Violent images are harmful to children, and parents need help to protect them from the media that will soon all be available on mobile phones, argues psychologist Marie Murray
The debate about whether or not violent and pornographic media images are harmful to children has returned and intensified. With the ever-decreasing age at which material is deemed appropriate for children and with increasing multimedia convergence (whereby all media will soon be accessible on a child's mobile phone), many parents, rightly, have given up listening to this professional debate. Disillusioned by research-based claims followed by vehement counter-claims that violent and pornographic media are/are not harmful to their children, frustrated parents are using their own common sense as the basis for deciding what is best for their own children.
These parents recognise the undeniable fact that media are about messages, and that messages are powerful. They recognise that many media-generated realities are inappropriate for children. They see that sexualised images of women are abusive to their daughters and that manliness defined as violence is an insult to their sons, their definition of being male and their appreciation of masculinity. They realise that savage attacks, hate and revenge do not make for useful messages and that there is little benefit in video games designed with vicarious violence as their purpose and reward.
In summary, parents understand that alongside the many educational, social and recreational advantages of technology lie dangers they should combat to keep their children safe.
Until recently, this was possible. Parents could monitor TV and DVDs, and which video games their children bought; and while mobile phones were technologically confined to verbal communication, they could "net nanny" the Internet.
Now, however, as media technologies merge and converge, with almost "everything" accessible by "everything", parental child protection is threatened. This may explain why as many as 73 per cent of Irish parents in the Amárach research published this month expressed concern that they could no longer control and monitor technology usage, while 76 per cent were worried that their children might access harmful, sexually explicit or violent material on the Internet. And soon, all that material will converge and be available on a child's mobile phone.
It's time for childcare professionals to challenge the methodologically unsound so-called research "evidence" of those who deny that violent images can harm children. Because protection must now come from within and outside the media entertainment and service industry, the "harmful effects" debate must be replaced by a public consensus on content; stringent guidelines on access; a commitment from product providers to child protection; and political will allied to a legislative process to ensure that what is agreed is enacted. The days of denying "harmful effects" must end, to be replaced by proper child protection.
The main argument put forward by those who insist on the "no harm"' view is that the new media have inherited the legacy of fear that has always existed about new developments.
One presenter from this "no harmful effects" platform is Dr Guy Cumberbatch, director of the Communications Group in Birmingham, which carries out media, marketing, communications and social policy research. At the Internet Advisory Board debate in Dublin last week, he told a bemused adult audience, already recovering from his graphic description of the beheading of Ken Bigley, about a Swedish study in which children aged seven to 11 were exposed to pornographic images, including bestiality, which showed that "none of the children were affected", although "two of the mothers required psychiatric treatment for six months afterwards".
He further asserted that there was no evidence that inappropriate images necessarily caused harm in themselves, that advertising had no behavioural influence and that his study on adult reactions to video showed that "there was more support for releasing uncut the shocking rape scenes in Baise Moi and Irreversibles than for Wes Craven's Last House on the Left because "the audience saw that the rape scenes were justified in terms of their integrity".
But those who believe, as media philosophers Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen do, that "the media-isation of reality threatens our capacity to be shocked and that in the absence of shock, horror and outrage vanish", point to the past four decades of research involving more than 3,000 studies on the impact of the media. From the earliest recognition of the potential for imitation of images in the 1960s, and the famous US Surgeon General's report (1972), which confirmed that heavy exposure to screen violence was "one of the causes of aggressive behaviour, crime and violence in society", the evidence of harm has been available to those prepared to accept it.
A childhood of exposure to "screen" now consists of a reported 25,000 hours, with 200,000 acts of violence and 16,000 murders, before the age of 18. Screen time (multimedia) can average four to six hours daily. Inappropriate media exposure has been shown by research to have a negative impact on psychological development, speech and language, conversation, creativity, cooperation, concentration and school performance. Connections have also been found with gender stereotyping, hyperactivity, a perception of the world as mean and dangerous, anti-social behaviour, a decrease in sensitivity, an increase in fearfulness and an appetite for violence in entertainment and in life. There are also the studies which emphasise the detrimental effects on physical health of too much screen time.
Additionally, the interactive nature of the child-media relationship - not just what media does but what the child does with media - has been studied extensively. We know from neuroscience that environmental experiences may shape the developing brain's connectivity, with "habits of mind" influenced by repeated exposure. The famous Winn "the plug-in drug" study suggests that children become conditioned to deal with real people as if they were on- screen. They can "turn them off, with simply a knife or a gun or a chain as if turning off a television set".
In the 1990s the respected British psychologist, Prof Elizabeth Newson, of Nottingham University, expressed concern that children were receiving distorted images of life before they had had life experiences. Particularly dangerous, she said, was the equating of love, sex and violence. The American Psychological Association, meanwhile, has confirmed the problems caused by exposure to violence.
Indeed the concern about interactive technology games such as Doom, Grand Auto Theft, Mortal Kombat and Manhunter is that interaction requires intentional simulated violence for reward. A plethora of studies have examined the results of imitating violent roles, including increased indifference to violence and a frame of mind that sees violent acts as a socially acceptable response to frustration. Given this triad of distortion, desensitisation and addiction, allied to an increasingly subhuman portrayal of victims, we need not ask why levels of inhumanity, bullying and brutality seem so high.
This is not moral hysteria. Of course, investigating complex human behaviour defies simple research designs. Trends do not account for individuals, and an audience is not an individual entity but a collection of individuals. Study after study shows the impossibility of objectivity in the questions we ask, the research designs we create and our interpretation of results. But in response to those who deny "harmful effects", I leave it to teachers who daily watch children at play, emulating the latest media characters, to challenge the contention that research on imitative behaviour is without substance. I leave it to any woman who has been raped to challenge the view that the "integrity" of a film story justifies the portrayal of prolonged or graphic rape scenes. I leave it to the many clinicians in this country who have encountered children harmed by images to challenge studies citing "no harm", such as the research into children who were exposed to scenes of bestiality, in which the children were never actually asked if they were distressed. Why not? What follow-up was done? Or could any credence be placed anyway in research so lacking in respect for the children involved? Of course, it is futile to decide causality, to say that Video A affected Child B in predetermined fashion C to commit act D. But that is not to say that a child does not have the human right to protection from what is inappropriate, upsetting or distressing.
Parents are neither hysterical nor unable to distinguish what is right for their children. But they are fed up with soundbites contradicting common sense. Parents want resources in child protection, not further research. Now that mobiles have cameras and video games are online, now that mobiles can access all media, the territory of technology and protection has changed. Parents want the convergence of practice codes and classifications, regulation across technologies and content protection for their children.
Without convergence of protection the cases of children being frightened by material they inadvertently access will increase. The emotional world of a child - exposed to visions of the darkest recesses of the human imagination on how to kill, torture, humiliate and debase other humans - can be changed in a moment.
Our challenge is protection. We need to get this right. There is no rewind button if we don't.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin
