The Effects of Viewing Television Violence on School Children
Shelton (1998) commented that a results of the National television Violence Study confirmed the worst fears of the American Medical Association (AMA) and other public health and
other children's advocates in that [prime time TV violence has been seen as increasingly on both broadcast and cable networks. The study found that much of the aggression that appears no television is glamorized, sanitized, and trivialized. About 60 percent of all entertainment programming was found to contain some type and level of violence, a figure that has remained constant over the past three years (Federman, 1996, 1997, 19980).
Violent programming has increased 14 percent on broadcast networks and 10 percent on cable. Shelton (1998) further states that about 90 percent of programming on cable services such as Cinemax, Showtime and HBO, depicts violence. Research suggests that the context in which violence is portrayed is an important factor in assessing its impact on children; when the violence is perpetrated by an attractive character, the chances are increased that viewers will become desensitized to aggression or become fearful of violence in their own world. Cartoon violence, which is endemic in children's programming, has the potential to seem realistic to children younger than 7 because they cannot easily differentiate between reality and fantasy, thus posing a special concern (Shelton, 1998).
Huston, et al (1999), in a study of how young children spend their leisure time, found that when parents control or restrict television viewing, children find alternative entertainment options. Correspondingly, these researchers also commented that there are very real sex differences in program selection when young boys' and girls' viewing choices are compared. Males are more generally attracted to intrinsically violent programs, while females are less likely to demand such progra...