Violent games, a threat to public health
According to a new study by the
Although they haven’t been around that long, video games are one of the biggest concerns of the study because most of them contain violence of some sort. “Children are spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83 percent of homes with children,” said L. Rowell Huesmann, senior research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research.
Huesmann went as far as to say that the effect of violent games, movies and TV shows is second only to the negative effects of smoking cigarettes: “Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well-known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer,”
“Our lives are saturated by the mass media, and for better or worse, violent media are having a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being of children. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior. But that does not diminish the need to address the threat — as a society and as parents by trying to control children’s exposure to violent media to the extent that we can.”
All I can say is: I hope Jack Thompson doesn’t hear about this!
