'Your kids might be ready to explode': popular fears of media influence on the young
Anxieties about the perceived negative impact of popular culture on young people have a long history. Successive scares have cited different forms of commercial entertainment as a corrupting influence on the young. In Britain, as John Springhall (1998) shows, the Victorian era saw moral crusaders link an apparent rise in juvenile crime to the popularity of sensationalist ‘penny gaff theatres and ‘penny dreadful’ novels. In the US lurid ‘dime’ and ‘half-dime’ novels attracted similar criticism during the late nineteenth century. Consequently, they were targeted by campaigners such as Anthony Comstock who ensured the passage of the Federal Anti-Obscenity (or ‘Comstock’) Law of 1873, which suppressed the circulation of popular fiction and allowed for the arrest of publishers of ‘pernicious literature’.1 During the 1920s and 1930s gangster films attracted similar controversy. Hollywood was accused of delivering impressionable youth into a career of crime through depicting mobsters as glamorous and exciting, and in both America and Europe many gangster movies were either censored or banned outright.
In the US, anxieties about the ‘corruption’ of youth by popular entertainment reached a crescendo during the 1950s. In 1953 concerns about rising levels of juvenile crime prompted the appointment of a Senate Subcommittee to investigate the causes of delinquency (see Chapter 4). The Subcommittee considered the role of various factors, though the possible influence of the media was a recurring preoccupation. Testimony was heard from a parade of moral campaigners, including the influential psychologist Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 study, Seduction of the Innocent, presented popular ‘horror’ and ‘crime’ comics as a wellspring of juvenile depravity. The Subcommittee’s findings, however, were inconclusive. Scrutinizing the comics industry, followed by TV and Hollywood, the Senate hearings found little evidence of a clear link between the media and juvenile crime. Nevertheless, while the clamor for federal censorship was resisted, the Subcommittee demanded the media exercise stricter self-supervision and the call was generally acceded to. Hence comic publishers adopted a severe, self-regulatory Comics Code in 1954 that proscribed any content dealing with ‘shocking’ or ‘sensational’ subjects. Concerns about the negative impact of comics on young readers also circulated worldwide. And, throughout the 1950s, fears similar to those in the US melded with local anxieties to fuel anti-comics crusades in at least 20 countries across 4 continents.2
Fears that comics were a cause of youth crime dissipated during the 1960s. But a succession of anxieties about other media took their place. In Britain, for example, the early 1980s saw the tabloid press spearhead a campaign against what were dubbed ‘video nasties’ — a loosely defined group of gory, low-budget, American and Italian horror films that included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Available via (then new-fangled) video rental stores, the accessibility of such movies on VHS tapes was relatively unregulated, and critics construed their popularity would lead inexorably to a rise in violent crime. As a consequence, the introduction of the 1984 Video Recordings Act made British film censorship laws some of the toughest in Europe.3 In 1993, however, fears revived after a 2-year-old boy, James Bulger, was murdered in Liverpool by two 1 fl-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. The murder was horrific, and made all the more shocking by the youth of the perpetrators. Subsequent accounts suggested the killers’ troubled childhoods lay at the root of their behaviour1 but, at the time, the press speculated that the young killers had been influenced by violent horror movies — especially Child’s Play 3 (1991), a film depicting a malevolent doll’s spree of cruelty'. There was, it later transpired, little evidence to show the young killers had ever seen the film. But the campaign against ‘video nasties’ was recharged, with tabloid newspaper The Sun organising a public burning of copies of Child’s Play 3 and urging its readers: ‘For the Sake of ALL Our Kids: BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY’ (26 November, 1993).
In response to the episode, the British government commissioned child psychologist Elizabeth Newsom to investigate the media’s influence on the young. Subsequently published as Video Violence and the Protection of Children (1994), Newsom’s study seemed to be a watershed in debates about the media’s effects on youth. Her report purported to demonstrate conclusively that ‘violent’ media caused young people to behave violently. Newsom’s analysis claimed to be based on considerable empirical evidence, and to draw on a wealth of scholarly expertise - and it prompted a further tightening of Britain’s (already relatively strict) censorship laws. On close inspection, however, Newsom’s study proved less than convincing. In systematic critiques, media theorists Martin Barker (2001) and Guy Cumberbatch (2002) both showed Newsom’s work to be largely speculation based on an uncritical survey of assorted press stories, while none of the 25 ‘experts’ she cited had actually published work in the field of media analysis.
