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| Killing in cold blood is not a natural act, Lt. Col. David Grossman says. But it can be taught. The former psychology professor at West Point and Army Ranger says killing is so unnatural that many soldiers let themselves be killed rather than shoot the enemy. As recently as World War II, a study found that only 15% of soldiers could bring themselves to shoot an exposed enemy. Many fired over enemies’ heads or simply pretended to fire. But, once the military recognized the problem, it fixed it. The military disoriented soldiers by brutalizing them. It taught soldiers to enjoy violence. It programmed them to react to threats instantly, without thinking. In the Vietnam War, nearly 90% of soldiers were willing to shoot to kill, Grossman says. The really scary part: He says television violence and video games are using the same methods and teaching kids to kill just as effectively. Not so fast, says Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT who directs the comparative media studies program there. He says Grossman and others assume that images of violence provoke violence—a far-too-simplistic view. Jenkins says that the violence has to be looked at in the context of the stories being told—often, the violence is portrayed in a negative light or is a small part of a large story that does nothing to promote aggression. Jenkins adds that people use media; they aren’t used by it. In other words, people pick and choose images that fit with their way of thinking. They don’t respond blindly to stimuli from TV and video games. Not surprisingly, Grossman and Jenkins disagree on what to do about violent images. Grossman says video games need to be regulated to keep them away from young children. Jenkins says regulation would be a huge mistake, because it would cut into personal freedoms. He says the solution is to find alternative forms of play so that children can address their need for power and work through dark feelings without resorting to violence. While the highly charged discussion that follows generates plenty of heat, it also sheds a lot of light on a complex, important issue.
In 1972, the surgeon general made a report that established the link. In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health assessed more than 2,500 scholarly studies and concluded that there’s a worldwide consensus on "a strong link" between media violence and violence in our society. In 1992, the American Psychological Association said, "The scientific debate is over." Ted Turner has said, "Television violence is the single most significant factor contributing to violence in America." When CBS President Leslie Moonves was asked about the Columbine High School shootings, he said, "Anyone who thinks the media have nothing to do with it is an idiot." HENRY JENKINS: I don’t see this issue as predominantly medical. I see it as a cultural and social issue, concerning how people relate to media narratives. Medical authorities can contribute to such a discussion, but it would be a mistake to assume that their expertise extends very deeply into social and cultural matters. Medical intervention in culture has been a disaster, going back to the doctors who shut down the playhouses in Elizabethan England, and to the doctors at the turn of the century who insisted that women had no place in higher education because they were physically incapable of withstanding the pressure. The thousands of studies that you cite come from a fairly narrowly defined tradition called media effects. Researchers show kids distilled, violent images that are devoid of any narrative context. Often, the images have to be constructed by the lab because researchers can’t find media violence without any narrative context. Researchers expose kids to these images in a laboratory and assume this is equivalent to the social and cultural space where media are actually consumed. In fact, the context in which something is viewed matters tremendously in defining what it means and how it affects an audience. Media-effects testing also assumes a crude stimulus/response model. It’s very good at measuring sweaty palms, an adrenalin rush, and so forth, but its practitioners are not very interested in understanding what those feelings mean for kids. They don’t explore the connections between the results in a laboratory and actual behavior. The studies you cite often make quite moderate claims. Frequently, in the hands of antipopular culture activists, all the qualifications are stripped aside and we are left with broad statements that few researchers would support. Saying we have several thousand studies that claim media violence results in real-world violence is like saying we have thousands of studies finding cures for cancer. The discussion of all these studies blurs what effects we’re attributing to violent entertainment. Is it desensitization? Or is there a direct causal relationship to violence? That’s one point where the studies tend to disagree. There seems to be more support for a claim of desensitization or a perception that the world is more dangerous than to say it is a catalyst. If it were a catalyst, we’d have to ask why shootings are occurring in schools rather than in video arcades and theaters. Criminologists will tell you that, at most, media violence is a relatively trivial factor that affects kids who already have strong, aggressive impulses. GROSSMAN: The studies we’re talking about are not just from the laboratory, stripped of context. We’re talking about naturalistic field observations and about longitudinal studies of 875 kids across 21 years. We’re talking about the quasi-experimental studies of two cities in Canada that never had television. One got it, the other didn’t. There was an immediate explosion of schoolyard violence in the community that got television. There was no change in the control group. The Journal of the American Medical Association released a study in June 1992 that established that, anywhere television appears, the murder rate doubles 15 years later. That’s how long it takes for young kids to get to the age where they kill people. It is not just the medical field