Violence in the media - Research Paper Example

It was in 1975 when the medical community was first alerted regarding the negative effects of media and television violence on the youth. Rothenberg’s Special Communication in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or AMA, did this in particular. The theory emphasized a corresponding increase in the level of aggressiveness and violence among the youth and children who have viewed violence on TV and in the media. Thus, the House of Delegates of AMA passed Resolution 38, which emphasized the threat of TV violence to the health and welfare of the American youth, and states the society’s opposition to violent TV programs.

This announcement of the American Medical Association was closely followed and confirmed by the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (Centerwall, 1992). As media and TV violence caused hate crimes, the first hate crime law was passed in 1978 in the State of California. The institution of this law was then followed by several other statutes related to hate crimes. These laws and statutes have specific provisions for religion, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, political affiliation and involvement in human rights activism.

Moreover, other states instituted the authorized collection of hate or bias-motivated crime data (Grattet et al., 2008). During the 1980s, the field of public health became involved in violence prevention. The Department of Health and Human Services then financed violence prevention research and programs. Some of these programs included the establishment of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in 1991, which is an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Moreover, in September 1992, former President Clinton condemned violence in America as well as its outrageous costs (Mercy et al., 1993). One challenge that awaits law enforcement agencies is the idea that the institution of a law against a particular crime usually requires proper timing, or idea of “temporalization” (Grattet et al., 1998). This is indeed a great challenge because the Senate and Congress both have to have hard evidence first stating that it is the crucial moment that one has to enforce a law banning all forms of media with a specified degree of violence in them.

Another challenge facing individuals and law enforcers is that children are being exposed to the television even from the age of 14 months (Centerwall, 1992). This means that it would be hard to prevent any influence of media violence on children because they are exposed to it at such a young age and even in those years when their brains are just developing. Thus, it would be hard to know whether media violence cultivates the nature or the nurture part of the aspect of a human being. A third challenge is the strong prevalence of interpersonal violence in the United States, which translates as 6,000 physically injured people every single day on the average, and so many more who died from violence in the past (Mercy et al. 1993). This means that even if there were to be a law that should ban violent forms of media, there is basically no way to immediately stop this trend.

According to Huesmann (2007), media violence causes a significant increase in the risk that a viewer or game player will display a more