In the US a comparable controversy unfolded following the tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado on 20 April, 1999. Armed with an arsenal of pistols, shotguns and pipe-bombs, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold went on a deadly rampage through classrooms, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher, before turning the weapons on themselves. In the wake of what became known as the ‘Columbine High School Massacre’, attention soon focused on the possible role of popular entertainment. The press quickly conjectured that ‘gothic’ rock music might be a factor in the killings, since Hanis and Klebold had been members of a loose group of friends who supposedly shared a taste for ‘goth’ music and style. As a consequence, The New York Post ran a feature titled ‘Telltale signs your kids might be ready to explode’, alongside a picture of Adolf Hitler and photographs of teenagers in ‘goth’ make-up (cited in Ferrell et al., 2004: 145). Rock musician Marilyn Manson, already a target for moral crusaders, was also singled out for criticism — many commentators citing the dark imagery of Manson’s songs and performance as an influence on the Columbine killers.5 Computer games were also blamed. Harris and Klebold had been keen on games such as Doom and Final Fantasy VII, and the games’ violent content was cited as contributing to the murders. In 2001 relatives of the Columbine victims even filed a $5 billion lawsuit against 25 computer companies (including Sony and Nintendo), claiming the linns’ products had triggered the killings. In 2002, however, the lawsuit was dismissed after a court ruling that the computer games firms had no case to answer. Notions that rock music had been a factor in the murders also lacked foundation, as it subsequently emerged that neither Harris nor Klebold had been fans of Marilyn Manson. And, rather than finding evidence of media effects, subsequent research on the Columbine shooting has highlighted the contribution of a collection of cultural and environmental factors, together with the mental illnesses from which both killers probably suffered/’
Nevertheless, concerns about possible links between the media and youth violence continued to punctuate the late twentieth and early twenty-first
Media effects and youth 87 centuries. Along with the Virginia Tech killings of 2007, for example, video games were cited as an influence on 20-year-old Adam Lanza who, in 2012, used a (legally purchased) assault rifle to kill 26 people (including 20 children aged between 6 and 7 years old) at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, before killing himself with a pistol. Following the slaughter, a renewed debate ensued about the effects of violent video games on young people. And, according to Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association (NRA - the biggest gun rights advocacy group in America), the relative ease with which powerful firearms can be obtained in the US was of little importance to the shooting. Instead, LaPierre contended, responsibility for the tragedy lay at the door of ‘vicious, violent video games’, along with:
... blood-soaked slasher films like American Psycho and Natural Born Killers that are aired like propaganda loops on ‘Splatterdays’ and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life.
(Guardian, 21 December 2012)
As in the case of other mass shootings, however, there was scant evidence of any causal link between violent video games and the killer’s behaviour. Indeed, while the State Attorney’s final report into the Sandy Hook shooting noted that Lanza often played video games, it observed how his particular favourite was not a violent shooting game, but Dance Dance Revolution — a dance-exercise game (Office of the State’s Attorney Judicial District of Danbury, 2013: 31—32). And, instead of the influence of video games, it was Lanza’s significant record of mental illness that the State Attorney highlighted as a key factor in events.
There is, then, a long history of popular fears regarding a possible causal link between ‘violent’ forms of media and violent behaviour by young people. Evidence for such an influence, however, is scarce. Official investigations, for example, have repeatedly refuted the idea of a causal connection between video games and mass shootings. At the same time, however, these popular fears have been paralleled by an extensive tradition of social scientific research that has claimed to reveal a general relationship between ‘violent’ media and aggressive behaviour by the young. This tradition, though, is a site of heated controversy and has both ardent advocates and fervent critics.
