The media in today’s world de-sensitizes kids with violence and brutality and this is affecting the way kids act and deal with problems. The media portrays villains as heroes, making violence seem acceptable to children. People must be trained to kill. Human beings have a violence immune system that must be broken to allow them to act violent. Children come to associate violence as entertainment without processing the consequences that come with bad behaviors. The media is one of the strongest factors that has made youth violence double in the past 15 years, and in order to fix it we need to understand it.
With so many acts of violence on television it makes the most horrific actions seem normal. The media glorifies killings and killers sharing every detail and emotion from those violated, and of the families left in crisis. To the kids who are attention deprived, the act of a violent crime seems to be a way to be noticed. The desire to be noticed may be strong but it takes much more to kill another person.
A human being is born with a resistance to killing of their own kind, as do most species. Children are exposed to violence in video games, morning cartoons, and daily news shows. The over saturation of violence through the media may provoke violent tendencies for those with poor coping skills without thought to what the consequences are for their actions. When kids play these games they kill things that look much like humans, but they receive no actions that say “killing another person is wrong”. The news shows many reports of one human killing another, many times without consequences. Kids at a young age have a tougher time telling reality from fantasy so they think all problems can be solved by violence
Children come to associate violence with entertainment. Children’s Saturday cartoons consist of one character battering the other. Evening shows cover horrific homicide shows that are real as a novel filled of characters instead of real children and families. Interactive videogames also have conditioning features, rewarding violent acts that are accurate with higher scores. Our children are learning to be violent without understanding the true consequences to their actions, or learning other coping skills to handle their issues.
With the rise of violent crimes being committed by kids under the age of 18 there must be a reason. After examining the reasons one conclusion inevitably leads to the media and their presentation of violence. The media is everywhere and it is impossible to avoid it. The media is one of the root problems for youth violence and should not be ignored or tolerated.