making these claims. It is also psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, the National Institute of Mental Health, and so on. JENKINS: We can talk at length about these studies, but we’re never going to agree. We’re approaching the problem from fundamentally different methodological perspectives. The approach I take comes out of qualitative sociology and anthropology. The approach has an enormous contribution to make because it can put all those media images into a richer context. We are all concerned about the impact of violence on our culture. We also have to be concerned about free expression. The moral panic we have now in the wake of incidents such as the Littleton, Colo., massacre is leading to enormous crackdowns on American youth in high schools. The ACLU reported to me that they had more incidents of student rights being violated in schools in the last six weeks of the last academic year than in the last six years. School officials are striking out blindly. In one incident, a kid was suspended from school for wearing a Star of David because a teacher mistook it for a gang symbol. In the midst of this panic, we are moving swiftly toward social policies that are going to have a devastating effect on the culture. GROSSMAN: You have just put your finger on the heart of the matter. The bottom line to you is free expression. For me, it’s limiting access. Children are not allowed access to guns, pornography, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sex, and cars. All I’m saying is that technology and media products need to be restricted just like those other products. Violent visual imaging is potentially extraordinarily harmful. Let’s go to the extreme—a five-year-old practicing blowing people’s heads off at the local video arcade. You’ve got to ask yourself the same questions we ask with guns, tobacco, alcohol, or drugs. Is there any redeeming social value in having a child practicing blowing somebody’s head off? Answer: probably not. Is there any potential harm to society? Answer: definitely. He’s learning the skill and the will to kill. Conclusion: We need to restrict children’s access. The movie industry, the television industry, and the video-game industry say, "We have rating systems on our products." They freely admit that these products are not for children. But if you try to get them to enforce their rating systems, they will not tolerate it. They say it’s the parents’ job to limit access. Now, imagine if the gun industry had said, "Yeah, we have a warning label on that .357 magnum. But you can’t stop the local dealer from selling it to children." JENKINS: You are describing media images as products. I don’t think cultural works should be thought of as substances like carcinogens. You use a vocabulary that strips works of any cultural value and equates a narrative film like Basketball Diaries with an automobile or a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette. The equivalence is simply not there in terms of their cultural value and their social effects. What you seem to be proposing is to create a new class of works that are excluded from the protection of the First Amendment. Traditionally, works are excluded from First Amendment protection only after they have been viewed as a whole and judged by respected authorities to be utterly without redeeming value. My concern is that we’re in a political climate where exclusions that would not stand up in a court of law are being enforced through intimidation. Having said that, let me say very clearly that I am speaking as an educator and a citizen, not a defender of the video-game industry. I would support some of your ideas. For instance, while the video-game rating system is designed to provide information for parents, the industry should be prepared to put teeth into it and enforce it. GROSSMAN: That is absolutely splendid. Then we’re in full agreement. JENKINS: But you seem to be calling for legal enforcement. That’s where I draw the line. We don’t legally enforce the rating system of moving pictures, for example. Ultimately, the choice about what culture our children consume is best made by parents at the most local level. GROSSMAN: You say the rating system needs to be enforced and needs teeth in it—but we’re going to count on the industry to do it. We know—and this is a physiological fact—that for young children violence is an addictive, toxic substance. The television industry has used violence to steal market share from magazines and newspapers. Imagine if Context magazine were Coke, and CBS were Pepsi. If Pepsi put cocaine in its product, could Context compete? No. The media industry will never enforce its rating system until somebody makes it do so, no more than the tobacco, gun, or alcohol industries would have voluntarily enforced their systems. There’s too much money to be made. Henry, you keep talking about narrative. Tell me what the narrative is in video games. They are nothing but constant killing, completely divorced of narrative. The red herring that’s constantly pulled out in these discussions is the First Amendment. If you want to talk about the First Amendment, we can talk about the book Hit Man, which told readers how to become a hired killer. When somebody used it to script a multiple murder, the families of the victims sued the publisher and the author. Despite a First Amendment challenge, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the suit to proceed. Why? Because the book exhorted an individual to engage in violent actions, it taught blatant disregard for human life, and it taught criminal skills. Ask yourself: If the written word sold to adults is not protected under these circumstances, then how in the world can a plastic device sold to children be protected? JENKINS: Again, we need to be worried precisely because people like you can’t tell the difference between Context and Coca-Cola and don’t make a basic distinction between a cultural forum and an economic product. You assume that violent images have an immediate, unmediated effect on the human body and that we are incapable of exercising even the most minimal agency in how we respond. GROSSMAN: You keep talking