Family
and Media
It’s time to stop training our
kids to kill
by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
.
In the wake of the Littleton
and other school shootings, many parents have wondered about the effects
of the media on their children’s psyche. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman,
an expert on the psychology of killing and a recent retiree from the
U.S. Army wrote the following piece. Responses from U.S. Catholic
readers follow. If you’d like to participate in one of
U.S. Catholic’s reader surveys click on www.uscatholic.org
I am from Jonesboro Arkansas. I travel the world training
medical, law enforcement, and U.S. military personnel about the realities
of warfare. I try to make those who carry deadly force keenly aware
of the magnitude of killing. So here I am, a world traveler and an
expert in the field of "killology," and a school massacre
happens in my hometown. The March 24, 1998 schoolyard shooting in
Jonesboro left four girls and a teacher dead and 10 others injured.
Two boys, ages 11 and 13 at the time, are now serving time for the
killings, which–until topped by last month’s mayhem in Littleton,
Colorado–were the deadliest school shooting in American history.
I spent the first three
days after the tragedy at Westside Middle School, where the shootings
took place, working with the counselors, teachers, students, and parents.
I train people how to react to trauma in the military, but how do
you do it with kids after a massacre in their school?
To understand the why
behind Jonesboro, Littleton, and all the other outbreaks of this "virus
of violence," we need first to understand the magnitude of the
problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in this country between
1957–when the FBI started keeping track of the data–and
1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the
rate people are attempting to kill one another: the aggravated-assault
rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in
1957 to more than 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade. As
bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for our tremendous
imprisonment rate and today’s medical technology and sophisticated
lifesaving skills and techniques.
But violent crime is
also occurring at record levels in countries such as Canada, Australia,
Sweden, Belgium, France, and Hungary. While guns do prevail in our
society, violence is also rising in nations that have draconian gun
laws. And although we should never downplay child abuse, poverty,
or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these
countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented
as entertainment for children.
I spent almost a
quarter of a century as an army infantry officer and a psychologist,
learning and studying how to enable people to kill. Believe me, we
are very good at it. But it does not come naturally; you have to be
taught to kill. And just as the Army is conditioning people to kill,
we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but
without the safeguards.
After the Jonesboro
killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force
on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don’t
naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse
and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment
in television, the movies, and interactive video games.
Killing requires training
because within the midbrain, there is a powerful, God-given resistance
to killing your own kind. In the Civil War, the average firing rate
was incredibly low. And during World War II, U.S. Army researchers
discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could
bring themselves to fire at exposed enemy soldiers. Men are willing
to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation,
but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into
human nature, but when the military became aware of this, they systematically
went about the process of trying to fix this "problem."
And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent
of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the
rate rose to more than 90 percent.
How
the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive,
because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children.
The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning,
operant conditioning, and role modeling.
• Brutalization. Brutalization
and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. Your head is shaved,
you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality.
In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal
and essential survival skill in your brutal new world. Something very
similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our
children through violence in the media–but instead of 18-year-olds,
it begins at the age of 18 months, when a child is first able to discern
what is happening on television. Even though young children have some
understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally
unable to clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality. When they
see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered
on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening.
The Journal of the
American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological
study on the impact of TV violence. This research demonstrated what
happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance,
as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or
regions being compared were demographically and ethnically identical;
only one variable was different: the presence of television. In every
nation, region, or city with television, there was an immediate explosion
of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling
of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the
brutalization of a 3- to 5-year-old to reach the "prime crime
age." That’s how long it takes for you to reap what you
have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a 3-year-old.
• Classical
conditioning. Another military training method, classical
conditioning, is like the famous case of Pavlov’s dogs you learned
about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing
of the bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear
the bell without salivating. We are doing the exact opposite. Our
children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they
learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar,
or their girlfriend’s perfume.
After the Jonesboro
shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students
reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school.
"They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction
happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence.
The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn
and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have
learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering
and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.
