that also found widespread exposure of adolescents to violent television and videogame content.

“No expert in child development would advocate for subjecting children as young as 10 to this level of violence, yet the study shows that such exposure is commonplace in this country,” James Sargent, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and one of the study's authors, said in a statement accompanying release of the findings.

According to the study, the most likely children to have seen highly violent movies were boys, as well as minorities, those with low socioeconomic status, and those with poor school performance. The study authors found a strong relationship between exposure to violent movies and race, with black adolescents at particularly high risk for exposure.

The extent of exposure to movies with extreme violence raises concerns, according to the researchers, because of the growing body of research that documents a link between exposure to media violence and increased violent thoughts, emotions, and behavior and even, perhaps, more permissive attitudes toward other risk behaviors unrelated to violence.

Those dangers should encourage parents to limit such exposure, and health care professionals, including physicians, should urge such limits, the authors said.

“Although all mechanisms of the connection between exposure and behavior are not yet understood, it is clear that parents of adolescents should be aware of the negative consequences of this exposure and encouraged to limit it,” said study coauthor Keilah Worth, Ph.D., a fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School.

Among the troubling aspects of violent-media exposure, the researchers said, are the findings of previous neurological research that determined that even if children, on a conscious level, report knowing the difference between entertainment violence and real violence, their brains respond as though they were being exposed to a real threat.

Michael Houston, M.D., chair of APA's Council on Children, Adolescents, and Their Families, noted that children and adolescents with preexisting emotional, cognitive, and neurodevelopmental difficulties are significantly more likely to confuse events that they witness in violent movies with real events than are youngsters without such conditions.

Houston agreed with the authors that physicians—including psychiatrists—need to take an active role in educating parents on the importance of limiting children's exposure to media violence.

The study highlights the importance of clinicians taking a complete media history when working with children, adolescents, and their families, Houston told Psychiatric News.

“This would include the general psychiatrist working with parents,” he said.

It is, however, becoming more difficult for parents to limit their children's violent media exposure due to the increasing number of ways children have to access movie content, including DVDs, television movie channels, pay-per-view channels, and Web-based movie downloads, according to the researchers. Even when parents limited DVD rentals to movies rated appropriate for children, those often contain unrated “director's cuts” that may include violent material that was edited out of the theatrically released version.

Parents can better control violent-movie exposure by limiting the use of televisions and DVD players in their children's bedrooms, the researchers noted. They also can make use of blocking technology, such as television V-chips.

The film industry also must do a better job in limiting the marketing of such ultra-violent films from other entertainment likely viewed by children, said Sargent and colleagues. The idea of relying on the 40-year-old U.S. film-rating system also was found wanting: it allows adults to take children into theaters to watch highly violent films, which reflects the outdated view that these types of movies won't adversely affect children.

The researchers pointed out that much of the previous research on the impact of exposure to movie violence has focused on teenagers. They urged that future studies of media violence examine the impact of the apparently widespread exposure to violent movies on young adolescents such as those whose viewing habits were assessed in the current study.

An abstract of “Exposure of U.S. Adolescents to Extremely Violent Movies” is posted at<http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/122/2/306>.▪