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There are more and more bloody scenes in movies and computer games, and the number of violent crimes is decreasing. It seems that the opinion that those who have “seen enough” of cruelty on the screen are sent to kill people is a myth.
In all corners of the world, advocates of public morality blame various freedoms for everything bad that exists in our lives, including freedom of creativity, freedom of information, freedom of speech. In their opinion, in the media, in movies, books, computer games, sex, cruelty and violence reign, which, de fact, push fledgling minds to commit all sorts of terrible things.
Therefore, all this must be banned, and then peace and quiet will come, they believe. Beliefs of this kind are so stable that sometimes they take possession of the artists themselves. Stephen King decided not to republish his novel Fury, about a school shooter, after copies of the book were found in the possession of two teenagers who staged a real school shooting (a third, according to his friend, Fury was a favorite book, and a fourth , when he took classmates hostage, he used a phrase that vaguely resembles a quote from a novel).
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However, a study* by Christopher Ferguson of the Stetson University in Florida, published in the Journal of Communications, suggests that the world of images lives and develops according to its own laws, reality – according to its own. Thus, it can be assumed that if there is a causal relationship between reading “Rage” and shooting at classmates, then it is rather the opposite: having started an attack, a psychologically unstable teenager, of course, studies “hobby literature”, but the origins of his crazy demarche you have to look elsewhere.
However, Ferguson did not study books, he limited himself to films and computer games. In the first part of the study, independent reviewers assessed the number and naturalism of violent scenes in popular films that appeared on the screen from 1920 to 2005, and the author compared these data with crime statistics. It turned out that a slight correlation existed in the second half of the last century, but before the 1940s and after 1990, the relationship was reversed: more “ketchup” on the screen – less murders in reality.
The second part of the work concerned computer games and covered the period from 1996 to 2011. To assess the “violence” of games, the author used the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings. This authoritative non-governmental association labels games as intended for a certain age category, and also develops and applies a system of standard indications of the content of the game in terms of public morality (marks on the packages “Contains strong language”, “Contains sex scenes”, “Contains mention of tobacco products “).
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Ferguson compared the data on violence in games with the statistics of violent crimes committed by teenagers and young people. The result is even more convincing than for movies: a strong inverse correlation was found. The resources that society can devote to fighting crime are limited. There is a risk that misrepresentations of the problem, such as accusations of violence in the media, will divert attention from more real issues – poverty, poor education, inequality in the labor market and mental health of people, ”Ferguson emphasizes.
* С. Ferguson «Video games and youth violence: A prospective analysis in adolescents». Journal of Communications, 2014.