• Operant
conditioning. The third method is called operant conditioning,
which the military and law enforcement community have used to make
killing a conditioned response. Whereas target training in World War
II used bull’s-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic,
man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view–that’s
the stimulus. The trainees only have a split second to engage the
target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response–soldiers
or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions of this. Later,
when they’re out on the battlefield, or a police officer is walking
a beat, and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively–and
shoot to kill. Seventy-five to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern
battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.
Now, if you’re
troubled by this, how much more should you be troubled by the fact
that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video
game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.
You never put your quarter into the video machine with the intention
of not shooting. This process is extraordinarily powerful and
frightening. The result is ever more homemade pseudosociopaths who
kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to
kill, and learning to like it.
One
of the boys found guilty in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are
just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The
other one, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience
shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range
of more than 100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That’s pretty
remarkable shooting. How can a kid who has never picked up a real
gun in his life pick one up and be so incredibly accurate? Video games.
It came as no surprise
to me when I read that the two shooters in the Littleton massacre
had allegedly been avid players of Doom and Quake, two
popular computer games full of realistic violence in which players
stalk their opponents through dungeonlike environments to kill them
with high-powered weapons.
• Role
modeling. In the military, you are immediately confronted
with a role model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence and
aggression. Along with military heroes, violent role models have always
been used to influence young, impressionable minds. When the images
of young killers are broadcast on television, they become role models.
The ultimate achievement for our children is to get their picture
on TV. The media have every right and responsibility to tell the story,
but they have no right to glorify the killers by presenting their
images on TV.
What is the road home from
this dark and lonely place? One route would be to "just turn
it off": If you don’t like what is on television, use the
off button. If you don’t like violent computer games, make sure
your children don’t play them. Yet, even if all the parents of
the shooting victims in Littleton and Jonesboro had protected their
children from TV and game violence, it wouldn’t have done a bit
of good. Somewhere there were other parents who didn’t "just
turn it off."
Another route to reduced
violence is gun control. But it will take a long time before we wean
Americans off their guns. And until we reduce the level of fear and
violent crime, Americans would sooner die than give up their guns.
We also need to progress in rebuilding our families. But nations without
our divorce rates are also noting increases in violence.
Work is needed in many
areas, but there is a new front–taking on the producers and purveyors
of media violence. We ought to work toward legislation that outlaws
violent video and computer games for children. There is no constitutional
right for children to play interactive games that teach weapons-handling
skills or that simulate destruction of God’s creatures.
The day may also be
coming when we are able to seat juries in America who are willing
to sock it to the networks in the only place they really understand–their
wallets. After the Jonesboro shootings, Time magazine said:
"As for media violence, the debate there is fast approaching
the same point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco
reached some time ago–it’s over. Few researchers bother
any longer to dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has an
effect on kids who witness it."
Most of all, the American
people need to learn the lessons of Jonesboro and Littleton: Violence
is not a game; it’s not fun, it’s not something that we
do for entertainment. Violence kills.
Every parent in America
desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV and other
violent media on children, just as we would warn them of some widespread
carcinogen. The problem is that the TV networks, which use the public
airwaves we have licensed to them, are our key means of public education
in America. And they are stonewalling.
In the days after the
Jonesboro shootings, I was interviewed by Canadian TV, the BBC, and
many radio shows and newspapers. But the U.S. television networks
simply would not touch this aspect of the story. Never in my experience
as a historian and a psychologist have I seen any institution in America
so clearly responsible for so very many deaths, and so clearly abusing
their publicly licensed authority and power to cover up their guilt.
A CBS executive told
me his plan. He knows all about the link between media and violence
and is determined to protect his own child from the poison his industry
is bringing to America’s children. He is not going to expose
his child to TV until she’s old enough to learn how to read.
And then he will very carefully select what she sees. He and his wife
plan to send her to a day-care center that has no television and to
show her only age-appropriate videos. This should be the bare minimum:
Show children only age-appropriate videos, and think hard about what
is age-appropriate.
Education about media
and violence does make a difference. I was recently on a radio call-in
show in San Antonio, Texas. A woman called and said, "My 13-year-old
boy spent the night with a neighbor boy. After that, he started having
nightmares. I got him to admit that while he was there, they watched
splatter movies all night: people cutting people up with chain saws
and stuff like that.
