CHILDREN exposed to violence in films, on television, in video games and on the internet are at significant risk of displaying aggressive or fearful behaviour, research suggests.

A review of the influence of media violence shows that both “passive viewing” of television and film and “interactive viewing” of video games have substantial short-term effects on children’s emotions and increase the likelihood of aggression.

Parents should treat adult media entertainment with the same caution as medications or chemicals around the home, the authors of the paper, from the University of Birmingham, conclude. Parents who allowed children to be exposed to some of the extreme violent and sexual imagery were committing a form of “emotional maltreatment”, they said.

Kevin Browne, the lead author, said that the study highlighted the need for government action to curb the influence of violent media on impressionable children, and the implications that it carried for public health.

Professor Browne called for guidelines to help parents to gauge when and how to protect their children from the increasingly bloodthirsty, sexually explicit and amoral content of some video games and films.

He said that critical appraisals of media should also be included on school curriculums to help pupils to understand what they were experiencing.

Controversial titles such as Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s film of a young couple’s killing spree, and Manhunt, a computer game that awards players points for inflicting the most grisly death, gained instant notoriety on their release and became cult hits among the young. Stone’s film was linked to several killings carried out by impressionable teenagers, while public outrage forced Manhunt to be withdrawn from sale last year after it was blamed for the murder of a 14-year-old boy by a teenage friend.

Another British teenager last year confessed to having watched Queen of the Damned nearly 100 times before killing his best friend. He said that he had been instructed to carry out the crime by the central character, a female vampire.

Professor Browne said that the causal link between such imagery and violent behaviour was statistically similar to that between passive smoking and lung cancer. He said that family and social factors were likely to affect how a child responded to televisual or computer violence.

“Some children are more vulnerable than others,” he said. “If you have a child who is vulnerable then you should not allow them access to this sort of material. It is the same as knowing that your child is depressed and leaving a bottle of paracetamol around. Media violence just adds to the problem and gives them ideas about how to express their anger.”

Professor Browne and his co-author, Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, said that media violence clearly had short-term effects by arousing emotions and increasing the likelihood of “aggressive or fearful behaviour”. The influence was particularly evident in boys, they added.

The review, published tomorrow in The Lancet, involved laboratory assessments of children’s behaviour after they had watched scenes of violence, and investigations in the community to see whether children who watched lots of violent scenes were more prone to violence or law-breaking.

“The availability of video film, satellite and cable TV in the home allows children to access violent media inappropriate to their age, development stage and mental health,” the paper concludes. “Carelessness with material that contains extreme violent and sexual imagery might even be regarded as a form of emotional child maltreatment.”

Welcoming the review, John Beyer, director of Mediawatch UK, said that film and television had a part to play if the Government’s aim of reducing antisocial behaviour was to be reached. There was little point, he said, in having more punitive criminal sanctions if the culture that contributed to it was left unchecked.

THREE DEGREES

Professor Browne’s study divides violent films into three categories:

Violent Action: violence used in a “pornographic” fashion to excite (Rambo, From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill)

Violent Horror: viewer shares in the degradation and humiliation of human characters (Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

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