The Impact of Media Violence on Children

In a United States Senate committee hearing in June, witnesses agreed that violence shown on television affects children but disagreed about whether the government should restrict violent content on the airways.

The American Psychological Association (APA) told the Senate Commerce Committee that there is ample evidence of the harmful effects of television violence on children. Jeff McIntyre of the APA's Public Policy Office said studies have shown that repeated exposure to violence in the media places children at risk for desensitization to acts of violence and increases in aggression, plus "an unrealistic fear of becoming a victim of violence, which results in the development of other negative characteristics, such as mistrust of others."

In other testimony, the leader of a National Television Violence Study in the1990s cited evidence-based conclusions that can be drawn from scientific research on television violence. For one thing, said Dr. Dale Kunkel, most violence on television is shown in a manner that increases the risk of harmful effects on child viewers—portrayals fail to show realistic harm to victims, both short- and long-term, and immediate pain and suffering is included in fewer than half of the scenes. "Most depictions sanitize violence by making it appear much less harmful than it really is."

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, an advocacy group, told the committee there is no doubt that television violence is increasing and that it is being viewed by children even in the so-called "family hours" of 7 to 9 p.m. "Last year, nearly half (49 percent) of all episodes that aired during the study period contained at least one instance of violence. Fifty-six percent was person-on-person violence and 54 percent of violent scenes contained either a depiction of death or an implied death." The parent group gave the Senate committee a DVD with a sampling of violent scenes from recent television programs that aired during the "family hour," including stabbings, disembowelings, sexual violence, oral sex, and bloody beatings.

But whether it is a violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for parents and others to ask for laws restricting violence on television also came up at the June 26 hearing. Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told the committee that suggested legislative responses to the violence problem such as "time channeling" (banning certain content during certain hours) are likely to run into free speech challenges in the courts. "Although parents can have a legitimate interest in restricting the television their children watch,"the solution is not more intrusive government control over the free flow of speech, Tribe said.

And in the most voluminous testimony at the hearing, Peter Liguori, president of entertainment for Fox Broadcasting Company, claimed that while three government reports—from the Surgeon General, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission--have concluded there may be a connection between television and violence, "there is no causal link." Without evidence that TV actually causes children to become violent, "We cannot justify imposing content limits on the media," he said.