I live in Ireland, where films, books, and magazines are censored if they are judged to be ‘obscene’ or ‘liable to corrupt’. My question is: has it ever been shown that a film, book, or magazine has, independent of any other influence, ‘corrupted’ an individual? Has it ever been demonstrated that regular exposure to violent/pornographic media negatively influence the behaviour of children or adults? Are there more or less sex crimes in, say, Amsterdam than there are in any other European or North American city? Is there a causal relationship between the incidence of sex crimes and the general acceptance of violent/pornographic images in the media?
Well, a lot of psychos have claimed ‘Catcher in the Rye’ as the inspiration for their crimes, but they probably would have snapped eventually without it.
I actually believe that early exposure to some kinds of media could potentially have long term effects on children. I am somewhat sociopathic today, and I think part of it was because I was reading fiction intended for adults from about the age of 5. I was having rape fantasies when I was 8.
For starters, try Bandura’s famous Bobo Doll experiment.
Here’s the summary:
My own feeling is that if you raise a kid in front of a television and you don’t talk to him about the differences between TV and real life, then your kid might grow up with problems. Human behavior can be very complex, and I don’t think you can ever say that one factor alone causes something to happen.
What I’m talking about is not imitation of something observed over time - have you ever seen or read about something you never would have imagined, and then found yourself thinking about it again and again? If it’s something that you perceive as bad, you will worry about the fact you keep thinking about it, which will lead you to thinking about it more. It can eventually effect your behavior, even if you are a fairly self-aware adult who on one level realizes why you are so preoccupied with this. Now have this happen to a young child, with a more limited grasp on reality, less self-awareness, and not as much experience in controlling their own behavior.
As an example, when I was very young I saw ‘The Omen’ on cable. One scene that really stuck in my head was the part where the man is impaled so that he is held standing up by the object he is impaled on. I couldn’t stop thinking of it, the concept of being stuck to the ground by having something long and sharp stuck through you. Not long after that I started scooping up little fish from my Dad’s fountain/fishpond in the side yard and recreating that scene with stick-pins and needles. I never exhibited cruelty to animals before that - today and even then I had a lot of empathy for animals, and I have no doubt I wouldn’t have done that had I not seen that image, which somehow wormed it’s way into my mind and (I’m speculating here) made me want to control the images by doing it to other things. Today I am hardly squeamish when it comes to violent and gory movies, but scenes where people are impaled like that still strike a chord within me, and I can’t help but shudder when I think about that. I wonder if my impalings would not have escalated to cats or puppies had I not been brought up by a family that had a lot of respect for life.
As to the rape fantasies mentioned earlier, at a very young age I was exposed to sexual media. My parents usually did a good job of keeping me from watching movies with nudity or sex (though I did manage to see a lot, managed to watch most of ‘Turkish Delight’ when I was 6) but my reading material was not so closely monitored. I read “When Harley was One” by David Gerrold at a very young age. It’s a good science fiction novel, nothing too bad in it, but it had some very explicit sex scenes. I remember reading those parts over and over again, and I REALLY wanted to have sex with a girl after it, though I was still a bit vague on some of the details of how it worked. I remember when I was in the third grade I used to daydream scenarios where I could get a girl naked and under my power. One of my earlier ones was that I was some kind of giant monster that lived under the playground (there was an old well in the middle of it) who would rise up, pick up whatever girl I thought was pretty at the time, and pull her clothes off. I knew that was something that could never happen, but one time after school I saw a girl walking alone and I thought to myself "I could knock her out by sneaking up behind her and hitting her over the head with a rock, then I could do whatever I wanted to her before she woke up. I picked up a good sized rock and sat in an alley and thought about it, but knew it would be wrong. If I had less self-control, if I had been exposed to violence in real-life more, I could have ended up braining some poor girl with a rock. If my parents didn’t have cable and I didn’t have access to pornography (albeit in a written form) I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought that.
I have other weird anxieties that I can trace back to my being exposed to material inappropriate for my young age. For instance, I read a story about someone making a deal with the Devil, then started worrying about that - although I didn’t REALLY believe in that religious stuff at that point, on one level it was very real to me. I wondered if I would have to actually say out loud that I wanted to make a deal with the Devil for it to be made, or if just thinking the words would do it. Everytime I started to think that way I would try to think about something else to distract myself, but at one point, for some reason, I completed the thought that if I was still in the bathroom when the toilet made that gurgling noise at the end of the flush, the Devil would rise up and take my soul right then and there. I was 19 before I was able to force myself to stay in the bathroom until the flush cycle was done.
Today I consider myself pretty sane, but I thank my upbringing for that - being exposed to that kind of stuff can be counteracted by good parenting, but not 100%. I still have a few weird habits, usually nothing anybody would notice, and I still have disturbing thoughts and images that I have to consciously drive out of my mind. Some of them I would still have if my childhood was perfectly innocent, but a lot could have been avoided.
Quite often I hear claims that kids exposed to violence in the media (TV, film, cartoons, comic books, video games) become violent kids. And usually these things come up shortly after some kid brings a gun to school and starts shooting people.
If there’s any correlation at all, it’s mighty weak I think. Compare the USA to Japan, the source of the most graphically violent cartoons and video games I’ve ever seen. Yet violent crime is practically unheard of there.
As these are just my opinions, I could be way wrong. I’ll rely on others to support me or refute me.