"I called the
neighbors and told them, ‘Listen, you are sick people. I wouldn’t
feel any different about you if you had given my son pornography or
alcohol. And I’m not going to have anything further to do with
you or your son–and neither is anybody else in this neighborhood,
if I have anything to do with it–until you stop what you’re
doing.’"
That’s powerful.
That’s censure, not censorship. And we ought to have the moral
courage to censure people who think that violence is legitimate entertainment.
One of the most effective
ways for Christians to be salt and light is by simply confronting
the culture of violence as entertainment. What the media teach is
unnatural, and if confronted in love and assurance, the house they
have built on the sand will crumble. But our house is built on the
rock. If we don’t actively present our values, then the media
will most assuredly inflict theirs on our children, and the children
simply won’t know any better. I hope that our churches can
provide the clarion call of decency and love and peace as an alternative
to death and destruction–not just for the sake of the church,
but for the transformation of our culture.
Q: The
most eye-opening experience we ever had at our household over a child’s
exposure to violent programming or playthings was the time when .
. .
My son announced, while
perched atop his jungle gym, that he was "shooting Yankees."
Name withheld
Lake Charles,
La.
A commercial
showing a man punching another man came on. My oldest son, who was
2 at the time, immediately turned around and, mimicking what he saw,
hit my husband. Our TV went off and has been off ever since.
Kristin
Blakeslee Jarocki
Duluth,
Minn.
A neighbor
allowed her 3-year-old to watch Friday the 13th and then terrorized
him into
behaving
by telling him that "He [Jason from the movie] was going to get
you if you’re not good." I was sickened. Kathy
Schmitt
Richmond,
Ky.
When my son was 5, he had
a play rifle and scared me by sneaking up behind me and yelling "Bang!"
I took away the toy and smashed it. I think my reaction was even more
violent than what he did. Maureen
Theiler
Polson,
Mont.
The realization
of how mesmerizing and addictive video games are–and how rapidly
this addiction takes hold. Denise
LaPorte
Southgate,
Mich.
A friend’s small child–who
was limited at home to what he could watch on TV and owned no violent
toys–was running around and pretending to shoot people because
that is what his friends at day care like to play.
Janice
Mackay
Kalamazoo,
Mich.
My 4-year-old pretended
to use a machine gun, with sound effects and actions that looked shockingly
like he’d seen the real thing.
Mary Bencks
Durham,
N.H.
Q: What’s
most difficult for you in dealing with the impact of media violence
on children?
Convincing my grown children
that what they see in movies, videos, and violent computer games does
have an effect on their children. Louise
Harris
Lodi,
Wis.
As a licensed clinical
social worker, every week I deal with out-of-control anger problems
that have resulted in others getting hurt or abused. Media violence
and the hype of reporting violence only increase the negative emotional
states in people, which foster abuse and being abused.
Penelope
A. Klestinski
Libertyville,
Ill.
It’s amazing to me
how many parents accept it as a form of entertainment.
Nancy
Thomas
Walled
Lake, Mich.
I teach high school students,
and the desensitization they exhibit about violence on TV or in the
movies is tragic.
Mary
L. Benner
Toms River,
N.J.
I don’t want to be
an overprotective parent to my teens, but I don’t like what I
see. I’m afraid to make my kids "stand out in the crowd"
for my stand on violence–it could get them killed. Name
withheld
Woodstock,
Ga.
Watching the needless killings
of children across America in schools–their vulnerability in
a once safe haven. Kay
Mahoney
Tolland,
Conn.
The helplessness I feel
in battling a "giant."
Marian
Geary
Grand
Rapids, Mich.
That children think it’s
entertaining!
Name withheld
Providence,
R.I.
Right now
the wrestling mania has caught hold of our 11-year-old son and his
friends. It
carries over
to aggressive behavior with siblings, classmates, and friends.
Name
withheld
Cape Girardeau,
Mo.
Q: What’s
the best way you’ve ever seen a household, a school, or a parish
tackle the issue of children’s exposure to violent entertainment?
We put away all our TV
sets for a six-month period while our children were in grade school.
