A quick perusal at Statistics Canada and The FBI show a fair discrepancy between the relative murder rates (1.76 per 100,000 in Canada in 1999 vs 5.7 for the U.S.).
Putting aside my smugness for the moment, I also find quite a few articles claiming a correlation between violent media and violent crime.
Has it occured to anyone fighting these statements to use Canada as a control group? We get the exact same violent media as the Americans, almost always at the exact same time (some shows like The Sopranos are delayed a few months before appearing on Canadian cable channels). Offhand, I can’t think of anyone in the American media who’s ever said “Look north. The Canucks are listening to our rap music and watching our horror movies and playing our video games. They aren’t killing each other nearly as fast as we are, so back off already, Tipper.”
It isn’t really a very good comparison as murder is only one extreme indicator of violent crime. In other areas like simple assault, while I find we canadians tend to be far less fearful of violent crime, our statistics are not much better. There are those who take the position that the statistics only demonstrate the inneficiency of trying to club someone to death. Others look to differences in collecting statistics and confounding factors. Then there is the massive regional and historic differences in violent crime both in Canada and the United States.
It is easy to construct an argument using crime statistics but careful analysis shows us they don’t tell us a hell of a lot about anything so esoteric as violent media.
I personally believe, in a hueristical (I think I just made that word up) sense that stupid people generally are responsible for most stupid violent acts. Them and the crazies. So really I would argue that while violent media may be correlated wth violent crime, it is only a matter of poor education and a lack of moral growth.
The answer is, of course, that Japan has a more sophisticated penal system and puts more emphasis on rehabilitation than America. The media has simply nothing to do with any of it.
The article suggest cultural differences are the main difference for the different rates of crime.
From what I have read of japanese prisons I am also not sure that an expressed belief in rehabilitaion corresponds to a reasonable effort in reality. Calling extreme control and harsh discipline for minor infractions rehabilitative does not make it so. In any case, whatever they do doesn’t appear to be working as their recidivism rate is not significantly different.
Regarding Japan. I read an article a while back (sorry not gonna find a cite on that one) that said that a lot of crimes against women such as sexual harassment crimes, go unreported due to the mysoginistic atmosphere in Japan. The example they gave was a girl being stripped in the middle of the street and the men running off.
Careful, now. It’s a gross oversimplification to say that there’s only one reason for Japan’s lower crime rate. There are many reasons, and no doubt the one you cite is among them. But there are many other factors that influence the crime rate of a country, such as level of poverty and political stability or lack thereof. And of course there are a fistful of cultural factors, such as the emphasis on conformity and the social stigma attached to crime in Japan. You can’t really boil it down to just one or two reasons.
I guess my original question, then, is why Canada and Japan aren’t used as counter-examples whenever someone starts bleating about violent video games and movies?
when you say media, are you referring to the entire spectrum? i.e. the news and the newspapers, the ‘real’ stuff? i’ve never lived in canada but i’ve been living in japan for the past 8 months and violent televised news items i have not seen. whilst working in dallas, knowing that i was from the uk, a work colleague boasted that nothing is hidden from the american viewing public when it came to violent crime. if there’s a guy shooting a gun and he’s caught on camera, then they’ll be damed if that’s not going to make the early evening news. he compared this with the lack of violence in news in the uk. yes, it’s certainly reported on, but the visuals are often editted - and when they ARE shown, it’s after the 9 o’clock watershed.
he was a police officer with the bomb squad. his argument was that the american public weren’t cheated, that they were shown exactly what was happening in their country (and no wool-pulling). my argument at the time was that, surely, this kind of coverage only desensitized the public. he said - “don’t call me shirley”.
i read a short story recently, by umberto eco. the protagonist of the story is a pacifist of the highest order, but he explains how he will encourage his newly born son to play with guns and tanks, and blow up old toys with fireworks when he’s a little older. he feels that by doing this the son will learn the difference between play and the reality that will engulf him soon enough. he believes this will be his son’s most important lesson for life.
Crime statistics vary widely from country to country and state to state. About the only thing they can be cleary correlated to is the surplus population of young males thus crime goes down in a good economy and up in a poor one but even this tells us little about absolute numbers. The numbers do strongly suggest that culture matters. Southern states have persistently higher murder rates. Canada is persistently lower than the US and within Canada rates of most crimes rise as one moves east to west.
While it seems pretty clear that culture matters any argument which purports to demonstrate that some particular cultural factor is or is not a causal factor is so debatable as to be close to bunk and they use considerably more detailed analysis than a simple comparison of murder rates. The US has 2 million people in prison and there is no widespread agreement of the effect of this massive incarceration on crime rates and you think you can prove something about violent media using the same numbers??
But lets cut straight to the argument killer. The difference between the murder rates in these three countries existed long before the introduction of violent media. You can’t reasonably argue that the failure of one potential causal factor to suddenly equallize those disparities demonstrates the factor has no effect.