The issue that I am addressing is the effect of sex and violence in the media on children. As long as there has been television, there has been an association made between media and violence – children who repeated what they saw on cartoons leading to their death, teenagers injured while emulating a popular movie, and mass killings blamed on video games. Primarily this relationship has been assumed to be causal with television being the assumed central cause in violent or risky behavior. Once you begin delving into the roots of violent and risky behavior, however, the association between modeled violence and expressed violence becomes less and less obvious.
Violence in society in general is complicated and requires unpacking so that each aspect of the roots of violence can be analyzed and ultimately discussed in a meaningful way, including acknowledging that the origins are just as layered and complex as the solutions.
Summary of Internet Information
I began looking into various studies and articles about violence in media to see what kind of information was already available on the subject. There were a number of points of view represented, however, none of them outright dismissed that there was some relationship between sex and violence in the media and violent behavior. The studies also generally agreed that the complexities of violent behavior may potentially be ultimately unknowable because of that complexity. What may drive one person to violence may have little to no effect on another or the level of exposure to images of sex and violence in combination with other influences, including parental and peer attitudes towards sex and violence, may be a stronger relationship than media influence alone.
The article “It’s not all sex and violence” by Agustín Fuentes set the tone for how I came to look at my research because it brought up the important point that sex and violence are