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Villain Or Scapegoat

Decent Essays

Living in a world full of crime and violence, people begin to wonder what the cause of the violence is and how it can then be prevented. Unfortunately, there is not a single root cause that can be found when people attempt to decipher why children are deciding to bring guns to school and murder their peers. Some may believe that it was influenced by being exposed to a hostile family, violent films, or gory video games. Although sometimes this might be the case, a lot of the time it is not as black and white, making this topic very difficult to analyze and understand. Both Jonathan L. Freedman in “Villain or Scapegoat? Media Violence and Aggression” and L Rowell Huesmann and Laramie D. Taylor in “The Role of Media Violence in Violent …show more content…

Huesmann and Taylor then begin to define violence in its various forms and stages. This seemed to be slightly redundant and useless information since it is obvious and is not specific to the topic in question. The authors then begin to obtain the reader’s attention as they begin to describe the issue faced by the youth having unlimited access to violence on television. A study done on children is then mentioned, where half of the group watches a violent movie and the other half a non-violent movie. The two groups of kids are then combined for a hockey game where levels of aggressive behavior are observed and compared. As expected, the research indicated that the kids who watched the violent movie demonstrated more violent behavior.
The authors continue to point out the various influences that media violence is affecting the youth and studies that back up their arguments. Huesmann and Taylor then shift to another source of violent influence, videogames. The various ratings categories of video games, Everyone, Teen, and Mature, are mentioned and the fact that all three of them allow some sort of violence. It is mentioned that the Teen category consists of roughly 94% violent games which is astonishing. This turns out to become a major issue because of the amount of time that teenagers spend playing video games. The authors then mention studies that show that teenagers who play violent video games demonstrated

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