How Do Disney Films Promote Crime

INTRODUCTION:
Definition of crime and culture learnt by children through Disney movies:
Media has become the primary source of education and communication for children. It introduces and promotes a culture from which children learn about gender role portrayal, the way of expressing aggression and emotions, way of living and crime existence, the roots of crime and the characters that get involved in criminal activities, crime as unconnected to social conditions, the role of gender in crime, redemption for criminals, and punishment for criminals. Disney films and images function as cultural icons and a way of teaching and educating not only children but the whole public. Henry Giroux (2002) called Disney films “teaching machines”, as its characters merge their life with reality and gains an important position in implying the idea of criminal justice ideology, and roots of crime. At the age where children don’t receive any education about crimes, aggression, and violence from real life, learns or assimilate their schemas about these aspects from Disney ideology and apply it to their real life.
Disney promotes crime as an inherited personal character that is motivated by his or her own desire of being wealthy, rich, beautiful, powerful etc, and isn’t considered from any of the environmental or outside factor.
Crime is associated with insanity, madness, craziness, foolishness and selfishness. So the criminal is faulty within his own self and psychology and his or her character has no influence from society which represents the idea that is contrary to real life where criminal behavior is provoked in result of some unpleasant experiences such as racism etc. In addition to that Disney represents the non-white characters and villains which promote the idea of racism in children concluding that darker people are more criminals. Along wise, female villains and portrayed as more evil uncontrollable, and
sexualized.
The value of studying the representations of crime in Disney lies in the idea that children, as well as adults, learn from the media. (Rabison, R, 2008)

Effects of media violence:
Media violence and decreased helping behavior are linked with each other as from a study conducted by Bushman and Anderson concluded that violent video games that are famous to desensitize people decreases helping behavior, perceptions, and cognitions. In an experiment participants were given helping situations after playing video games and it was observed that the group playing violent video game was less likely to help than the one played non violent games. In addition to that the behavior varies from one gender to another as observed that women are less helpful than men. (Brad J. Bushman1,2 and Craig A. Anderson3 2009). Another study conducted to test if short term exposure to prosocial video games increases helpful behavior in children and decreases the hurtful behavior as compared to violent and neutral video games. Results proved that prosocial video games can change the behavior from hurtful to helpful in children. Whereas, children who play violent games showed opposite results from that of the helpful behavior. It is also seen that playing video games without any prosocial content can work as an aggression reduction factor. This short term exposure to prosocial video games is encouraging and is effective to produce long term changes, as suggested by social-cognitive theory, through repeated exposures. However, the study found that these unreal, cartoonish video game characters affected children’s behavior in a task where they were asked to choose to help or hurt another child.