The Role Of Media And Family Life In Increasing Of Violence In Youth
According to Merriam Webster, the definition of crime is an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law. Crime has always and continues to be a growing problem in the United States. Unfortunately, there is an increasing amount of violence occurring in the youth resulting in a serious concern in our society.
According to the CDC, youth violence is the third leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 15 and 24. As reported by a 2010 CDC fact sheet “Over 656,000 physical assault injuries in young people age 10 to 24 were treated in U. S. emergency rooms in 2008”(CDC 2010). Surveys from the CDC also state that about 32% of high school students reported being in a physical fight in the 12 months before the survey (CDC 2006) In 2015, there was a study that sampled those in 9th-12th grade and found that 16. 2% carried a weapon throughout the time frame of the survey and 5. 3% specifically carried a gun. There are multiple contributing factors to the increase of violence in youth including, the media, influence of family life, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and easy access to weapons just to name a few. In this paper, we will be only looking at media and the influence of family life and how that affects youth committing crimes. Research has shown that violence in media such as television, movies, music, and video games increase violent behavior in youth both long term and short term.
The short-term exposure to this violence increased the likelihood of verbally and physically aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts and emotions. Children in the United States spend an average of three to four hours a day watching television and over 60% of the TV programs contain violence and 40% contains heavy violence. In addition, children are also spending an increasing amount of time playing video games. Based on the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health children spent 49 minutes a day playing video games and about 94% of the video games were violent. There have been experiments that exposed groups of children to violent TV shows for a period of time and checked to see if they would react violently afterward. The experiment consisted of 396 boys between the ages of seven and nine and had them watch either violent or non-violent video before playing a game of floor hockey. There were observers who watched and didn’t know which ones watched the violent or non-violent videos. They then recorded the number of times the boys attacked another boy during the game. Hitting, tripping, and shoving another player was considered to be an attack.
The experiment allowed teachers to observe and associate the students that were more aggressive in class with how they were acting during the floor hockey game. The same experiment was done with preschoolers and teens and also with the use of video games. To sum it up, experiments distinctly show that viewing violent television, movies, or playing violent video games “cause” the risk to go up that the observing child will behave seriously aggressively toward others immediately afterwards. This is true of preschoolers, elementary school, high school, college students, and adults. Those who watch the violent clips tend to behave more aggressively than those who view non-violent clips, and they adopt beliefs that are more “accepting” of violence. Violence in youth can also be contributed by family influence or surroundings. A family is a key component of a child’s socialization and influences their development. Parents and family are supposed to be a model for their children and depending on how that is can play a role in how the child grows up. The bond that a parent has with their child is detrimental to how they become as an adult. For example, if a parent supports, encourages, and shows affection towards their child the child would look up to the parent in a positive way as will model them. On the other hand, if a parent is negative and acts in a negative way it’s likely that the child would follow in those footsteps.
A study done by Barnes Hoffman in 2006 showed that a lack of communication caused a child to be defensive, increase in anger, and neglect their responsibilities. To help prevent the delinquent behavior from happening parents have to use effective discipline, monitoring, and problem solving techniques. Having discipline will instill what is right and wrong and prevent repeated bad behavior. Monitoring the child involves knowing where they are, who their friends are,The crimes committed by youth not only affect the person but has an effect economically as well. Youth violence costs the United States 158 billion dollars a year and the crimes continue to grow. Communities are also impacted because of the increase cost of healthcare, decreasing property values, and medical and work loss. Youth assault-related injuries and homicide results in approximately $18. 6 billion in medical and work loss costs. Because of this large amount of money that gets lost and wasted on fixing crime issues it takes away from areas that can benefit more such as education and fixing the communities. In conclusion, there are multiple contributing factors to the youth committing crimes including the media, influence of family life, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and easy access to weapons. For this paper we only focused on the media and influence of family life.
Although, there is no absolute way to prevent kids from watching or taking part of violent media there are some tips parents or older adults can implement to reduce the violent behaviors. This includes keeping an eye on how long they are watching tv or on the video game, teach conflict resolution, explain consequences of violence, and expose them to positive TV shows and video games as well. This also ties in with the influence of family life by making sure parents are teaching and being a positive role model for their kids. In addition there are programs that are out to help prevent violence in youth as well.
For instance, the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) developed the Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere (STRYVE) program that provides communities with resources to be successful in preventing youth violence. “Communities are connected to tools that help them convene partners, use data to design local prevention approaches, select evidence-based strategies, and conduct evaluations to help ensure community youth violence prevention goals are being achieved. STRYVE helps communities take a public health approach to preventing youth violence—stopping it before it even starts. ” With programs like the one just mentioned and conscious efforts to be more active in kids lives and reduce the exposure to violent media there should be some decrease in violence in youth.
