Learning Violence From Television example essay topic

Television Made Me Do It! They lay quietly in the moist grass waiting for their plan to unfold. Their camouflage clothing helped them to blend into the scenery. No one would be able to see them until it was too late. The plan was quite simple but well thought out. They knew that it would work because they had seen similar ones work before.

They both heard the warning signal at the same time. Now it would be just a matter of seconds until the enemy would be in sight. Bang! The first shot rang out which was followed by many more. When the shooting had stopped, there were bloody bodies lying in the elementary schoolyard.

The two shooters, who were only eleven and nine years old thought that using violence would solve their problem. How could a nine and eleven year old child think of setting up an ambush? Where could they have learned how to do this? Who was their role model for this horrible event? Television! The effects that television has on our children can be seen by the increase of violent crimes committed by children.

Children mimic what they see on television. A child starts the learning process the second he or she is born. As children grow, they learn by imitating what they see and hear from the role models in the environment around them. Children that watch violent television shows learn to be violent people. Parents care about their children and work very hard in trying to raise them to become upstanding citizens. Parents send their children to school to become educated.

They care for their children's daily needs and take all the precautions possible like telling them not to talk to strangers or open the door to a stranger. They do not want the child to get hurt. One thing that some parents do not think of is that letting children watch the television is just like letting a "stranger into their household to teach their children for 3-5 hours a day" (Strasburger). Some might say that it is only a few hours of television a day.

These few hours add up a lot, according to Doctor Victor C. Strasburger Chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine, University of New Mexico, "American children and adolescent spend 22-28 hours per week viewing television - more time than any other activity except sleeping" (Strasburger). There are studies that have pointed out that a child will have more hours in front of the television than is the classroom by their high school graduation day: "15,000 hours versus 12,000 hours" (Strasburger). That is 3000 more hours! Also these studies have pointed out that a child will have viewed more than 8,000 murders and 10,000 acts of violence before the end of elementary school. Leonard Eron, Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently summarized. ".. before the United States Senate Committee on Government Affairs: There can no longer be any doubt that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence in society...

Television violence affects youngsters of all ages... The fact that we get this same finding of relation between television violence and aggression in children in study after study". (Media Scope) The children who see all this violence and mayhem, learn that the solution to life's problems is violence. This is very evident when the news headlines read children killing children. The crime rate is in the news on a daily basis but what is the fastest growing crime? Juvenile violence has the highest rate of growth.

Some people will agree that viewing violent television shows does cause a problem with children, but it is not their concern because they don't have children. This attitude is wrong. Just because one does not have a murderer in the family doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about the Jeffrey Dahmer imitators that live around the corner. Society makes laws to protect us from such evils.

Society update laws when a new problem arises. The new problem of today is the increasing amount of violent crimes committed by children. After looking into the causes of this problem and reviewing case studies, you will find out that the major influence in the young criminal is the television violence. This means there should be a law that filters the violence out of television programming.

Children that watch violent television shows today are receiving the seeds of violence, which will sprout in the future. Why does one need to filter out the violence from television when it is ultimately the parents' responsibility for rearing their children? The parent can select all the positive television shows that a child will watch, but what happens during those commercial breaks? These breaks are sometimes filled with violent scenes from upcoming movies. How can a parent defend against that? Laws, in general, are designed to protect the public.

There are laws especially designed to protect children. Children must be of a certain age to be able work, to buy tobacco and alcohol products. Why do we have these laws? Are these laws unnecessary? Isn't it the parent's responsibility to protect their children? These laws are in place today because parents can't do it all by themselves.

Laws are always being changed and / or created to react to new criminal violence. Now with this new problem of juvenile violence that is caused by television violence, there should be a new law made to censor the violence from television. When people started to die from cancer, didn't we strive for a cure and not just settle for a way to care for them until they passed away? We need to do the same thing for juvenile violence as we are doing for finding a cure for cancer. Censoring the violence from television is one solution for juvenile violence: "Many Americans say that censorship is acceptable because it is simply for the protection of the children". (Jason R.) The law that allows children to be tried as adults after they have committed one of the violent acts that they learned from television is dealing with the aftermath and does nothing to prevent it.

We need to enact a law for television censorship before it is too late. A study done by L. Rowel Hues mann and Leonard Eron showed "the correlation between violence-viewing at age 8 and how aggressive the individual was at 19 was higher than the correlation between watching violence at age 8 and behaving aggressively at age 8" (Szaflik). Just like when the wind blows seeds from a neighbor's yard into your flowerbed, it sometimes takes weeks before you see any growth. When the weeds start to sprout they begin to take over the flowerbed very rapidly and a major battle is mounted to correct the problem.

The television violence is just like those weeds. You will not see a major impact until the child grows up. The children of today will be the society of tomorrow. Protecting our young children today from learning violence from television is everybody's duty. One can't believe that the children down the street are just going to grow up and stay there. As you stroll down the street, how will you be able tell that the angelic looking child who is approaching is not one of the media grown heartless demons.

It is not too late. We can change the direction of the path that we are on but it will take everyone's help.