about how context is important, and how we must make distinctions between the types of violent images. But children can’t make those distinctions. Let’s look at how a nation evolves in dealing with technological innovations. For more than 100 years in America, the Second Amendment meant you had the right to any weapon. You could have a cannon on the front doorstep. You could buy dynamite at the hardware store, and right up through the 1920s a kid could buy a Tommy gun there, too. But today we have a very intelligent conversation regarding the Second Amendment. The NRA concedes that nobody has the right to sell weapons to children, and we all concede that the Second Amendment doesn’t include nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, the anti-gun people concede that you have the right to your steak knives and maybe flintlock muskets and even shotguns. The point is we all agree there needs to be a line. The only question is where the line belongs. Yet, in the realm of the First Amendment, we have absolutists who say that children should have the right to the most horrendous violent images, which are primarily instruments of mass desensitization. JENKINS: You have turned this conversation in the direction I think it needs to go: What are the competencies we assume of children? Do we assume that children are incompetent in dealing with media? In fact, most evidence suggests that kids are very media-savvy. Kids are often more adept than their parents are, particularly in the digital realm, where the new forms of representation are only imperfectly understood by parents. Kids, at a relatively early age, make clear distinctions between reality and fantasy. GROSSMAN: Pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychologists know that until a child is five or six years old he cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. He has to learn the difference. When I played caps with Billy when I was a kid, I said, "Bang, bang, I gotcha." Billy said, "No, you didn’t." So I smacked him with my cap gun. He cried. I got in big trouble. And guess what I learned? I learned that Billy is real, and that when I hurt Billy I’m going to get in trouble. Now, I play the video game, and I blow Billy’s stinkin’ head off thousands of times. Do I get in trouble? No. I get points for it. JENKINS: I’m happy to hear you agree that any child over six is fairly capable of making distinctions about media. The question is, What percentage of the people playing violent video games are below five years of age? Market research suggests that something like 60% of the market for PC games is adults. So, it’s not clear to me that much of this play is taking place among very young children. I agree with you that some of the games currently on the market are offensive and inappropriate for children. I would certainly recommend, as a parent, that parents prevent their kids from playing those games. But if we turn that recommendation into a legal standard, we’ve made a decisive step to erode First Amendment protections. GROSSMAN: The industry claims that most video games are sold to adults and that most are nonviolent. So, why is the industry spending so much money to prevent regulation that would limit violence in games used by children? The answer is that violence is the addictive ingredient that makes the games so successful. Consider the advertising: One ad talks about a game that has technology that lets you scan images from your high-school yearbook onto the faces of the people you kill in the game. And an ad for a game with a similar theme says, "Kill your friends, guilt-free." Yet another says, "More fun than shooting the neighbor’s cat." This isn’t about the First Amendment. This is about greed. JENKINS: We’ve come down to a fairly classic argument. Do we sacrifice basic freedom in the name of what is always presented as security or public health? The rhetorical force of your argument hinges on a strong desire to protect our children, which makes it very powerful. But we have to resist the urge to protect our children by doing away with their rights to participate in media. There is a central question that we haven’t addressed yet: What is the appeal of this violence? I believe if we understood the appeal—and I don’t think it is addiction—we could construct alternative fantasies that serve the same commercial needs. In fact, I think people would prefer them. Some evidence suggests that people are offended by some of the gore. Yet the violence in media provides images and messages that are not being expressed elsewhere in the culture. I think we need a deeper study of the content of media, and the social context in which it’s used, to understand violence’s appeal. It seems to me that kids are drawn toward images of power. The gaming industry currently defines power in terms of violence. Now, we need to allow new forms of interaction and storytelling to take hold and define power in less offensive ways. There’s also a certain pleasure in transgressing parents that is basic to adolescent culture. It can take harmless forms, or it can take dangerous forms. If we eradicate harmless manifestations, such as virtual violence, it doesn’t actually do much to prevent aggression from moving in a much more antisocial direction. If we cut people off from symbols of aggression, we may, in fact, leave them less room to express those feelings and frustrations. Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist who has written extensively about fairy tales, says many parents object to their violent content. What they miss is that kids have antisocial or aggressive feelings and, if they live in a world of total sweetness that doesn’t acknowledge those feelings, they feel themselves to be monsters. If they have a way of working through those violent feelings and coming out the other side, kids are much more mentally healthy. We need to foster a culture of storytelling that encourages us to deal with the darker themes that are appealing in violent entertainment without reducing them to the kind of banal shoot ’em ups that you—justifiably, to some degree—find offensive.
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