We spent our evenings either at the park or at home reading, listening
to the radio, or doing homework.
Name
withheld
Duluth,
Minn.
Promote shows with sound
and healthy content. Schools should also ask children which shows
they saw in the past weekend or evening and then discuss the good
and bad of such shows.
William Van Dril
Allegan,
Mich.
Unfortunately I have not
seen any attempts to tackle this issue. I work in the local school
system
and am active in our parish–but they never seem to address this
in a systematic or organized fashion. Name
withheld
Napa,
Calif.
Don’t let young children
watch certain things. End of discussion. Be a parent!
Nina Lattarulo
Bronx,
N.Y.
Q: One
of the most violent kids’ toys or movies I’ve ever seen
is:
I watched Robocop
at a friend’s home, even though it really disturbed me. On the
drive
home that
night, I was so upset that I became nauseated and came very close
to pulling my car over to vomit. Father
Lyle D. Peters
Des Moines,
Iowa
Arcade video games using
guns for hand controls, available for even small children to play–and
parents putting in the quarters for the little ones to play. Sue
Gilbert
Burlington,
Vt.
You name the popular cartoons,
and you’ve got violence. Name
withheld
Niagara
Falls, N.Y.
Antz has some really
violent battle scenes, although I assume that many parents took their
children to see it.
Johanna
Gengler
Estes
Park, Colo.
The evening news can be
the worst because, unfortunately, it’s the real world. I remember
the news reports from Vietnam–the images of violence. Luckily
my parents were there to talk to me. I hope that I play the same role
for my children. Sara
Sheehan
West Swanzey,
N.H.
Other mentions:
Beavis and Butthead, Small Soldiers, All Dogs Go
to Heaven.
General
Comments
This is a thorny issue.
To what degree do we limit freedom of speech? Networks and programmers
respond to money. We should organize boycotts of such material if
we really want the networks to listen.
Robert
H. Irwin
Berkeley,
Calif.
Violence doesn’t just
involve the physical. I’m also concerned about posturing, "trash-talking,"
and the look-out-for-number-one attitude. Name
withheld
Saugerties,
N.Y.
Sadly, kids sit inside
all day playing video games and watching TV instead of going outside
and using their imaginations. And the dearth of fun, innovative, and
challenging video games speaks volumes about our societal priorities.
Aszani
Kunkler
Verona,
Wis.
If we raise
a generation of sissies, who is going to defend the country? The real
world has violence, and our children should be trained to deal with
it. James
C. Molsberry
Palo Alto,
Calif.
We have lived in England
for nine years. Violence on TV is strictly regulated in regard to
what can be shown before 9 p.m. This has really helped us with our
son’s exposure to media violence. Movie theaters are also good
at not admitting children to shows that have an unsuitable rating.
We in the U.S. should be more concerned with our children’s welfare
than with the profit made from the movies, games, and toys. Donna
Zigler
England
(military post)
And The Survey Says...
1. When I have tried
to curb my kids’ exposure to violent programs or toys . . .
19% I
have been quite successful.
37% I
have been fairly successful, but it’s been a struggle.
14% I
haven’t been all that successful: peer pressure and cultural
pervasiveness have won the war.
14% My
kids aren’t all that interested in violent entertainment.
16% Other.
2. Most parents underestimate
the harmful effects of steady exposure to violence on TV or in video
games.
Agree 92%
Disagree 4%
Other 4%
3. The people who bear
the most responsibility for controlling the spread of the "virus
of violence" among our children:
49% Parents
39% The entertainment
industry
7% The
news media
7% The government
4% Other
4. Restricting
violent TV programs to late evening, along with a parental warning,
doesn’t go far enough; we should try to eliminate most, if not
all, depictions of gratuitous violence on TV.
Agree 79%
Disagree 14%
Other 7%
5. Violent video games
should come under government regulation to ban or limit their use
among children.
Agree 72%
Disagree 21%
Other 7%
All comments used in
Feedback must be signed, but we withhold names on request. We regret
that space limitations force us to condense letters and that many
cannot be used at all. Our thanks to all who wrote. –The
Editors
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