RHODES' SCHOLARSHIP
Richard Rhodes - author of the classics
The Making of the Atomic Bomb and
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
- has mostly recently written
Why
They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.
The latter book no doubt led to
his recent (Sunday, 9/17/00) NYTimes
editorial entitled "Hollow Claims About Fantasy
Violence", in which he begs to differ with the
recent renewed hysteria about evil Hollywood corrupting
our precious, innocent chilluns.
It's not a partisan issue, as Senators McCain and
Lieberman are both manning the barricades for truth,
justice and the American way.
Rhodes asks the simple question "Is there really a link
between entertainment and violent behavior?" and
proceeds to answer it.
He starts with an appeal to Clio:
History alone should call such a link into question.
Private violence has been declining in the West since
the media-barren late Middle Ages, when homicide rates
are estimated to have been 10 times what they are
in Western nations today. Historians attribute the
the decline to improving social controls over
violence - police forces and common access to courts
of law - and to a shift away from brutal physical
punishment in child-rearing (a practice that still
appears as a common factor in the background of violent
criminals today).
We move on to the studies cited by the latest pack
of crusaders.
The American Medical Association has jumped on the
bandwagon in a large part due to the studies of one
Brandon Centerwall, a Seattle psychiatrist.
He compared the murder rates for white folks in three
countries from 1945 to 1974 with statistics for TV
ownership. Television broadcasting was banned in
South Africa until 1975, unlike in the USA and Canada.
Murder rates stayed flat until 1975 in the former (if,
of course, you don't count the numbers of blacks brutally murdered
by whites there), and
doubled after the introduction of TV in the latter two.
A damning indictment? Hell, no. Homicide rates in
France, Germany, Italy and Japan either didn't change
or declined with increasing TV ownership over the same
period. There's also the matter of American homicide
rates declining over the last decade despite the
hysterically denounced proliferation of violent
movies, TV, video games, etc.
Another biggie - invoked as if it were eternal proof carved onto
marble tablets during the hearings for the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 (i.e. the V-chip
circus) - is a 22-year study by a couple of
psychologists about boys exposed to violent media.
So just what does the study really tell us?
Following 875 children in upstate New York from third
grade through high school, the psychologists found a
correlation between a preference for violent
television at age 8 and aggressiveness at age 18.
The correlation - 0.31 - would mean television accounted for about 10 percent of the influences
that led to this behavior. But the correlation
only turned up in one of three measures of aggression: the assessment of students by their peers. It didn't
show up in students' reports about themselves or in
psychological testing. And for girls, there was no
correlation at all.
Wow. Out of three measures, TV violence has been
shown to possibly account for 10% of violent behavior in one and for squat in the other two, and in only
one sex for that matter.
All this hysteria for - in the worst case scenario
the advocates can come up with - 10 fucking percent.
So where the hell are the similar studies about the
effects of physical and sexual abuse at home on the
future violent behavior of the precious chilluns?
Or about the link between creating spoiled, steroid-crazed,
sociopathic athletes and violence?
Rhodes offers a final taste of reality:
But violence isn't learned from mock violence.
There is good evidence - causal evidence, not
correlational - that it's learned in personal
violent encounters, beginning with the
brutalization of children by their parents or their
peers.
That's right. It begins at home much more often than not,
but there's no political hay to be made blaming
the precious, sacred, hetero family for its
own dysfunctionality.
posted by Steven Baum
9/19/2000 12:14:04 AM |
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