Media and the phenomenon of child killers - Essay Example

DISTORTED IMAGES: Media and the Phenomenon of Child Killers "God I can't wait till they die. I can taste the blood now - NBK (Natural Born Killers)" Dylan Klebold, one of the two killers in the Columbine Massacre The gruesome sight of the body of four-year-old Horace Millen at the beach at Dorchester Bay initially led those who had seen it to believe that it was the work of a grown man or an adult. Little did they know that such savagery was the handiwork of a boy barely out of childhood. He was sent to a reform school prior to the incident for beating up younger children and using an astounding degree of unnecessary physical force. When people began speculating about the kind of background this child might have that led him to commit such unspeakable acts of atrocity, one thing that came up was his penchant for dime novels. Sordid tales of killing and violence leapt from the pages of these dime novels, and many believe that these tales emboldened him to commit the crimes himself. From the first example of Jesse Pomeroy, recent history has had its share of child killers and child criminals. There is the Heath High School shooting where Michael Carneal, just fourteen years old, opened fire at a group of students praying and killed three female students while wounding five others. Two years later, in 1999, the Columbine massacre took place wherein two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed twelve students and a teacher, and wounded twenty four others, before turning the guns on themselves and committing suicide. Just this year, on April 16, 2007, in Blacksburg, Virginia, a Korean-American by the name of Cho Seung -Hui went on a killing spree that was to become the deadliest shooting rampage in America. After the smoke had cleared, the death count was 32 bodies. Much speculation has taken place as to what might have caused children to behave in this manner. Of course, several factors came into play: mental illness, family background, a history of child abuse, teen-age social stratifications (particularly in the case of Columbine and Virginia Tech) and a host of other factors that contribute to maladjustment. However, ever since the case of Jesse Pomeroy, an accusing finger has been particularly directed towards the media. It has been said that the surfeit of violent images depicted in it that could have triggered psychological responses in the child-perpetrators. Indeed, there is no dearth of cases and examples to prove that there is a causation between media violence and violent behavior. In an article entitled "The Impact of Mass Media Violence on US Homicides", Phillips (1983, p. 560) presented "what may be the first systematic evidence suggesting that some homicides are indeed triggered by a type of mass media violence." Just a year before, he came out with another paper, with the following findings: Violent, fictional television stories trigger imitative deaths and near fatal accidents in the United States. In 19877, suicides, motor vehicle deaths and non-fatal accidents all rose immediately following soap opera suicide stories. The U.S. female suicides increased proportionally more than male suicides. Single-vehicle crashes increased more than multiple vehicle suicides.1 Several years after Phillips came out with his seminal studies, new researchers came out with evidence to support his conclusions. Cornstock2 found "a very solid relationship between viewing anti-social portrayals or violent episodes and behaving anti-socially." Even more compelling, Huesman and Erron3 published a 20-year follow up of 400 children and discovered that heavy exposure to television violence at eight years old was associated with violent crime and spouse or child abuse at age 30 and this is true for all socio-economic levels and for all levels of intelligence. More careful than her predecessors but presenting evidence equally noteworthy, Sheenan4 found that the question of the young being more vulnerable to the effect of media is a complex and difficult one to interpret precisely. The author explained that one can only really address the issue by attempting to understand the operation of multiple variables, or factors that may play a part. Variables cited by Sheenan5 include the capacity to differentiate screened fantasy from reality6, degree of justification for the aggression shown7, the identification of the viewer with the violent events being displayed8, and how much viewers attend to, comprehend and cognitively process the meaning of the violence they view.9 Only a few years ago, Anderson and Bushman stated that "evidence is steadily accumulating that prolonged exposure to violent TV programming during childhood is associated with subsequent aggression."10 It is not only violence, but sex, that is a problem as well. There can be no denying that media plays an important role in the molding of social values and in the legitimization of personal perceptions. It has been said that media is even more potent than formal education, in that its effects seep into the subconscious and accost individuals wherever they may be, whatever time of the day. Gender stereotyping is a huge problem that must be addressed by the media, as it could lead to notions of male domination and female submission. According to the Media Awareness Network: The statistics are startling. The average North American girl will watch 5,000 hours of television, including 80,000 ads, before she starts kindergarten. In the United States, Saturday