National Center For Policy Research (CPR) For Women & Families

Violence


News You Can Use on Kids and Violence

By Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.

    There is a lot of research on violence and kids, and this information has important implications for parents, youth workers, and policy makers. Here are summaries of recent research findings, with information about how you can obtain copies of the original articles describing the research. All are written by Diana Zuckerman, president of CPR for Women & Families, and are based on her Research Watch column in Youth Today, unless a different citation is noted.


Child Abuse and Domestic Violence
. When Relatives Care for Kin
. Father Figures are the Answer, But What is the Question?
. Linking Spouse and Child Abuse
. Witnessing Violence at Home



Teen Suicide
. How Childhood and Youth Experiences Link to Suicide
. Research on Teen Suicide
. Smoking, Drinking, Marijuana, Family Problems, and Suicide

Media:

Violent Songs

Although Eminem and other rappers have attracted a great deal of attention for violent song lyrics, most of the public attention about the impact of media violence on youth has been on movies, TV and videogames. Since kids often listen to music while doing other activities, it is possible that violent lyrics are not as influential as visual media.

On the other hand, favorite songs may be listened to hundreds of times, and can have a strong emotional impact. For those reasons, violent songs could be more influential than other media violence.

Previous studies have found that enjoying or listening to heavy metal and rap music correlates with hostile attitudes, negative attitudes toward women, lower academic performance, behavior problems in school, drug use and arrests. Experimental studies of music without lyrics found that listening to "tense" music resulted in people writing more unpleasant stories in the Thematic Apperception Test.

A new study of violent lyrics is based on five experiments, each conducted on students from a large Midwestern university. Each study ranged in size between 60 and 160 students, approximately half male and half female.

In each experiment, young people listened to the lyrics of a song, then completed a scale aimed at measuring whether they were feeling hostile or having aggressive thoughts. Some songs had violent lyrics and some did not; some songs were humorous and others were not.

Hostile feelings and aggressive thoughts were measured in several ways, such as the students' greater tendency to turn incomplete words into hostile words (changing "h_t" to hit rather than hat), and the authors' State Hostility Scale, which consists of 35 sentences describing current feelings, either hostile or friendly (such as "I feel furious" or "I feel like yelling at someone").

Students who listened to the violent song expressed more hostility and aggressive thoughts immediately afterwards. There was no effect of violent lyrics on arousal, understandability of lyrics or familiarity with the songs. However, in some cases if the students had another task between the time they listened to the songs and filled out the questionnaires, they did not seem more hostile in their responses to the questionnaires, although they continued to have more aggressive thoughts. The students who listened to a violent humorous song were not as influenced as those who listened to a violent song that was not humorous. The authors conclude that humor partially canceled out the effect of violence on state hostility, but did not completely cancel out violence for aggressive cognitions.

Using a meta-analysis on the five experiments, the researchers concluded that violent lyrics increased the students' feelings of hostility and likelihood of interpreting ambiguous cues as hostile, and this was true (although less influential) even if the violent lyrics were in a humorous song.

The researchers were surprised to find that students who were initially more hostile did not respond differently to the violent songs than those who were less hostile.

The strength of the studies are that they used songs with similar styles and the same artists, so that the only difference was whether lyrics were violent. They also studied whether the songs increase arousal, not aggressiveness. Surprisingly, they found no differences in arousal by violent songs.

Overall, the findings from the five experiments were consistent with each other, suggesting that listening to even one violent song can have a short-term impact on a college student. But the fact that students did not show increased hostility when they were given another task between listening to the song and participating in the hostility survey or word tasks indicates that the impact of these songs on hostile feelings may be short-lived. However, their impact on aggressive thoughts may be longer lasting.

Because other youth were not studied, it is not possible to know if younger or older students, or less educated youth, would be affected the same way.

Unfortunately, this study does not study the impact of repeated exposure to the same violent lyrics. It seems logical that if the song had an impact after listening just once, the impact would be greater if the student listened to it many times. Because listening just once causes short-term hostility and increases the chances of interpreting ambiguous cues as hostile, the authors note that it is possible that those hostile feelings could generate negative reactions from other people, which could start a cycle of hostile or aggressive behaviors. That, however, was not evaluated in this study.

Reference:
Exposure to violent media: The effect of songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts and feelings,
Craig A. Anderson, Nicolas L. Carnagey and Janie Eubanks,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2003, Vol. 84, No. 5, pgs. 960-971
Available at www.apa.org/journals/psp/press_releases/may_2003/psp845960.pdf

 


Teens as Online Victims

Many youth are exposed to sexual solicitations, unwanted pornography, or harassment on the Internet, according to a new national survey. One out of four children between 10 and 17 who used the Internet regularly was exposed to unwanted pornography last year and nearly one out of five encountered unwanted sexual solicitations and approaches. Parents were not informed about most of those incidents, and even fewer were reported to authorities.

