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"Teaching
Kids To Kill"
A
Virus of Violence
First
we must understand the magnitude of the problem. The murder
rate does not accurately represent our situation. Murder
has been held down by the development of ever more sophisticated
life saving skills and techniques. A better indicator of
the problem is the aggravated assault rate -- the rate at
which human beings are attempting to kill one another. And
that has gone up from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957, to
over 440 per 100,000 by the mid-1990’s (Statistical Abstracts
of the United States, 1957-1997).
Even
with small downturns recently, the violent crime rate is
still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true not
just in America but worldwide. In Canada, per capita assaults
increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993. According
to Interpol, between 1977 and 1993 the per capita assault
rate increased nearly fivefold in Norway and Greece, and
in Australia and New Zealand it increased approximately
fourfold. During the same period it tripled in Sweden, and
approximately doubled in: Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales,
France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland. In India during
this period the per capita murder rate doubled. In Mexico
and Brazil violent crime is also skyrocketing, and in Japan
juvenile violent crime went up 30 percent in 1997 alone.
This
virus of violence is occurring worldwide, and the explanation
for it has to be some new factor that is occurring
in all of these countries (Grossman, 1999b). Like
heart disease, there are many factors involved in the causation
of violent crime, and we must never downplay any of them.
But there is only one new variable that is present
in each of these nations, bearing the same fruit in every
case, and that is media violence being presented as “entertainment”
for children.
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Read
a different article:
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Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
© 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.
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