morning cartoons alone come with 33 commercials per hour. Commercials aimed at kids spend 55 per cent of their time showing boys building, fixing toys, or fighting. They show girls, on the other hand, spending 77 per cent of their time laughing, talking, or observing others. And while boys in commercials are shown out of the house 85 per cent of the time, more than half of the commercials featuring girls place them in the home. There can be no denying that media plays an important role in the molding of social values and in the legitimization of personal perceptions. It has been said that media is even more potent than formal education, in that its effects seep into the subconscious and accost individuals wherever they may be, whatever time of the day. In a study it was found that 98% have at least one television, 70% have more than one television, 70% have cable, and 51% of households with children have a computer.11 Indeed, a particularly vulnerable sector or demographic are children, not only because of the access they have to virtually all forms of media - such as the internet, television, radio, newspapers and magazines - but also because they are at an age where they are particularly vulnerable. They have yet to develop sufficient maturity and discernment necessary to filter out potentially destructive messages and unhealthy ideas streaming in from various media sources. Let us now discuss the movies that have come under fire for being media artifacts that have provoked children to employ violence, or have presented violence in a glamorous light. "Basketball Diaries" Basketball Diaries is a film made in 1995 and based on a book with the same name. It was written by Jim Carroll. The story revolves around a character named Jim Carroll, who is a rising basketball and who has big dreams for himself. He envisions himself to someday be a professional athlete. His drug addiction however, gets in the way of his dreams. He enjoys using drugs with his friends every so often. The allure of drugs eventually makes him leave the world of basketball behind and embark on a perilous journey in the streets of New York, where they commit acts of violence and mayhem in the name of drugs. His mother banishes him from the house, and this makes him plummet even deeper into his destructive addiction. This film came into controversy because of the Columbine shootings. In the shootings, the two boy-killers were dressed in trench coats while they were shooting their classmates. In the movie, there was a dream sequence wherein the lead character Jim enters a classroom in a trench coat and systematically executes his classmates and teachers while his friends egg him on. The film was also blamed for the Heath School shooting. The parents of three victims filed a case against Internet pornography sites, computer game companies and the producer of Basketball Diaries for being responsible for the deaths of their children. The case was dismissed in 2001, with the 6th US Court of Appeals saying that it was "simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom."12 "Natural Born Killers" In the movie Natural-Born Killers, an unmarried couple, Mickey and Mallory, both of whom suffered abuse at the hands of their caregivers, embark on a road trip cum killing spree, leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake and followed by sensationalist media vultures. The movie is at once a horrific look at how serial criminals behave and an indictment of media and its propensity to glorify crime and criminals. It also asks the troubling question: who does one blame for crimes What social factors may have contributed to the behavior of criminals Much reference is made to television as a powerful medium. For example, the part where Mallory is shown to have been the victim of a sexually abusive father is a satire on 50's-era sitcoms, where canned laughter from the audience is activated when the father makes lewd and disparaging comments about Mallory. Another example is the role of the sensationalist TV reporter who follows the exploits of the pair - outwardly denouncing their crimes; but off-camera, admitting that he wants the crimes to continue because it would mean ratings from the show. The film Natural Born Killers was said to be responsible for a variety of real-life crimes. Teenagers Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Benjamin Darras committed murder and robbery after watching the film, prodding the relatives of one victim to file a case against the producers of the show. Seventeen-year-old Nathan Martinez, was a fan of Mickey and shaved his head and wore dark shades to look like him. He killed his stepmother and half-sister while they were sleeping. Most notably, the Columbine pair were fans of the movie, and made documented references to it in their blogs and journal entries. They used the code "NBK" - Natural Born Killers -- to identify themselves. "Hitman: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors" This book, published by Paladin Press in 1983, is a veritable how-to on the process of being a hitman, on committing a crime, and fulfilling contracts. In came into controversy in 1993 when a man, James Perry, in Maryland committed a triple murder, and admitted to using the book as guide. He was hired as a hitman by a man who wanted to receive the proceeds of a life insurance policy. The families of the victims sued the publishers of the book for "aiding and abetting" the murders, and unlike the case of the "Basketball Diaries", the court decided in favor of