The study was conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center of the University of New Hampshire, and funded by the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children.

According to the study, 19 percent of youth received unwanted online requests to engage in sexual activities or to provide intimate sexual information in the last year. In 15 percent of such incidents, the person soliciting sex attempted to contact the youth in person, over the telephone, or by mail. None of the solicited youth who were interviewed actually suffered sexual assaults or sexual abuse as a result of these episodes, but 25 percent of the youth involved in these encounters reported being very upset or frightened.

In addition, 25 percent of the youth interviewed in the study were exposed to unwanted online pornography in the past year, usually while they were surfing or searching the web. However, one in four of the exposures to unwanted pornography were the result of email or Instant Messages that the youth opened. Approximately a quarter said they had been very upset by what they saw.

The study also reported that 6 percent of youth were harassed in a nonsexual way, including threats of physical harm or postings of embarrassing information. Overall, the survey revealed many offensive and potentially exploitative episodes, whether sexual or not, with some coming from other youth and even from women.

Although the authors report that most youth are not bothered much by what they encounter on the Internet, some are very distressed. The study also urged the training of mental health, school and family counselors about these new Internet hazards, so they can help youth deal with distressing online experiences.

Why didn't more youth report what had happened to authorities? One possible explanation is that only 17 percent of the youth and 10 percent of their parents knew where they could report what had happened. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children runs one such service, the CyberTipline.

Software that screens out certain sexually oriented websites or language is another line of defense. Only a third of families were employing any filtering or blocking software, including the software made available by Internet service providers themselves.

The study called for more involvement of young people in planning Internet protection strategies. According to the findings, Internet sexual offenses target a somewhat older, more exclusively teenage population than conventional "offline" child molestation, which targets seven to thirteen year olds. "Good protection strategies, especially for the teen group ... need to be tied to youth aspirations, values and culture. That requires the input of youth" the report says. Parents and other adults who work with youth can help to make that happen.

The study was based on half hour telephone interviews with a Nationally representative sample of 1501 youth who used the Internet at least once a month and separate interviews with their caretakers, conducted between August 1999 and February 2000.


Reference:
Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation's Youth
David Finkelhor, Ph.D., Kimberly Mitchell, Ph.D., and Janis Wolak, J.D.
Crimes against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire.
Available free from 1-800-843-5678 and online at www.missingkids.com





Media and Kids: Everything You Were Afraid to Ask

This special issue on the mass media and adolescent health provides a broad overview of the pervasive influence of media on the lives of adolescents. It is based on a conference on media and youth that was held last November, sponsored by the William T. Grant Foundation. The articles raise interesting questions on everything from the media's impact of teen consumerism, to civic socialization, to "unrestrained access to erotica." The journal provides an overview rather than detailed studies, and is informative and provocative.

The two articles of greatest research substance are the ones entitled Access, Exposure and Privatization, by Donald Roberts, and Media Violence, by Joanne Cantor.

Everyone knows that American kids spend a lot of time with the media, but Roberts' study of more than 2,000 children between 8 and 18 shows just how immersed they are. He found that the average youth devotes 6.5 hours to media each day, and that the simultaneous use of several media increases exposure to eight hours a day of media messages. Perhaps most important, but not surprising, most youths' media use occurs "in the absence of parents." The study details which media are used for how many hours, and with what other family members present.

Cantor's article on media violence is an excellent summary of the research that has been done over many years. She makes it very clear that media violence is a likely cause of:

  • Antisocial behavior, including criminal violence.
  • Desensitization, including reduced emotional disturbance when exposed to violence, reduced likelihood of intervening in a fight, and less sympathy for victims of violence.
  • Fear, which can last for days in some children.

Cantor explains that even though youth who are already violent tend to seek violent entertainment, they will still be influenced by the exposure to violence. The result is a vicious cycle: the kids get more violent as they are exposed to more violent media. This is the key to understanding why media violence is so dangerous, and yet its impact is difficult to study.

This special issue provides a great deal of information about what is known, not known, and what we need to find out about the impact of media on adolescents. This is a subject that youth workers may not understand as well as they need to.


Reference:
Special Issue on The Mass Media and Adolescents' Health
Journal of Adolescent Health
Supplement to Volume 27, No. 2, August 2000
Available at: http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/jahonline or from (888) 437-4636




Violence in G (G-Rated Animated Films)

If you had any doubt about the pervasiveness of media violence, this article will convince you: it quantifies the violence portrayed in all G-rated animated feature films that were released in theaters between 1937 and 1999, recorded in English, and available on videocassette in the U.S. late last year.

