The Influence Of Violent Entertainment In Adolescents

For many centuries we have seen the influence of violent entertainment in our lives. It has been enjoyed and cherished since the beginning of time from live fighting pits and gladiators games in the medieval period to the blood and gore of shooting games today. Violence has been glorified throughout history by the ‘Great’ wars and battles fought in yester years. Although the implications of the violence may not seem direct but it’s deeply embedded in the minds, especially that of early adolescent children and teens. Nowadays children are being exposed to an array of violent happenings through television broadcasts, news and especially gaming. Children are playing games which contain a high content of violence and even sexually explicit scenes,

Violent games have been believed to also cause crime related activities but experts argue that since the early 90’s the sales of video games has increased manifolds which has oddly coincided with a drop in violent crimes by teens. Personalities of people differ from one to another therefore categorizing or generalizing a large number would be unfitting. Studies which are established through collection of sample may not necessarily show accurate results since they ignore important details like the background history, personal traits, emotional state etc. This was shown by a research conducted by psychologists at Villanova and Rutgers Universities (Miller, 2011) who derived that, it did not matter what game the child played, personal traits generally urge children to act violently. These include emotions like be angry and depressed, be highly emotional and easily upset, be disagreeable, cold or indifferent to other people, act without thinking, fail to keep promises or break rules. Another experiment undertaken at Brock University (Adachi & Willough, 2011)it was observed that it did not matter whether the subjects played a violent or non- violent game, the resulting data from the experiment proved to be insufficient to determine a direct relationship. Following it with another experiment, they concluded that

It basically is an open world game where the character has the license to freely purchase arms, brutally kill, steal cars, rob banks and involve himself in sexual activities. All this is done with an extremely realistic feeling that the user gets while playing the game. Children and teens playing this genre of games try to replicate this scenario within their own lives. Due to which there has been an increase in violence related criminal activities in young individuals. In a shocking incident reported in Slaughter, Louisiana it was believed that an eight year old boy had shot his eighty-seven year old grandmother which resulted in her death. An investigation later revealed that the boy had been playing a video game, Grand Theft Auto which motivated him to shoot. Child psychologist Kristopher Kaliebe said access to a violent video game may encourage aggressive behavior. He said: “From a behavior therapy perspective, I would say that 's practicing. When you have a video game that is shooting at a human being, that is practicing shooting at a human being (Wynick, 2013).”To add to this popular and bestselling first person shooting games exhibit blood and gore, as a result it has a desensitizing effect over young individuals. So accustomed to the violence in these games it can negatively affect the minds. It is believed that military uses war based