Kids Watching Violence

“He wants to go on the Eggbox and shoot people”

She said it with a wry and resigned smile as she eyed her disgruntled three year old with an air of impotence.

Her husband then proceeded to explain that the youngster’s older brothers had shut him out as they played violent games on the X-Box because he was getting in the way and continually wanting a turn. The game they were playing was one of the Call of Duty series – for 18 year olds. The children in question were 13 and 9. I tutted and made some remark about it being terrible that a shop had sold such a game to minors before being informed that the father had actually bought the game for his kids.

It is not the first time that I have come across this scenario. Some years ago, a young boy of my son’s acquaintance had demanded that his mother buy him one of the Grand Theft Auto series – the one with the pimps and the prostitutes. He was seven years old. “He just keeps going on and on about it!” she explained.

I told her that all she needed to do was to give him the money and tell him to go and buy it himself because no shop would sell it to him and he would then understand that it was not in her power to do so. A week or two later she revealed in a conversation that she had not listened to my advice but had purchased the game at his insistence, only to have him ask her to return it because it was too scary – but not before my similarly-aged son had also been exposed to it.

This particular mother also felt that it was ok for her two under-11s to watch ‘The Osbornes’ with her, under the instruction that they should not repeat any of the obscene language in the playground. Yeah, right!!!

In my recent post on Kids Watching Porn, Sunlover mentioned the strange example of parents thinking violent movies were fine and porn was wrong. I agree wholeheartedly with that commenter – which I also expressed to our friends with the Eggbox shooter. They wouldn’t buy their kids porn, so why did they think it was ok to buy them adult violence. But they just didn’t see it that way. Their boys also had laser pens which had eventually had to be confiscated because they kept shining them in their parents and each other’s eyes. It seems a peculiar type of parenting that endangers both themselves and their children because they don’t want to say no.

Perhaps I am a ‘nanny state mummy’, but I refused to buy my children films and games that were not for their age group – certainly if I had not viewed them first. I did not want them exposed to violence or excessive sexual activity until I felt they were ready to emotionally understand what was happening. Of course I was powerless to prevent my ex from complying with this stance and would often come home to find them watching unsuitable comedy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love rude and lewd comedy. I just don’t think it’s suitable for seven year old boys who cannot yet tell the difference between the right scenarios for repeating such sketches. Particularly when they are allowed to watch them over and over so that they can repeat the rudest parts verbatim. I am still haunted by a ‘deepthroat’ comment made over the lunch table when I was out with some other mums and under 8s. Fortunately, it passed unnoticed as the other mothers were not paying attention or didn’t understand the reference.

Wikipedia talks of the video game controversy and Ruf says that scientific evidence has proved that children are not affected by the violence that they see on television, although back in 2006, the BBC reported on this study of the link between violent games and behaviour.

I would say that scientists are clearly not measuring for the right things. There has to be something not right when children will spend hours and hours wanting to shoot or hurt people. It doesn’t matter whether they’re aliens or human enemy soldiers. This is not a facet of our make-up that needs to be encouraged. It desensitises them to violence and blood, affecting the development of their natural humanity. Deep in the furthest recesses of their brains, most children are not yet emotionally mature enough to separate the real from the fantasy. And exposure to the repeated violence of such games, they lose the ability to control their actions because there are no repercussions and, therefore, no need for restraint.

But, particularly here in the UK, where our reliance on getting out of our skulls on alcohol or substances seems to result in hideous and unprovoked aggressive outbursts against innocent passersby.

The ferocity of such attacks cannot be helped by an upbringing which has exposed them repeatedly to severe violence from an early age. I am sure that I read somewhere about how children who had suffered with physical abuse (not necessarily sexual) in childhood were more likely to continue the pattern as adults.

Is it such an extrapolation to say that such a correlation might soon be extended to those children who have watched video games that were aimed at over 18s from their earliest memories?

And perhaps it does not affect all kids but, if there is one tiny defect in the genetic make-up of a child’s brain that is responsive to such triggers, that’s all it might take to turn a normal child into a potential killer – even if it was not premeditated.