All 74 films contained at least one act of violence, averaging 9.5 minutes per film, and ranging in time between 6 seconds and 24 minutes. This carefully analyzed study found that the duration of the violence increased as the films became more recent. The study documented 125 injuries, 62 of them fatal, in these cartoon movies. Most of the violence involved good or neutral characters fighting with bad characters -- in other words, using violence to resolve a conflict.

The researchers point out that the message for kids is clear: violence is effective, fun and can even been funny. There are very few exceptions, where heroes rely on clever strategies instead of force, such as "Aladdin" and "Balto." The implications for youth workers are clear: G-rated films can be very violent, adults need to be cautious about exposing children to them, and adults can use these videos to talk about violence with kids before and after they watch them.

The researchers recommend websites where adults can review the content of films and videos, such as www.kids-in-mind.com and www.screenit.com. I checked both out, and found the Kids-in-Mind review was shorter and yet had exactly the kinds of details that most parents would want to decide if a film was acceptable by their standards.


Reference:
Violence in G-Rated Animated Films
Journal of the American Medical Association
Fumie Yokota, M.S. and Kimberly Thompson, Sc.D.
May 24/31, 2000, Vol. 283, p. 2716-20
Available free at www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu or from Dr. Thompson (with a 9-by-12 self-addressed envelope, with 66 cents postage) at Harvard School of Public Health, Center for Risk Analysis, 718 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115





Violent Video Games Can Increase Aggression
Playing violent video games can increase aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in real life, according to two new studies.  Violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive and engrossing, requiring the player to identify with the aggressor. 

The first study involved 227 male and female college students, who were asked about their recent delinquent behaviors as well as their video game playing habits. Students who reported playing more violent video games in junior high and high school had more aggressive personalities, behaved more aggressively, and were more likely to report delinquent behavior in real life. In addition, students who spent more time playing video games had lower grades in college.
 
Of course, a study like this doesn't prove that playing the video games causes the increase in violence -- it is possible that kids that are more violent like to play violent video games.  However, the kids who played more violent video games were more violent in real life even if they did not have aggressive personalities.
The second study was designed to determine if violent games really do cause violent behavior.  The 210 college students played either a violent or nonviolent video game. In the violent game (Wolfenstein 3D) the human hero chooses from an array of weapons to kill Nazi guards with the ultimate goal of killing Adolph Hitler.  The game was chosen because it is blatantly violent, realistic and has human characters.  The nonviolent game was Myst.  As part of the study, the students were "tested" on three different days to see how well they played the game.  On the third day, they were told to punish their opponent with an unpleasant blast of noise when the opponent
lost.  The students who played the violent game punished their opponent for a longer period of time than did students who had played the nonviolent video game.  (To protect the students in the experiment, the opponents did not actually hear the noise, but the students thought they did).

The authors explain that violent video games teach kids to practice aggressive solutions to conflict.  In the short run, playing a violent video game appears to affect aggression by encouraging a child to think violent thoughts. Over a long period of time, the player learns and practices new aggressive strategies and ways of thinking during the games, and he or she becomes more likely to use these strategies when real-life conflicts arise.

Why does this happen?  Many violent video games involve learning how to be more effective at destroying the opponent.  According to the researchers, this makes video games potentially more dangerous than exposure to violent television and movies, which are known to have substantial effects on aggression and violence.

I interviewed Karen Dill, one of the authors, who told me that parents and youth workers should be concerned if someone is spending a lot of time playing violent computer games.  "They aren't just games - they can have a serious effect, so consider it a red flag, and take it seriously" she emphasized.  She pointed out that the military uses video games to train troops for combat.  Perhaps most important, she reminded us that it is easier to prevent a child from becoming violent than to rehabilitate one who is already violent.


Reference:
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Craig A. Anderson, PhD, and Karen E. Dill, PhD.
April 24, 2000, Vol 78, No. 4, pgs. 772-790
Free at http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html
or contact Craig Anderson at caa@iastate.edu
or Dept of Psychology, Iowa State, W 112 Lagomarcino Hall, Ames, Iowa 50014.

These articles are based on Diana Zuckerman's monthly Research Watch columns that appeared in Youth Today in issues from November 1999 through November 2004, and were reprinted with permission. Youth Today is a publication of the American Youth Work Center, 1200 17th St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20036. (800) 599-2455. E-mail: youthtoday@aol.com.


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