When are Parents Held Accountable?
Despite what many people say, modern children have not become more overly aggressive or violent than previous generations by video games, violent music, or aggressive sports. Despite the large increase in children utilizing these forms of entertainment, crimes rates have not increased, but instead have actually decreased over the past few years. Many blame the behavior of their children on the different forms of violent media that their children have access to when that clearly is a spurious relationship and in actuality, the parents are to blame.
Many sources claim that children are becoming more and more violent because of how they spend their current past time. “As the time spent utilizing a violent form of entertainment, the tendency of a child to perform violent acts increases” (safeyouth.org). However, the tests used to garner these results are heavily biased in their methodology. To determine the increase in violent tendencies, a child is given a rubber ball that they are asked to squeeze. This is done before and after observing a violent form of media, either television or a video game. The different in pressure of the squeezes is then converted into a measurement to gauge violent tendencies. This test has two noticeable flaws that are closely related: the method used to determine the amount of violent tendencies and the implied use of the action performed. To give a rubber ball to a child and gauge violence based on how hard he squeezes the ball is irrelevant to being linked towards aggression. At the age groups that were tested using this method, an average ranging from 5 years old to 11 years old, the act of squeezing a ball does not register as a violent activity, but as merely a game. The children are tricked into achieving the results the test makers wanted by this methodology. The ignored factor in this testing is the free energy the test subjects have after their lack of movement when viewing the material. The children can be squeezing the rubber ball harder because they have pent up energy. This course of logic can be construed as violent activities are created as the byproduct of unreleased energy from these different forms of violent media. However, that would mean that almost everybody would become a violent person, which is clearly not the case. To assume that all pent up energy is used to commit violent acts is a hypothesis that is impracticable.
A major form of entertainment that is criticized for its violence is video gaming. In the above mentioned method of testing, the Nation Youth Violence Prevention resource center asserts that the rise in sales of violent video games directly corresponds to the increase in amount of aggressive behavior and crime. To test this theory with solid evidence, The Economist, a London based news organization, decided to track the sales of violent video games and overlay this with the amount of youth crime over the same period in America. Their results showed statistical evidence that as the sales of video games increased, the amount of violent crimes committed by youths have decreased nonlinearly overtime. This brings to light the fact that crime has not been increasing, but actually being reduced. This disproves the notion that violent video games cause crime, but supports the fact that they are actually crime reducers. Violent video games have the ability to reduce crime because of the fact that they are violent. The violence attracts youths to play and occupies their time. Instead of playing a violent game, those same kids could have spent the same time committing real crime.
Another concern for children is the rise of violent sports such as paintball. The common conception is that it militarizes youth and teaches them to be cold-blooded killers, shooting other people without remorse. A player would dress up in camouflage and learn to ambush and hunt other humans. However, knowledge and a different avenue of perception can change these misconceptions. As Paintballonline.com shows, the terminology used to describe paintball makes one of the most significant changes in its image. Instead of saying that you play a game where you shoot other people with guns, using proper paintball language, that is changed to playing a game where you tag other people with your marker. Using the term tag and marker are words that are not used selectively to put paintball into a good light, but wording that is an industry standard. On technical manuals and patents, paintball markers are not listed as guns, but as markers. This is due to the mechanical differences between something being a gun and a marker. In order to be a “gun”, it must fire bullets, which are a self contained ammunition that includes propellant (gunpowder) and the projectile (bullet) in a single unit. A paintball gun fires a paintball (projectile) using a bottle of air or CO2 (propellant) to mark a target. Paintball came to be not as a sport of tagging other players, but as a quicker method to mark trees and cattle in the 1970’s. It was not until 1981 that the first game of recreational paintball was played. Now paintball is played in over 100 countries and has levels of leagues ranging from local events to national level circuits.
Two prime examples of how irresponsible parents, not violent media, ruined the lives of other people are Michael Clark and John C. Crumpton Jr. On April 24th 1965, Michael Clark positioned himself on a hill overlooking a highway and killed three people with many others seriously injured. He then turned the gun on himself when the police came to his position.
Theplaintiff’s charges were negligence twofold “…(1) failure of the Clarks to train, control, and supervise Michael, and (2) failure of Forest Clark [Father] to keep the rifle out of Michael’s hands” (Reida v. Lund. 96 Cal. Rptr. 102 (1971)). A psychologist found the parents testimony to the behavior of Michael falsified to cover the fact that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. This lead to negligence of the parents for being able to keep their son in control and have access to guns. Like Michael Clark, the parents of John C. Crumpton were also found guilty of negligence for the behavior of their son. John was a known, chronic abuser of drugs and alcohol. On the morning of June 28 1978, John became drunk, got high, and used a weapon to rape a girl. His parents knew of his violent tendencies, he was already caught at school with a concealed knife, and his problem with substance abuse. Before he raped the girl, his parents would give him knives, guns, and an allowance, which he would use to buy drugs. John even used one of these knives during his rape. The attitude and actions of his parents clearly demonstrate a lack of parenting and gross negligence. Video games or other violent media did not spur these violent crimes; the lackadaisical parents of these children ignited the powder keg of consequences.
Another example of bad parenting is the court case of Costa v. Hicks. In this court case Walter Hicks, father of Walter Jr, purchased a motorcycle for his son to use. The conditions of use was that it could only be used his own supervision or one of his older brothers, who already owned motorcycles. On a day when neither his father nor older brothers were around, Walter Hicks Jr. took his motorcycle out for a ride and smashed the handlebars into a young child that was watching him. His father knew of previous instances where Walter Jr. took his bike out without permission and had the ability to chain the bike so that it could not be ridden without his consent. This information shows that, like the two cases mentioned previously, while not violent, the lack of parenting caused criminal negligence that could have been easily avoided with proper parenting skills.
As final proof that parents are responsible for their children, I use myself as an example. I was raised with strict guidelines by my parents. I hated them for restricting what I could do, what I was allowed to watch and listen to, and in retrospect, I can see their reasoning. I am currently in an “elite and highly selective” group of students for business in a letter the Dean of the College of Business Administration sent me. I was able to get two scholarships for school, one for good grades and one for my essay of the “BGSU effect” for the Alumni Legacy Scholarship (BGSU effect being that an education at BGSU will make me better prepared for a career in North East Ohio as shown through my personal experiences). With such achievements thus far, many people would not think I spend my free time doing what I do. I listen to music that many consider violent, such as Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, Rammstein, and many other bands that have songs that glorify violence. I play violent video games where chainsaws are mounted underneath assault rifles to use on other people, and people’s heads explode when shot by a sniper rifle. I dress in full camouflage and wear equipment to simulate being a soldier when I play paintball. Despite all of this, I am not a violent person. I have never been in trouble, whether in school or with the law.
What does this mean? It shows that violent forms of entertainment are trumped by parents who are not apathetic in their children or what they are doing. Parents have more control over their children than many think they do, not realizing this sobering fact until too late in some cases. The behavior of children lies not with what they do, but in how they are raised and taught to act by their parents.
