Television/Violence/Murder/Children/Behavior
Influence/Media/Movies: TERRORIZED BY TELEVISION Five years ago Purdue University researcher Glenn Sparks surveyed five to seven year old kids in suburban Cleveland. Twenty percent said they’d seen “Friday the 13th”; 48 percent had seen “Poltergeist” – in almost all cases they’d watched them on cable. By the age of eighteen, the average American child will have seen 200,000 violent acts on television, including 40,000 murders, according to Thomas Radecki, research director for the National Coalition on Television Violence. (The average two to eleven year old watches television 25 hours a week.) University of Illinois psychologists Leonard Eron and L. Rowell Huesmann studied one set of children for more than twenty years. They found that kids who watched significant amounts of TV violence at the age of eight were consistently more likely to commit violent crimes or engage in child or spouse abuse at 30. “We believe… that heavy exposures to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence…
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