Over the last few decades, parents, educators, clinicians and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the increasingly prominent role of media in the lives of their children and their concomitant impact on their children's behavior (Steyer 4; Villani 392). According to the 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation report, entitled "Kids & Media @ The New Millenium," children aged from two and 18 "spend an average of almost five-and-a-half hours a day at home watching television, playing video games or using some form of media" (Clay "Introduction"). Because of the substantial amount of time the children and adolescents are exposed to the different forms of media, it is likely that their conceptions of the world are influenced by the content of the media, which in turn affect their behavior (Villani 397).
What is most disturbing about the children's exposure to the media is the extent of violence that is present in the content presented by the media. As Potter pointed out:
Public opinion polls show that people are generally critical of the media because they think that there is too much violence in the media and that this violence is causing harmful effects (3).
The three-year National Television Study conducted by Federman from 1994 to 1997, which examined over 10,000 hours of programming on cable and noncable channels also indicated that young viewers were exposed to 10,000 acts of violence each year. Sixty-one percent of the shows contained violent scenes and even more significantly, 75 percent of the violent acts were not accompanied by "evident remorse, criticisms or penalty for the violence" (cited in Villani 393).
Similarly, interactive video games also contain a significant amount of violent content. In Funk's (1993) survey of seventh and eighth graders who engage in video games, it was found that 40 out of 47 of the most popular games contained some form of violence (cited in Villani 397). Furthermore,...