the claimants and held that the book is not protected by the mantle of the First Amendment clause in the Constitution. This is especially since, by its own admission, the book publishers admitted that the book could actually be used and was meant to be used by criminals and those who wanted to be criminals. Paladin Press settled the case by paying the families millions of dollars and agreeing to pull out remaining copies of the book from the shelves and henceforth not publishing it again. There were, however, illegal copies being distributed over the internet for a while. How the law protects children from exposure to media images Right now, the problem has grown tenfold with the proliferation of the Internet. Children now have access to a slew of unhealthy if not ourightly dangerous images, that could affect their behavior. Most of the law and jurisprudence have dealt with access to obscene speech, but indeed, this may be said to be analogous to access to violent materials. What is regulated, after all, is access of minors to sex and violence that could have deleterious effects on their psyche. Even in traditional media, determining what constitutes obscenity remains a tricky proposition. While the beginnings of obscenity laws may be traced to literary works, it has slowly expanded to include even pop music. (Cloonan, 1995, 349). However, even as the noose of these laws have widened, so too has the realization that the need to rein in prurient communication to protect impressionable minds must be balanced against the equally-compelling principle of freedom of speech and expression. As admitted by the United States Supreme Court through Justice Brennan: "As a result of our failure to define standards with predictable application to any given piece of material, there is no probability of regularity in obscenity decisions by state and lower federal courts." (Paris Adult Theater v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 92 [1973]). That is perhaps what led to Justice Stewart's famous line: "I know it when I see it" in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio. (378 U.S. 184, 197 [1964]). In the case of Miller v. California, the Supreme Court crafted a new three-pronged standard of obscenity: "whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." The Miller doctrine, however often quoted, does little to clear the confusion. It is perhaps as vague as the 1868 case of R v. Hicklin in the United Kingdom, where Justice Cockburn set the tone for the legal formula of obscenity when he declared: "the test of an obscene article is if it has a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall." In many states, suits have been filed against statutes prohibiting the dissemination of materials of a sexual nature that purportedly do not violate contemporary community standards. (Glassman, 1978, p. 161). Highly arbitrary in nature, the doctrine is susceptible to abuse and may result in the clamping down of free speech in the name of nebulous and oft-shifting concepts of decency. The difficulties grow exponentially when the medium in question is the Internet. There can be no denying the proliferation of obscene materials in the internet. Accessible even to minors, the need to address and curb dangers of pornography becomes even more crucial. Says Simon (1998): In recent years, the Supreme Court has struggled to prevent access by minors to speech that may harm them, while safeguarding the First Amendment right of adults to engage in non-obscene speech. The Court has addressed the constitutionality of restricting the rights of minors to access constitutionally-protected speech in a variety of fora. Generally, the court measures the Government's interest in protecting minors from harmful speech relative to the ease with which minors can access that speech.(p. 1016) There certainly are efforts that are being made to improve on the regulations pertaining to child protection. There is too a greater recognition that child protection must be the result of a synergetic effort among institutions and players in society. At the end of the day, we must be united in our goal to provide a better world for our children, where they can grow to the fullest of their potential and contribute to society as productive and well-rounded citizens. References Anderson, C. & Bushman, B. (2002) The Effects of Media Violence on Society. Science. Vol. 295. no. 5564, pp. 2377 - 2379. Cloonan, M. "'I Fought the Law': Popular Music and British Obscenity Law" Popular Music, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct., 1995), pp. 349-363 Glassman, M. "Community Standards of Patent Offensiveness: Public Opinion Data and Obscenity Law." Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 161-170 Huesmann, L. R., & Eron, L. D. (Eds.) (1986). Television and the aggressive child: A cross national comparison. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Paik, H., & Comstock, G. (1994). The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: a meta-analysis. Communication Research, 21, 516-546. Phillips, D. "The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides." American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Aug., 1983), pp. 560-568. Sheehan, (1983), Sheehan, P. W. (1983). Age trends and the correlates of children's television viewing. Australian Journal of Psychology, 35, 417-431. Simon, G. "Cyberporn and Censorship: Constitutional Barriers to Preventing Access to Internet Pornography by Minors". 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