Assess the view that media violence does not produce violent behaviour in the audience.
18 marks.

Violence in the media has become significantly worse due to it being more accepted. However, this does not necessarily mean that it influences people's behaviour to make them more violent.

There is evidence to show that violence does not produce violent behaviour. Gunter and Mcaleer support the belief of some psychiatrists that showing violent films to the disturbed individuals may help them to express their anger harmlessly. Also, they argue that television can have a pro-influence on children. They stated that ‘these portrayals of kindness, generosity, being helpful and socially responsible have been known to exert both short-term and long-term influences on similar behaviors among children. This provides us with a positive effect and shows that media violence does not produce violent behaviour.

As the hypodermic syringe model suggests, children copy what they see and behave more aggressively in the real world. The James Bulger case supports this. Two ten year old boys killed a 3 year old toddler (James) after watching the movie ‘Child's play 3’. Evidence suggests that the boys copied the content within the film and performed similar acts on James. However, they do not have any proof that this is true and results try to generalise every child and suggest that they are all easily manipulated. Therefore it can not prove that media violence produces violent behaviour, as they do not have enough research evidence.

Evidence suggests that there is no effect on violent behaviour through media violence. Hagell and Newburn compared the viewing of reading habits of 78 young offenders aged 12-18 years old with 500 school children of varied socioeconomic backgrounds. They found out that offenders did not watch more television or chose more violent programmes than school children in general. In fact, offenders has less access to television and video equipment than non-offending children. However, the groups chosen for the experiment are untypical and some variables are isolated, but results shown that there is no effect on whether media violence produced violent behaviour.

Some research evidence provides an inconclusive effect, which suggests that media violence may lead to produce violent behaviour. Bandura made a violent film using a woman and a bobo doll. They did the same thing using a human in a clown's outfit instead of the bobo doll. The children copied the video clip and imitated its actions by beating up the bobo doll. However, this experiment was conducted in a false setting and it was unrepresentative of the population. Also, Bandura needed more background on the children both before and after the experiment. Therefore, Bandura concluded that violent media content could lead to imitation or copycat violence. This shows that there was an inconclusive effect and there was not a positive or negative effect to this experiment

In conclusion, I believe that media violence does not produce violent behaviour in the audience. Although there is research evidence to suggest that it does, there is more evidence to suggest that it doesn’t. Most researchers do not take into account the person's background or their individual differences, which means they generalise their findings too much and do not have any proof as everyone is affected differently.