It seems that the news is filled with it. Columbine, School Killers, Playground Beatings and Third Grade Murder Plots… Teens beating a girl to post a video on YouTube, Sport Killings of the Homeless, and other kids who kill.

 Some people think that there’s no increase, but that we have more access to news so we hear more of it. 
Not true.

From 1986-1995, Juvenile arrests for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter increased 90%
From 1991-1995, female juvenile arrests for Violent Crime Index offenses increased 34%
http://www.violentkids.com/violence_facts.html

Wouldn’t you just love to see 1995-2008 numbers?  I’m sure it’s horrifying.  But… why?

 Is it bad parenting skills?

…For the past 25 years, psychologist Gerald R. Patterson of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene and his colleagues have noticed that some parents and children bring out the worst in each other. Their daily interactions consist of the parents demanding compliance with some rule or request, the child refusing to comply, and the parents eventually giving in. Long-term studies indicate that these coercive interactions foster aggression…
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060527/bob8.asp

The country attorney’s office of Hennepin County, Minnesota, analyzed the records of 135 children, ages 4 to 9, who had been accused of crimes. They found that 91% lived in families receiving AFDC, 81% were in families that had been investigated by child protective services, 70% had at least one parent or sibling who had been in trouble with the law…
http://www.casanet.org/Library/juvenile-justice/violentkids.htm

Is it something more insidious? 

Like, corporate profit? The American Academy of Pediatrics says that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior and desensitization to violence.

…children between the ages of 2 and 18 years spend an average of six hours and 32 minutes each day using media, which includes television, commercial or self-recorded video, movies, video games, print, radio, recorded music, computer and the Internet. In fact, they spend more time using media than any other activity, with the exception of sleeping…

Have you ever heard of Killology?
Is that a cop out?  Blame the media and we’re not responsible?  I’m not so sure.  There’s some really eye opening information at the Killology Research Website.  Like this, for example…

I spent almost a quarter of a century as an Army infantry officer, a paratrooper, a Ranger, and a West Point Psychology Professor, learning and studying how we enable people to kill. Most soldiers have to be trained to kill.

Healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns fight one another by butting heads. Against other species they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle one another.

During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1978)… Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of “fixing” this “problem.” And fix it they did. By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a)…

The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. Let us explain these and then observe how the media does the same thing to our children… (snipped for length).  

… something very similar is happening to our children through violence in the media. It begins at the age of 18 months, when a child can begin to understand and mimic what is on television. But up until they’re six or seven years old they are developmentally, psychologically, physically unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. Thus, when a young child sees somebody on TV being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered, to them it is real, and some of them embrace violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill …

On June 10th, 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a definitive study on the impact of TV violence. In nations, regions, or cities where television appears there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That’s how long it takes for a brutalized toddler to reach the “prime crime” years. That’s how long it takes before you begin to reap what you sow when you traumatize and desensitize children. (Centerwall, 1992).

The JAMA concluded that, “the introduction of television in the 1950’s caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually.” The study went on to state that “…if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United states, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults”

That’s just an excerpt of a longer article called “Teaching Kids to Kill” and it provides plenty of research, data and statistics to back up it’s claims.  It talks about conditioning.  And it’s eye opening.

Here’s another excellent snippet…

Classical conditioning is like Pavlov’s dog in Psych 101. Remember the ringing bell, the food, and the dog could not hear the bell without salivating?

In World War II, the Japanese would make some of their young, unblooded soldiers bayonet innocent prisoners to death. Their friends would cheer them on. Afterwards, all these soldiers were treated to the best meal they’ve had in months, sake, and to so-called “comfort girls.” The result? They learned to associate violence with pleasure.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training, but the media is doing it to our children. Kids watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda, and their girlfriend’s perfume…

What do you think?  Why are our kids more violent today?

a) Bad parenting
b) Violence on tv
c) Violence in the movies
d) Violence in music (ie; lyrics)
e) Violent video games
f) Violence in the home
g) All of the above
h) None of the above
i) Other (such as?)
j) Still don’t believe they are worse…

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